Evan Husney discusses pitching 'Who Killed WCW' to VICE TV.
The series, which is currently airing weekly on VICE TV, is seemingly a bit hit among fans in the wrestling community. As it turns out, Evan Husney had some trouble trying to get the idea off the ground.
While speaking to Fightful for a new interview, Husney explained the process of pitching the show to VICE TV and how they went back and forth on the length of the project in the early stages of planning.
"Well, it was still a little bit of a process because it is unique in that it's a four-part series. It's not something that typically happens for broadcast television, that sort of format. It's boring to some maybe, but it's like when you have 10 episodes of something, it's easier to spread the costs of a show around and you can make it more sort of economic in that way. With four episodes, you're compressing a lot of costs and it can be a little difficult. So it was challenging trying to get this down to the price that made sense for them to do. Pitching it, it was I think the first reaction was, well, you guys have covered a lot of this on Dark Side before and we had just done the Bash at the Beach 2000 episode for Dark Side of the Ring, which I sort of look at as almost a pilot for this show, for Who Killed WCW. What was clear to me seeing the reaction to Bash at the Beach 2000 that episode was there was a lot of intro, a lot more interest in a lot of the other stories we were telling that season and people were really interested to relive that time period to see the vitriol between all the characters involved. There's still a lot of speculation and a lot of just a lot of engagement around WCW and a lot of course nostalgia for it. So that was what spoke volumes to me and was sort of something that I showed them as well, too. It's like, ‘Yeah, this is going to be part of the story. We're going to have to sort of retell again, yes. But you can just see the engagement on this subject is still so strong and people have so much reverence for that time period, too, myself included.’ So that was sort of the process of showing how it's going to break down. At first, we didn't know what it was going to be. Was it going to be a standalone film? Was it like a two-hour movie? Was it going to be a 10-part thing? I think at the end of the day, we probably could have made it a little longer."
Husney went on to say that there is a lot of information packed into the four episode series, including some stuff that most would consider uncharted territory.
"So I think four is a good compromise. We definitely packed a lot in. It's very compressed. But I think what's really going to be cool for people to see, I'm very excited about people seeing last episode. Episode four is very interesting because it gets into, I feel like a lot of uncharted territory. One of the really cool things that we got as far as like never before seen footage, which is utilized in episode one and also mostly in episode four, is we found through Neil Pruitt, who is one of the brilliant minds, he's responsible for the nWo promos, he was doing a lot of the feature production that they had WCW at the time great guy. He turned us on to this guy who had was sitting on now for over 20 years, he's been sitting on never before released three days worth of documentary footage chronicling the last days of Nitro So literally covering the Panama City. The lead up to the last episode of Nitro. So we got all this footage that no one's ever seen before like Shane McMahon standing like in the middle of the ring like during the day, Bruce Prichard coming in, Gerald Briscoe coming into the Nitro set, everybody looking dejected, not knowing what's going to happen. Interviews with like, Kanyon and Hugh Morris, people talking about, ‘I don't know what's going to happen. No one's told us what's going on.’ Yeah, I believe he was a cameraman that had worked for WCW and he decided to just roll on stuff and was filming it. It was just three days worth of stuff we had to go through, but it was so cool to go through all of it because what a time capsule of that time and that moment of the last Nitro. So people, fans will be really excited about that. That's one of the main cool things I think about this is seeing that stuff for the first time."
Elsewhere in the interview, Husney talked about interviewing Kevin Nash and Booker T for the series. Learn more here.
Fans can check out Fightful's full interview with Husney in the video linked at the top of this article.
