David Shoemaker discusses working with Vince McMahon.
The long-awaited Vince McMahon docuseries, "Mr. McMahon", has finally premiered on Netflix. The series was first announced in 2020, but it was pushed back multiple times.
Executive producer Bill Simmons and consulting producer David Shoemaker spoke about working on the docuseries on the The Bill Simmons Podcast. Simmons first discussed their approach to telling McMahon's story.
"I don’t want to say too much because I don’t want to prejudice how people watch the documentary. I really want people to sit down and watch it, but the backstory of it was, Vince wanted to do a documentary, and the WWE, because I had done the Andre the Giant doc, and he was ready to tell his story. A big thing for us was well, if we’re gonna tell your story, it’s gotta be everything. We’re not doing an autobiography. It’s gotta be warts and all, and it’s like I’m ready to talk about everything. So the next step was finding a director, and the best thing was with Chris, he wasn’t a wrestling fan, and we actually decided it’d be more interesting. Let’s get somebody who doesn’t know this, and we immerse him into this world, and he’s experiencing everything for the first time, and we can help him with the wrestling stuff. So we get all these interviews and we’re going, and probably working on it for over a year, year and a half, and then the first wave of stuff happens with Vince. For the next two years, we’re trying to figure out, will we have to audible on the fly again, what’s this gonna mean? There’s a couple times when I think both of us thought this things gonna get shelved, this won’t happen. But the thing for me, we were trying to do a balanced portrait, as balanced as we could, of somebody who for 50 years had this [huge] impact on not only completely changing professional wrestling, the culture, television, cable, the pay-per-view model, the streaming model, there’s nobody like him. There’s no promoter like him. So the big thing was, how do we capture that impact? The second thing was, who is this guy? What’s real and not real? That’s where we kind of gravitated with the doc, but then all the sudden, there’s a twist here, there’s a turn here," McMahon said.
Shoemaker highlighted how the project was a major undertaking, given all of the history involved. He also responded to Simmons, who had noted that McMahon was initially eager to participate. Shoemaker noted that he was not sure that McMahon knew what story he wanted to tell.
“You said Vince was eager, he wanted to do the documentary at first, which is 100% true. But I don’t think Vince, it sounds so weird to say, I’m not sure Vince knew what it meant to do the documentary, and I’m not sure that he knew what story he wanted to tell. I don’t even know if he knows who he is enough to tell that story. It was really hard, even when he was pseudo eager in the first phase of the documentary, it was really hard to get beyond the surface with him," Shoemaker said.
During the podcast, Simmons and Shoemaker also discussed how working on the docuseries was bizarre, and Simmons called it the strangest documentary experience that he had ever been involved with. Check out his comments here.
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