Pro-Wrestling Cue the Music, Roll the Mayhem Page Pro-Wrestling Cue the Music, Roll the Mayhem Page
Last updated 15 January 2000
INDIANAPOLIS -- On a recent Monday, 11,000 fans gathered in Conseco Fieldhouse here to watch World Championship Wrestling's "Monday Nitro," a live wrestling match with more plot twists than an Italian opera.
Behind a silver curtain near the ring, the scriptwriters, Vince Russo and Ed Ferrara, stood with earphones clamped to their heads, staring into television monitors, following the action as 3.5 million people watched on Turner Network Television, a unit of Time Warner Inc.
On a screen above the ring, videotaped scenes played of a wrestler stalking a woman through a parking garage. ("Kimberly, I'm going to find you no matter where you hide!") On stage, the Nitro Girls dance troupe mimicked sexual intercourse on stage to rap music by House of Pain. Three-hundred-pound men with stage names like Sid Vicious, Lex Luger and Sting shouted threats at one another. ("How about a game of hide and seek? You hide. I seek. Then I destroy!") A wrestler named Jeff Jarrett broke an acoustic guitar to pieces over the head of a fellow wrestler -- a woman with 19-inch biceps and as much body fat as a strip of beef jerky -- named Midnight.
During it all, Russo and Ferrara monitored the progress -- or physical deterioration -- of their repertory players, offering advice to the wrestlers just before they ventured on stage and going over lines at the last minute.
"You've got to give the people what they want," Russo said later. "The people want girls in the ring, they want women and men beating on each other, they want things you might not see at 8 p.m. Gritty, in-your-face stuff."
Suddenly, Russo and Ferrara have become two of the more important people in television. Their move last month to Ted Turner's empire -- from the rival World Wrestling Federation, whose programs are run on UPN and USA Network -- made the front page of Variety, a sign of how wrestling, in all its boisterous, adolescent, violent, blood-stained, sweat-spattered glory is changing television.
The industry has come to regard the two writers as the magic bullet that makes wrestling programs among the fastest-growing shows on television. At W.W.F., Russo and Ferrara have not been replaced by scriptwriters, but by a committee of writers and wrestlers working in concert to draw story lines with the precision of a "Friends" episode. Wrestling can no longer be left to vague plot lines and the whims of the wrestlers themselves. The shows are surging in popularity. They have moved beyond the cable channels into broadcast television and are even attracting mainstream advertisers like Coca-Cola and Pfizer.
UPN, which is owned by Viacom and Chris-Craft Industries, was almost left for dead last year before it became the first broadcast network to offer wrestling shows. Now it is starting to beat some WB programs and has put a dent into the Fox network's Thursday night male-oriented schedule.
Executives at World Championship Wrestling, or W.C.W., say they have been told that Fox, owned by the News Corporation, whose chairman, Rupert Murdoch, is a bitter rival of Turner, is considering adding wrestling to its prime-time lineup and is trying to lure Hulk Hogan, one of the Turner wrestling empire's prized names. A Fox spokesman, Gary Ginsberg, would not comment.
Russo's move to W.C.W. also has people wondering: given the newfound competition, will wrestling reach new depths of raunch? He has already changed the tenor of Turner's family-oriented network: two weeks ago, W.C.W. changed its rating to TV-14 from TV-PG, as Russo -- a man who scripted in "accidental" female frontal nudity and faked hangings when he was at the W.W.F. -- has incorporated steamy storylines into what has become 1999's version of the old-fashioned variety show. Has Turner thrown in the towel on taste? A spokesman for Turner said he declined to comment on the topic of wrestling.
And the business of wrestling scriptwriting has begun to draw in traditional television writers. Russo got his start in wrestling as an editor of W.W.F. magazine, but Ferrara studied theater in college, is an alumnus of the short-lived UPN series, "The Secret Diary of Desmond Pfeiffer" and says his favorite playwrights are Peter Schaffer and Shakespeare. Three months ago, the W.W.F. hired Tommy Blacha, a former Harvard Lampoon writer who was a writer for "Late Night With Conan O'Brien" on NBC.
Before Russo and Ferrara became widely recognized in the industry as the first professional wrestling scriptwriters, wrestling was loosely scripted by a member of the wrestling management known as a "booker" -- usually a wrestler or a former wrestler who booked talent and sketched out rough storylines, while the wrestlers largely ad-libbed their own lines.
But Russo and Ferrara work like any scriptwriter on a movie. At the W.W.F., Russo said, he and Ferrara would gather in his den, turn on "The Jerry Springer Show" for inspiration and while Russo's young daughter ran in and out of the room, would write the intricate storylines, dialogue and plots for 16 different segments in a show. The script includes lines for the wrestlers, basic plot outlines and even stage directions, though the wrestlers themselves are allowed to devise the manner in which they dispatch their opponents to the mat. Russo and Ferrara's work habits are much the same at the W.C.W., but they are writing from hotel rooms more often.
The storyline, they said, should work seamlessly week to week, 52 weeks a year: there are no seasons in wrestling, no weeks off. They meet almost daily with wrestlers to assure plot lines jibe with the wrestlers' on-stage personalities.
"We want them to be part of the process," Russo said. "You have to come up with something that they are happy and comfortable with, something that frees them to perform."
These days, he added, a wrestler's acting is of paramount importance.
"This is no longer about how good a wrestler you are, or how good a match you can put on," he said. "More than 50 percent of this is now about personality. We can put words in their mouth, but we can't give them emotion."
Bret (Hitman) Hart, one of W.C.W.'s most popular wrestlers, said Russo and Ferrara had transformed W.C.W.'s programs -- "Monday Nitro," "W.C.W. Thunder" and various pay-per-view events -- from a loosely organized set of faked matches into a cohesive narrative that draws viewers back week after week. "It has finally become what it should have been all along, which is soap opera," he said. "Of course, it is one of the weirdest soap operas you'll ever see."
Hart is so pleased with his new writing team that he does not harbor any ill will toward them for the accidental death of his brother, Owen Hart, 33, a wrestler who died in May after a botched stunt -- he was to be lowered into the ring from 50 feet, but fell instead -- at Kemper Arena in Kansas City, Mo. While Russo and Ferrara's script called for the stunt, Ferrara blamed the accident on mechanical problems.
Wrestling, as it has since the 1950's, rests on the soap-operatic conceit that there is always a good guy, known in wrestling jargon as the "babyface," and a bad guy, the "heel" -- and these two opposing forces of good and evil are supplemented by a Greek chorus of morally ambiguous characters. But, Russo said, it is more complicated than that. "There is one word that we start and end every conversation with: logic," he said. "Once you lose the logic of the situation, then you lose the realism and you lose the audience. It's all about, 'If you were in this situation yourself, how would you handle it?' "
Of course, it is difficult to imagine how a civilian would react if a 6-foot-5-inch man in leather underpants with the phrase "2 Cool" on the back attacked him with a garbage-can lid.
"The point is to move the plot along," Russo said. "Tomorrow we'll sit down and say, 'Well, this is what happened to Kimberly last night, and this is what will happen to her next week.' "
Russo explained that the wrestler, David Flair, was stalking Kimberly Page -- a woman in her late 20's with a master's degree in journalism from Northwestern University -- because last week Ms. Page injured him.
"She clipped him with her car," Ferrara said.
"That's what made him go over the edge," Russo said. "He just went nuts."
"And she clipped him because the week before that he laid out her husband with a tire iron," Ferrara said. Pardon? "He sent her husband to the hospital," he said.
In late November, Ms. Page and Flair will meet again for a live pay-per-view wrestling match. Russo sees battles between genders as a kind of opportunistic feminism. "I like to paint women in a way where they're not afraid to go into a man's world and prove themselves," Russo said. "It's not the woman being the victim. It's the woman choosing to bring it on herself."
Those kinds of battles prompted Russo and Ferrara to tell Brad Siegel, the president of TNT, as soon as they arrived at W.C.W., that they would have to incorporate elements that might cause the show's ratings to change.
"W.C.W. had this squeaky clean image, you know, 'We're a family show,' " Ferrara said. "Well, I am sorry but the whole basis of the show is two guys getting into a ring and beating each other up. That to me is not family entertainment.
"I do not know one family that is sitting down watching 'Nitro' from 10 to 11 on Monday nights," he added.
At the W.W.F., Russo said, the ratings were so high -- about six million viewers a show -- that "it got to the point where we were more or less entertaining ourselves."
"We would look at each other and say, all right, let's see how far we can go this week." he continued. "How much can we get away with?"
At times, that sure went far: on one pay-per-view episode, a wrestler wrenched the prosthetic leg off another wrestler and beat him with it.
"There are certain rules now," Russo said with a sigh. "But we can keep it under control."
Russo is disdainful of Blacha. "You can't come from Letterman, or Conan, and work in this world," he said. "This guy comes from television, and he's this artsy L.A. guy wearing clogs. And the boys are looking at him like, 'Who is this?' Do you think a 300-pound guy who has been in this business for 15 years is going to sit and listen to some little kid in a pair of clogs?"
But Blacha said: "My clogs fit in fine in the locker room at W.W.F. How can you sum up a human being by an article of clothing?" Then he added: "I'll challenge him to a my-clogs-versus-his-greasy-ponytail battle any day."