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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Guy Evans
Read between
March 16 - March 20, 2022
Concurrent to the webcast, TBS ran the ‘Best of Thunder’, a puzzling mix of old matches with an equally perplexing theme. Out of the nine bouts chosen for the special, eight ended in disqualifications, a disquieting motif for fans who remembered an infamous run of seven straight Nitro main events ending without a decisive winner.
“I walked downstairs and pulled David aside. When I told him, he burst out laughing and said, ‘yeah right’. I said, ‘no dude, they’re really gonna do this tonight’. He said, ‘no! No! We can’t do that!’ I said, ‘guess what? Yes’. I said, ‘If you don’t wanna do it, say you don’t wanna do it or...guess what dude? You’re the world champ’. Then it fucking hit him like, ‘are you fucking kidding me? Do I wanna be the WCW world champ? Fucking-a right I do!’”
I’m not condoning that, but David Arquette winning the world title? Boy, Scott Hall never won the title. Scott Hall never won the World Heavyweight championship, but David Arquette did. Can you tell me what’s wrong?”
“In my opinion, it was all negative,” states Jason Glast of the coverage. “I did not believe that ‘any publicity was good publicity’.
“Whenever I hear those guys who bust David’s balls,” growls DDP, “I tell them, ‘David only made $10,000 off that pay-off, and he gave all of it to [Brian Pillman’s widow]. He gave it all to her. “That changes people’s viewpoint on it. I tell people, ‘if it was you, you wouldn’t have done it, right?’ I say, ‘fuck you, you would have cut your buddies throat to get that spot’. David was just one of the guys that got that spot. “It was really stupid though!”
On occasion, some of the in-ring occurrences now called for actors to be involved, even during scenes seemingly best suited for wrestlers. “I played a police officer in a scene where ‘Kronik’ became too unruly in the ring,” remembers Michael Leslie Miller, an actor of some 15 years’ experience. “We were [instructed to] mace, beat, and handcuff these out-of-control wrestlers, and escort them into a waiting police car. “We were told to ‘be careful’, though, ‘because the mace is real - aim for the chin, not the eyes’.” Somebody said, ‘excuse me, did you say this is real mace? Why are you using
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“If Russo was managing the local Pizza Hut,” writer R.D. Reynolds memorably observed, “you’d order a pizza and they’d deliver a newspaper. Sure, it was a surprise, but it didn’t make much sense, nor did you want to order from them again. But it sure fooled you, didn’t it?”
“The writer said, ‘no-one called Vampiro to get on a flight from Vancouver, so he can’t get here ‘til Sunday. We’re just gonna do everything next week’. “I think the whole bill for that shoot was about $75,000, plus $20,000 to cancel it.”
“So here’s Buff Bagwell going to meet Brad Siegel. I got my best outfit on, and I’m going to meet the fuckin’ boss. So I walk in, go to close the door…but he mashes a button…and the door closes itself. I went, ‘oh, shit!’
“For all the calling foul to the Standards and Practices group - ‘you’re handcuffing me’ and stuff like that - there are creative ways to do things. It doesn’t always have to be something that crosses the line. That’s the easy way, in my book.”
“As a wrestling fan,” adds Diamond Dallas Page, “and as one of ‘the boys’, I wanted both companies to be around forever. The last thing anybody wanted was one monster monopoly.”
