Pro-Wrestling A longtime writer for Eddie Murphy directs an alluring doc on the weird world of pro wrestling. Why is WWF capo Vince McMahon trying to pile-drive it? Page Pro-Wrestling A longtime writer for Eddie Murphy directs an alluring doc on the weird world of pro wrestling. Why is WWF capo Vince McMahon trying to pile-drive it? Page
Last updated 2 August 2002
March 16, 2000 | Barry W. Blaustein, a co-screenwriter of "The Nutty Professor" and a longtime writer for Eddie Murphy, just wanted to make a documentary on his closet passion for pro wrestling. He didn't count on winding up in a cage match with the World Wrestling Federation's colorful, pugnacious impresario, Vince McMahon.
But Blaustein's searching documentary on the sport, "Beyond the Mat," has come under fire from McMahon and his powerful franchise, culminating in a cease-and-desist letter aimed at disrupting the movie's advertising campaign.
McMahon is a charismatic on-camera presence in the movie; at one point he even wanted to invest in it. But now he's told his wrestlers that they can't help promote the film -- and he's used his muscle to keep the film's commercials off his shows. Blaustein says McMahon has even worked to bar TV ads from two networks -- a charge that the WWF denies. The contretemps has chagrined both Blaustein and his distributor, Lions Gate Releasing.
Mark Urman, co-president of Lions Gate, has said, "Mr. McMahon has decided that he doesn't like our film, so now he wants to prevent wrestling fans nationwide, who so far have embraced the film, from finding out about it."
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How could such a battle come about -- and with such unlikely combatants?
Blaustein and his comedy partner, David Sheffield, have been writing for Murphy ever since the three joined "Saturday Night Live" in 1980. Blaustein and Sheffield share credit with other writers on "The Nutty Professor" (1996) and on the forthcoming "Nutty II: The Klumps," which Blaustein vows is better than the first.
But for a decade longer than he's known Murphy, Blaustein has been a fan of professional wrestling. When he was a kid in Westbury, N.Y., his dad would take him to wrestling bouts in West Hempstead and Queens. Blaustein never lost his love for it -- nor his embarrassment over it.
Five years ago, he decided to make a documentary about his secret passion, which he admits not even his wife or his two teenage children understand. The finished film, "Beyond the Mat" (which opens Friday nationwide) made the preliminary list of nominees for the best documentary Oscar and earned Blaustein a nomination from the Directors Guild of America. It's a potent piece of work, full of unresolved arguments and emotions. It leaves you in a state of visceral confusion toward intelligent, capable men who get paid for being bashed.
The film's hero is Mick Foley, aka Mankind, a sane, humorous family guy and the bestselling autobiographer of "Have a Nice Day: A Tale of Blood and Sweatsocks." Blaustein considers his Long Island homeboy the most normal wrestler he's ever met. But you feel like prosecuting Foley for child abuse when he allows his pint-size son and daughter to watch his friendly rival, the Rock, beat him mercilessly around the ring.
That sequence is typical of the jolts in "Beyond the Mat," which range from the sublime to the ludicrous -- from hearing a teacher-turned-wrestler talk Shakespeare while blood pours down his face to seeing McMahon audition a wrestler and dub him "Puke" because he can throw up on demand.
You mostly see Blaustein from the back of his gray-blond head, but there's no confusion about where he stands. From beginning to end, he's solidly pro-wrestling. He likes it, though he can't tell exactly why.
Which makes it all the more ironic that the film has put him at loggerheads with McMahon.
"When I approached Vince, wrestling was not as big as it is now," Blaustein recalled during a recent visit to San Francisco. "And Vince was getting a strong challenge from Ted Turner's wrestling group, World Championship Wrestling. I told Vince I wanted to do a movie to show why I like wrestling and to give non-fans an appreciation of what these guys go through. Not everybody can do what they do -- can go through the pain and still be these extraordinary performers -- and I thought they should be treated with respect. Usually, everything about wrestling is either negative or condescending. I promised Vince that this wouldn't be either."
McMahon didn't merely cooperate with Blaustein, he offered to triple his budget. Blaustein said no -- he wanted to maintain journalistic independence. Still, McMahon kept bidding to buy the movie. Michael Rosenberg, the president of the film's production company, Imagine, says, "During the three years of production on 'Beyond the Mat,' the WWF, through its owner, Vince McMahon, continued to try and convince Imagine to allow him to be an investor in the film." According to Blaustein, when McMahon saw the movie, he called Imagine and said, "Name your price." But Imagine turned him down.
The rebuff was apparently not what the scrappy WWF kingpin -- a bad-boy wrestling icon himself -- wanted to hear. Blaustein says, "Vince told me it's not the film he would have made: 'I like to put smiles on people's faces,' he said, 'but I think you did a great job, and I have no regrets knowing you. I'm just not going to do anything that would help you promote it.'"
He didn't want his wrestlers to promote it, either. "Six weeks ago, Mick Foley appeared on 'Good Morning, America' with me; Diane Sawyer said she'd never been a fan of wrestling but the film made her look on it as a different thing. Vince was very unhappy about that. He said, 'If any of these guys appear on any other programs with you, they do so at career risk. And if you care so much about Mick -- if he's your friend, as you claim him to be -- then you'll have him do nothing else.'"
McMahon's hardball tactics escalated. Lions Gate contends that the magnate is performing a pile driver on its ad campaign by vetoing TV spots for the film during the WWF wrestling shows "Raw is War," "Sunday Night Heat" and "SmackDown." (The company has retaliated by putting them on the Web.
Blaustein believes that McMahon went further. "He put pressure on UPN and USA not to run any commercials for the movie on any USA program or on any UPN program," Blaustein says.
Jim Byrne, senior vice president for marketing at the WWF, says that the company stands by its "longstanding policy" not to accept advertising for its TV shows from what he called "third-party wrestling product -- anything that isn't owned, controlled or managed by WWF Entertainment, Inc." He says there's "no truth" to the charge that the WWF pressured UPN and USA networks to decline advertising for "Beyond the Mat" on shows not produced by the WWF. And he chalks up the tangled relations between Blaustein and the WWF to misrepresentation on the filmmaker's part.
Says Byrne: "It was originally characterized as an art-house film, done as a major labor of love in 1997." But in the eyes of the WWF the film now appears to be "not an art-house film, but a major motion picture backed by major Hollywood players and a highly commercial venture." According to Byrne, WWF executives expected it to be shot and completed in 1997; McMahon continued to give Blaustein access precisely because he thought it was "an art-house film and labor of love. When we expressed interest, going back a year ago, for some financial stake in the film, [it was because] it uses our likenesses, trademarks and characters." But when the WWF honchos did take a look at the movie, in December, "We lost all emotional attachment to it. It just wasn't entertaining."
When I mentioned to Byrne that "Beyond the Mat" is only opening in 175 theaters, and that Lions Gate is primarily an art-house distributor, he countered, with a laugh: "We all know about 'Blair Witch Project'!" That comparison, at least, should make Blaustein happy.
UPN says, "No comment;" the USA network did not offer a response.
But Blaustein insists, "These broadcasters are bowing down to Vince. It's a frightening precedent. This movie is not negative toward Vince and the WWF. I think Vince's attitude is, if I can't have the film, I'm not going to let anybody else know about it."
Astonishingly, major newspapers by and large ignored this story. "They say, 'Oh it's just business.' But no it's not, guys, there's a civil liberties issue here. It doesn't matter if we have 600 TV stations -- if they are all owned by the same people, there's no freedom of choice. This is the nightmare scenario of synergy and of vertical integration."
As if to prove Blaustein's point, a week after we talked, the lead story on the New York Times' business page was about the "struggle for ownership" at UPN, which is complicated by the pending merger of UPN's co-owner, Viacom, and CBS. The story does not mention "Beyond the Mat," but it does emphasize the weight McMahon carries with Viacom and how valuable McMahon's WWF is to CBS, which reportedly wants Viacom to buy the rest of UPN from Chris-Craft Industries.
"I don't like what Vince is doing," says Blaustein, "but from a promoting standpoint and an entrepreneurial standpoint you have to step back and say, 'He's good at it.' And I have seen a softer side of the guy on occasion. I think he's been playing an SOB in the ring for so long he feels he's got to act that way outside of it all the time. I like to think the best of all people, so I hope Vince knows somewhere that what he's doing is ultimately wrong."
Blaustein says that when he went to the New York Times to rouse interest in his tale, he got turned down: "They say, 'Our readers don't watch wrestling.' Well, you'd be surprised who watches wrestling. The demographics of wrestling are higher than the demographics of Major League Baseball.
"Ironically," Blaustein continues, "The WCW, Ted Turner's outfit, didn't sign a release [to have its own wrestlers appear in 'Beyond the Mat.']. They wanted to have some sort of editorial control, so they're not in the movie. But when the movie had its Academy
Award-qualifying run in L.A., a couple of WCW guys were in town and saw it. They called me up -- the person who wouldn't sign the release is no longer there -- and said, 'Boy, you've done something wonderful for the industry, we really regret not being in it.' They're running the ads, even though they have their own movie coming out a month from now! And not only are they running ads for my picture, they're having their guys talk about it on the air! They don't have problems at all."
Blaustein believes that if more mainstream media covered wrestling the way he does in his film -- or the way Meltzer does in his online newsletter and others do on Internet "dirt sheets" that treat wrestling as a business -- more people would be drawn into its strange amalgam of sport and entertainment. "You've got to understand wrestling fans are a lot more knowledgeable about what's going on than non-wrestling fans. They suspend their disbelief -- it's like going to a movie."
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"Beyond the Mat" starts with you saying that you can't explain why you like wrestling. But at some point you must have come to grips with it. Is that statement a kind of posture, so that we in the audience know we're going to see wrestlers without a lot of external editorializing? Or is it totally true?
It's totally true. At one time I thought I was going to analyze why I like it. Essentially it came down to, I just do. I knew I loved the theatricality. I knew I loved the in-your-face element. At one time I thought I was going to analyze why I like it. [He laughs derisively.] Is it the repressed homosexuality? Is it because I didn't challenge a kid to a fight in seventh grade? And I realized that after all these years, I just don't know why. At the beginning I wanted to state that this is not "a study of wrestling as a popular social phenomenon and the effect it has on people." It's a view of the wrestling world from the perspective of a guy who likes it. He's embarrassed he likes it, and up until recently he would never tell another human being he likes it. To this day, I'm not proud I like it. But the only thing that makes me wonder why I like it now is that it's become so mainstream and so popular, it's lost that tainted, dirty feeling, which I enjoy so much. Up till now, it's been something you're not supposed to like, which gives you more reason to like it.
You include a clip of Max Von Sydow saying, 'Can you imagine the level of a mind that watches wrestling?'
That's from "Hannah and Her Sisters" -- Woody Allen! It's the first time Woody Allen has lent a clip out to anything. And I was real excited because now I have a framed contract, a release, between me and Woody Allen. But I was more excited because at the end of the movie I was able to put in "Personal thanks to Woody Allen and to Afa the Wild Samoan" one after the other -- a great combination.
Hasn't wrestling changed tremendously since you started watching it 30 years ago?
Yeah, it's changed, but there are more similarities than differences. It's just more hyped. Like movies today -- everything is amped up more. The characters and the violence are more extreme. But the same essential theatricality was always prevalent. I like the outrageousness of it and the political incorrectness of it.
Of course, there are things that make me uncomfortable. I met a lot of midget wrestlers -- I'm not going to say "vertically challenged wrestlers." There are not many of them left; they are almost always older guys. They're always the big comedy act. I never thought I minded it, but I remember even as a kid I thought it was humiliating when a ref picked up a midget wrestler and spanked him. I always thought, "Was that really needed?" And I asked them, "Was this really going too far?" And they said, "No, it was part of the show and we were getting paid good money."
For non-fans like myself, what's shocking about your movie is how much real punishment these guys take. We all grow up thinking it's choreographed and thus harmless.
It is choreographed, but these are huge bodies! When they get hit with a chair, people think, "Oh, it's a fake chair." I don't even know what the concept of a fake chair is. They are getting hit over the head with real metal chairs, and when they land on concrete, they land on concrete. The rings are not that padded and the ropes are really hard -- that was the big shocker to me. And when you see blood, it's real blood -- it's not capsules, it's blood, whether it's self-inflicted or not.
Vince McMahon said to me once -- when we were talking -- "It's funny. In the past the industry would go, 'It's real, it's real, it's real, it's real, it's real, it's real,' but it was just pulled muscles and stuff, not life-threatening. Now everyone goes, 'It's sports entertainment, it's fake, it's fake, it's fake,' and the reality is guys are really brutalizing themselves in the ring."
Unfortunately, you have fans who go, "OK -- you exploded yourself this time, what can you do next? How are you going to top that?" That's why I am glad Mick Foley is retired and out of wrestling; I think it is going to stick longer than most wrestling retirements. He retired two or three weeks ago; ironically, the day after Vince started pulling ads.
Since you bring him up -- let's jump ahead to the climax of the movie. You present Mick Foley as a prince, but then you show him bringing his little kids to a match where he ends up with a bandaged head.
Mick was going to bring his kids regardless. The WWF had wanted his wife at that match; they wanted to showcase him having a decent, regular wife and family, though they backed away from it the day before. The kids wanted to be there, but I said, "Mick, you know, I think this is a bad decision. As a father, I think this is bad." And Mick was like, "But the kids really want to go, they'll be prepared." And Mick did ask the kids if they really wanted to go, and did try to keep them from being scared. He did tell them that the Rock is his friend. As you see in the movie, the Rock goes to meet them and is really good with the kids. But the reality is no matter how well you prepare them, they're still seeing Daddy being brutalized.
Mick spoke to me about two weeks afterward and asked how the footage of the kids watching the match turned out. I said, "Mick, it's horrendous, it's absolutely horrendous." And he said, "You know, the kids seemed fine backstage afterwards." And you know, even if Mick was bleeding, the kids were kind of fine -- he never let go of his daughter or his son's hand. So I wanted to show Mick this footage for two reasons: First, he needed to see it. Second, from an editorial standpoint, I didn't want the last image of Mick to be that he's a terrible human being and father. Because I've been around him long enough to know that he's a wonderful father. He made a mistake in judgment. I'm a parent -- we make mistakes in judgment. That happens. And you like to be accountable, particularly when you make bad ones. I thought part of what was happening was that when you're in this lifestyle for so long, you lose all perspective on everything.
My editor was against me showing it to Mick. My wife warned me, "You like Mick a lot. And although he has no editorial control whatsoever, he's going to want it out of the movie. And you're not going to want to take it out." So I brought it with me when I went to shoot the footage of him playing with his kids. Before he saw it, he kept saying, "I don't think it was so bad -- the kids got a trip to Disneyland." Finally, when I decided to show it to him, I had someone take the kids out for ice cream, because I didn't want them to see it or see the reaction Mick would have. And it was hard -- like really punching someone who dares you to hit him in the stomach. It was devastating to him. But actually, as I was leaving he said, "You know, it doesn't make me look particularly wonderful, but I think you should keep it in the film, because it's important." I was going to keep it in anyway, but I appreciated that.
One thing I kept saying to my editor, Jeff Werner, who did a terrific job, is that rather than keep going back to what the footage shows, we should go back to the way I felt about these people when I was there. Because let's face it, footage isn't holy -- you can manipulate it any way you want. That's why I desperately wanted to get Mick's reaction to the footage and put it in the film. Because if people would see how he reacts and still think he's an awful human being -- well, so be it, I guess that's their prerogative. When Mick saw the final film, he felt really proud to be in it. But he asked whether his son, Dewey, was in it as much as Noelle. He just wanted to be sure that one child wasn't favored over the other, and that sums him up.
That's what's so befuddling!
It is confusing, but it's not a black-and-white world we live in. It's all grays, man.
Is there a kind of mental and emotional as well as physical numbing you need to go through to participate in this sport?
Very much so. And I think that's one of the reasons Mick has stopped; he realized he can't go on like this any more.
You always like Mick, even when he errs. But then there's Jake the Snake Roberts, a charismatic loner who has demons, who does crack, and who spends five minutes with his daughter when he first meets her after a four-year absence. Your feelings about him must have changed continuously.
That's one of the things I hope to capture in the film. Jake would remind me of Sam Elliott; he would look great on camera, and had this great voice. There are times when he's very charming and you feel sorry for him. And there are times like after he left his daughter when I would want to throw him out of the car and I would think, this is the most disgusting human being.
It would be interesting to do a fictional treatment of Jake. Wrestlers had told me to be careful around him: They warned me, "You'll really think he likes you, and then you'll be stuck in the middle of nowhere because he'll take your car." And I remember when we were driving, I think through Kansas -- on the third or fourth day we made a stop, and Jake said, "It's kind of cold, why don't you give me the keys to the car and I'll meet you inside?" And I said, "Jake, I'm not going to give you the keys to the car and let you leave me here." And then he smiles that devilish smile and says, "Barry, I would never do that to you."
Terry Funk, the aging happy warrior, is the opposite of Jake. You say that Funk was your favorite wrestler growing up -- and at the end of the film he is still one of your favorites.
In seven days with Jake he ultimately bad-mouthed everybody, except Terry Funk. I tried to goad him, and say, "Don't you have anything bad to say about Terry?" And he would say [in Jake's gravelly voice], "Terry's good; Terry's one of the few good ones. The only good one. Well, there are a few others."
Terry is about to become a grandfather and he's wrestling again, despite his lousy knees and everything. Terry is wonderful. There would be no movie without Terry Funk. Terry is respected in the wrestling business, as a wrestler and as a person, as a man of principle, the way Lou Gehrig was in baseball. Terry signed on early and opened doors for me. He would call up other wrestlers and vouch for me. In the course of the film he announced his retirement, and I went to cover his retirement match. Then he went back to wrestling. And I got calls saying, "He went back to wrestle again, this is going to ruin the film!" I went, "Please, I'm not that naive." Because when we started it was like, [in Terry's soft Texas accent] "I'm going to do my last match." Then it was like, "I'm going to do my last match in the United States." Then towards the end it was like, "I'm going to do my last match in Amarillo." Terry has had more retirements than fill-in-the-blank has had facelifts.
There's a sweet quality to Terry's part of the movie. My favorite part of that is his relationship with Dennis Stamp, who is the guy who hasn't made it. As much of a noodge as Dennis can be, overbearing and ungrateful, especially with Terry, I think he exemplifies something everybody has. Everybody has this desire to belong, to be part of the group, no matter what they do.
Do the up-and-comers know what they're getting into?
They know and they can't wait. Look: The up-and-coming part is the struggle. The least savory people you meet are on the lower levels. Originally the film was going to be about following young guys. I must have seen about 150 young guys. The problem is, because they're young, their stories are not as interesting. There was one guy I was going to follow, who by the time I got my cameras and everything actually made it. He's in the picture, Matt Hyson; he's got his own kind of charisma.
He's the former third-grade teacher -- the English major. There's an odd moment when someone off camera asks him to wipe off some of his blood.
It's so bizarre. I'm squeamish around blood. But after a while you come to accept it. Matter of fact, when you talk to people, and blood is squirting from their heads, you're just having a regular conversation. But with Matt, we had to cut around it -- because I'm laughing. I was thinking to myself, "This is like a Monty Python sketch! Blood's shooting out everywhere!" And I think that's the absurdity of it that I like.
Is there any relationship between your love for wrestling and your comedy work?
I like to say I did this film so I could prove to Hollywood that I could work with white people! I gave Eddie Murphy a video and he said, "Wow, I saw it four times over the weekend. It's great." Eddie's got a real quick mimic's memory; he was blown away by the Jake stuff.
Does that mean wrestling, in your experience, is still almost exclusively white?
Well, it is mostly white, and there aren't many women either. In the ring, most women are used as sex objects. But some women do go to the matches and like wrestling. And Chyna is different, she isn't lumped together with the rest of the women wrestlers.
In her black leather hot pants, boots and halter, she has a Wonder Woman thing going.
Yeah, almost. Chyna has gone through life having to hear people say she looked like a man or she must be a lesbian, but she sees herself as a figure to empower women. In the movie I say she had her jaw restructured to enhance her femininity. She's recently got her breasts enlarged. I know she's conflicted about it, but it's a business decision, and if you're going to sell out you might as well go all the way. Her following is still predominantly male, but she feels great when little girls go up to her in a mall and say, "Wow, you're great -- you're someone to look up to, a woman who'll stand up for herself." She's Chyna: She fights the guys.
But to get back to the relationship between Eddie Murphy comedies and wrestling ...
Well, wrestlers are outsiders and Sherman Klump is an outsider in a weird way, because of his weight and his appearance. In the first "Nutty Professor" movie Eddie played all the characters but the family was only in two scenes. In -- I think it's now called, "Nutty II: The Klumps" -- there are only three scenes we shot where he wasn't at least two characters in it. Mama and Papa are having problems, marital problems; after all, Papa's getting older, so he's having performance problems and psychological problems. Granny has a fantasy love scene with Buddy Love [Sherman's slick alter ego] that we have to edit down to get a PG-13 rating. I think Eddie feels very close to these characters, all of them, and I think he gives an even better performance. What's amazing is that it never feels like "Here's a guy in makeup." I hope people respond to him in the role because Sherman is such a decent person. He has everything going for him except for his weight.
I think studios are always pushing Eddie into playing the Black Guy. The Black Guy in a White World. The Black Guy that Really Outsmarts White People. And you know what? As a white person, we're not always going to get tricked. But in the Nutty Professor films the characters are very close to him. He talks about the mother being based on his grandmother. For me, looking at Granny is just like looking at my own grandmother -- same look, kind of freaky. It's a real collaboration between Eddie, and me and David Sheffield.
As for wrestling, the worst thing for me is when they do comedy; it makes me cringe. Whenever I told people I was making a movie about wrestling, they'd say it was going to be funny. I said, "No, it's a serious film." Recently, I took my daughter to an art theater in downtown L.A. to see some documentary about inner-city kids. There were only six people there. But I remember saying with pride, "This is what it's going to be like when my movie opens. I'm going to be opening in art-house theaters. Enough of these big openings! I'm finally going to do an obscure movie!"
This article can also be read at http://www.salon.com/ent/col/srag/2000/03/16/beyond_the_mat/index.html