WWE Hall of Famer and former WCW President Eric Bischoff addressed several topics on a recent episode of his 83 Weeks podcast, including Vince Russo’s creative pitches.
Bischoff said, “Here was my issue with Russo. Russo could pitch you an idea, even if it was a lukewarm idea. It was a six on a scale of one to 10, five and a half. But he would pitch it with so much passion and conviction that even though in your mind you’re going, ‘This is eh at best?’ He was charming enough and passionate enough, he could get you to go further with an idea than you might normally go. I would listen to some of his ideas more than I typically would, just because of his passion for it.”
On seeing through it:
“But once you got through the passion, like all of his ‘Bro, bro, bro, bro, bro, bro’ New York bulls**t. Once you got through that, if you ask him one question, ‘Where does it go from here? What happens next week? What’s the arc look like?’ It was like you were asking him to cure cancer. It would stump him. It was kind of amazing. And once I realized it — you know, Hulk was the first one to point it out to me, so I didn’t notice it right away. But if you ever wanted to shut Vince Russo down, all you had to do is say, ‘Vince, this is really great. What do we do next week?’ Because he never thought about next week. He never really understood episodic television. He booked one week at a time, and whatever got him excited, whatever it was and he got — once he wrapped his head around it, and he felt like he was going to go out and pitch it. That’s all he needed. ‘Next week? We’ll figure it out next week. Week after that?’ Whatever, I got it.’”
On Russo not understanding storytelling:
“He didn’t understand storytelling. He talks a lot about it, ‘everybody has a story,’ but the story sucked. It’s the same thing that I hear from the internet wrestling community fans that Dave Meltzer, ‘Oh, there’s so many stories in AEW, it’s hard to keep track of them.’ Are you f**king kidding me? Those aren’t stories. They don’t qualify as stories. There’s no structure to them, there’s no journey to them. Just because you come up and you book s**t every single week for the same two people over a course of six weeks, doesn’t mean you’re telling a story. You’re just booking matches. And Russo was more guilty of that than anybody that I’ve ever worked with in creative. He just didn’t understand the concept of — as probably in Jim Cornette’s example — yeah, it’s great to come up with a good idea on a piece of paper. It sounds really good when you’re pitching it in a room. But you have to execute it, right? And part of that execution is, what happens next week or next month? Where does it go? And if you don’t have the answer, Where does this story go after we shoot this really cool angle?’ If you don’t have a clear picture for that that you can explain with confidence, all you’re doing is pitching angles. And that’s what everybody does. Everybody’s pitching angles, nobody’s pitching stories.”
You can check out the complete podcast in the video below.
(H/T to 411Mania.com for transcribing the above quotes)
