Former WWE Director of VOD and Supervising Producer John Carlan discussed his experiences working with former Executive Producer Kevin Dunn with Conrad Thompson on the Insiders podcast.
“It was hard. It was never easy. He certainly had a high bar. At times, I didn’t like it, to be honest. Our relationship was good for the most part. We had a couple of ups and downs. We also had times where we had fun after the show where we would hang out in a group and he’d be part of that. It was hard. There was a lot of things there…it’s difficult because there were things that were handled differently than I would have handled them personally. There were certainly some policies that not all of us agreed with. He was the boss. It was what it was. There are people who are still there that grew up from Kevin that may have some of the same qualities that I may not necessarily agree with, but we rolled with it day-to-day. It wasn’t like I worked a lot with him directly. I had a little tenure on the road. That was my closest interaction in a professional environment. He was around if there were shoots that were very important. There were other times where we had fun and we had old production meetings.”
“Every time we came back from the road, KD would run the production meeting with all the producers. He would give a recap of the week and we’d go through different things and people would have questions. KD is a big Raiders fan. I’m a big Patriots fan. We’re leading up to the Tuck Rule game in 2001. Stephanie McMahon used to go the production meetings. We got close because we grew up Patriots fans and went to school down the street from each other in Boston. I told Steph before the meeting, ‘Underneath my work clothes, I have my Tom Brady jersey on. At the end, he’s going to ask if anyone has questions. I’m going to get up and say ‘We’ll see you this weekend,’ and I’m going to rip my work shirt off and spin around. Will you have my back?’ She said, ‘I have your back.’ We went through the meeting. I was dying inside thinking, ‘Am I really going to do this?’ I did it. Everybody popped and laughed. He looked at me and goes, ‘I’ll tell you right now, if they win this game, your ass is fired.’ It never happened, it was all in fun. It was great. That was a fun interaction with him. He’s certainly controversial, no question. A lot of that outside stuff is inaccurate, but a lot is accurate.”
(quotes courtesy of Jeremy Lambert)
