Kyle Dillon of Smark to Death sat down with Evan Husney and Jason Eisener, the producers of Dark Side of the Ring to discuss how Dark Side of the Ring came to exist, what sets this series apart from other documentaries, their unique approach to the Montreal Screw Job, and more. You can download or listen to the show in full at this link, and check out submitted highlights below.
On how the project came together
“Well basically the genesis of it is that Jason and I (Evan) became friends around our love of wrestling about 10 years ago or so. Jason is a feature film director, he made the film “Hobo with a Shotgun”, and I was in film distribution at the time and I eventually made the jump over to Vice. I was producing short form content, 20 minute documentaries, and was eventually doing stuff for Viceland. The whole time we were getting back into wrestling together not only looking at the current product, but looking back at the territory era and going back to 80’s wrestling in Japan and a lot of the stuff we totally missed as kids. Bruiser Brody was part of that rediscovering of this insanely captivating, legendary wrestler that wasn’t known about as we were kids. And then we got into the story of his passing and that intrigued us even more.
We wanted to make the Bruiser Brody story into a doc and it proved to be too ambitious for my department at the time I was working at VICE. Then the TV network popped up and they were accepting pitches and ideas. And we put together as a series. So we thought Brody could be one of them and we could a couple others and it went really well with everyone over there.”
