Grantland.com has a very in-depth interview with WWE executive Paul Levesque (Triple H) where he spoke openly about the WWE’s creative process, “dirt sheets”, TV-PG and so much more. Here are just some of the highlights:
Who decides to put you in a story line? Does it come from the creative team?
Yeah, it can come out of creative, but the ultimate sign-off is Vince. Technically, creative reports to Steph, but Steph is kind of the aggregator. Her office does everything from the magazine to digital to the shows, so it’s funny when people will say, “Oh, Steph and the creatives.” She really doesn’t have anything to do with the day-to-day. I mean, she’ll weigh in on something if Vince asks or if the writers ask her what she thinks before they bring something to Vince….. But for the most part, she controls the gigantic entity that creative is so that there’s continuity between the digital and the magazine, continuity between the domestic shows or the shows that run internationally, all of those components and those teams, which is a massive amount of people. But creatively, the final sign-off is Vince.
But they [Internet writers] do get things right sometimes. There was this guy on Reddit posting results recently.
The night we brought Lesnar in, the fans were chanting his name, and Vince said to me, “How do they know we have Lesnar here?” They didn’t! They’d heard rumors that Lesnar was a possibility. But if you watched that crowd, they were fucking blown away when he walked out there. And that’s the difference. People think they know, but they really don’t know any of the inner mechanics of what we do. Every now and then there’s something in there that will be right on, and I think that’s because talent put it out there. Talent hear things and that’s fine. We don’t really put much thought into it, to be quite honest. We just dislike when people ruin stuff for fans. It’s like telling kids Santa Claus is fake. Why do it? It doesn’t benefit anybody other than the ego of the person who put it out there. I never understood that. Why would you tell people what’s going on? Isn’t that the whole point of what we do, to keep them on the edge of their seats? I mean, yeah, we see where the Internet is going. We’re giving fans more access now and doing shows like Total Divas. But I laugh, like, when writers say “Oh, CM Punk laid the pipe bomb and lifted the fourth wall in a promo.” So let me get this straight, you think we put him out on TV, he broke fucking everything we were supposed to do, and then sat down Indian-style and started blistering everybody, and we didn’t think Let’s take him off the air? If that would’ve been a shoot, it would’ve been off the air the second he started.
You were talking about Paul Heyman making stars out of guys. Now you’re running the talent department, from signings all the way up.
Yeah, that’s mine. Everything that has to do with talent, from the legends to the developmental system, to the live events and all of its operations and the towns we book, to where the pay-per-views are, all of it. Obviously I have a massive team that does all that, but they report to me.
I started in the office full-time a few years ago. Vince had been bugging me for a while, saying “When are you going to stop messing around in the ring and come get a real job?” So one time when I was injured, I shadowed him in the office for three months. I did everything he did. When I finally started full-time, he was like, “Take a few months. I want you to dig into everything. Have meetings with finance, dig into every part of this company and see what you think needs work.” And the thing I came back to him with was we have this huge global marketing juggernaut, but we’re a victim of our own success. We’ve shut down all the other territories. There’s almost no place for guys to go learn, and when they do, they’re learning how to work in a junior high in front of 50 people. It’s a completely different thing than working in front of 10,000 or a million on TV with a camera in your face.
So I started this little division called talent development. It was basically to build a bridge between creative and the developmental wrestlers. Now, other than Vince saying, “OK, you can have that amount of money,” he doesn’t have anything to do with it. Honest to god, he hasn’t even seen the Performance Center yet. He’s supposed to go next week.
Some guys go through a lot of different characters, right?
Well, Damien Sandow was one. He was in developmental, got let go, then got brought back. When I took developmental over, he was in his second run. I sat down with him and said, “You’re a good hand, but I’m not buying your product.” One day he sent me this promo and said, “Check this out, I really like this.” He sent me the Damien Sandow character. I said “That’s interesting. Go down that road a little bit more.” The further he went down that road, the more it worked. Now he’s in the roster, but he paid his dues to get there and worked hard at it and took a long time. That’s the process now — to help these guys get through that.
To bring in more Bray Wyatts and fewer Husky Harrises?
Steph was just talking about it this morning with me. We took that kid, put him back in developmental, repackaged him, set the table for him, and put him into story lines. Last night I’m working with him hands-on. We were riffing, like “This is how we’re going to do this.” Then I watch him come out. I’m in Gorilla with the headset on, trying to get cameras to call it right. And when it’s a fucking home run, it’s just as much juice as me going out there and doing it myself.
And listen, I’m not trying to take credit, because it’s all him. If somebody asks me who created Bray Wyatt, I tell them: Bray Wyatt did. We just helped set the table. That’s the whole point. We give these guys every tool possible to succeed.
It’s to ensure the future of the business. Right now, probably 85 to 90 percent of our roster came through our system in some way. Five years from now, 100 percent of our roster will have come through there. We had seven guys in the past year at WrestleMania that weren’t on the roster the year before. Those guys come up to me and say, “I know we talked about this down there [in developmental], and I didn’t understand it then. Thank you for hanging in there with me, because I get it now.”
There are rumors that after the Performance Center, a physical Hall of Fame might be on the way.
Everybody always asks that question. Halls of fame are not a lucrative business. But here’s the bigger reason: If and when the time is right to do a Hall of Fame, it’s not just going to be a place where you walk in and say, “Oh, look, there’s a pair of trunks.” If we do it, it’ll be an immersive experience. With technology the way it is, a 4-D experience, whether it’s a ride, or, picture this: You walk into a locker room, lights go down, smoke comes out, and Andre the Giant walks out in a hologram and stands there and talks to you. That’s what it has to be. But is the Hall of Fame the priority? Absolutely not. It’s out there someplace in the stratosphere. But if we do it, it takes a lot of research because we want to do it right.
But you own a lot of the iconic artifacts of wrestling history, right?
One of the things we do is try to be the caretakers of the business. We have 130,000 hours of library footage. We’re perpetually looking for whatever else is out there. This past year, I got the first WWWF championship belt that Buddy Rogers lost to Bruno Sammartino. The night we put Bruno into the Hall of Fame, Bruno saw it. He hadn’t seen it since the day they switched it. He was amazed.
I got the NWA title that Harley Race wore, and Harley was in my office one day and I showed it to him. Harley had tears in his eyes, and he says, “See that dent right there? I smashed my head on it in St. Louis.” I love that aspect of the business.
The only thing you don’t have is the trunks of the guy Pat Patterson beat for the first Intercontinental title.
No, we have them. They’re behind a locked door. (The first Intercontinental title tournament, punitively won in Rio de Janeiro by Pat Patterson (the same guy who went on to be a backstage player), never happened. It was a useful lie from the pre-cable, pre-Internet days.)
This is obvious just a small sample of a very good interview. Other topics discussed are the status of a physical Hall Of Fame, The Clique, his feud with Mick Foley and much more. You can read the whole piece here.
