Former WWE writer Brian Gewirtz recently spoke on The Ariel Helwani Show for an in-depth conversation about various topics. During the discussion, Gewirtz revealed how much of CM Punk’s pipe bomb promo was a shoot:
“I mean, the real element of that was CM Punk’s contract was coming up. There were backstage tensions in terms of performer and management, and not knowing whether Punk was going to re-sign or not re-sign. But in terms of the actual segment itself, whether you want to call it a worked shoot, that was something, obviously Vince and the company knew that we had it scheduled in segment 11 for CM Punk to come out and cut a promo, but Punk brought so many elements of that to himself, in terms of sitting down as opposed to standing. I know he worked with Ed Koskey on it. But I believe that the vast majority of it was coming from Punk’s heart and his brain. But at the same time, too, I know going into it, there wasn’t anything he said or was going to say that was, unless he improvised some of that on the spot, but I know Vince and everyone had a version of it in front of them and knew when to cut the mic. It was part of a television show, to be sure.”
“But to your point, there were real life overtones to it and real life passion into it. It wasn’t like, Punk cut the promo, the mic went out, and then he’s giving hugs to everybody backstage going, ‘Oh, this is great. I can’t wait till next year.’ It was palpable, the tension and the realness. It’s a testament to Punk to pull that off so well and have people questioning it to this day, like, ‘What the hell was going on’, and it’s a testament to Vince to say, ‘Yeah, say it, I don’t care, do what you can do. Call me an imbecile.’ I’m sure there were plenty of lines within that, that Punk kind of improvised on the spot, but at the same time, we knew going in this is what it was going to be, and it was going to get people talking. So that was a great example of something just coming together, and it couldn’t have been executed any better.”
You can watch the complete interview below:
(h/t to WrestlingNews.co for the transcription)
