Some documentaries are made to entertain. Others are made because the filmmaker becomes obsessed with understanding a world that most people either misunderstand or completely ignore. That’s what makes this conversation with John Philapavage so compelling. What began as a teenager’s fascination with ECW wrestling culture slowly transformed into a 13-year filmmaking odyssey that became Barbed Wire City, an ambitious documentary about the rise, chaos, mythology, and emotional aftermath of Extreme Championship Wrestling.
John’s journey into filmmaking didn’t begin in film school or Hollywood. It began with childhood creativity, VHS cameras, comic books, and DIY storytelling experiments with his lifelong creative partner Kevin Kernan. Growing up in Pennsylvania, surrounded by wrestling culture and underground fandom, they became fascinated not just by wrestling itself, but by the people orbiting around it—the fans, performers, promoters, and strange emotional ecosystem that ECW created. That curiosity eventually evolved into something bigger than fandom. It became anthropology through filmmaking.
One of the most fascinating aspects of the conversation is how John reframes the purpose of the documentary itself. While many wrestling fans expected Barbed Wire City to simply celebrate ECW nostalgia, John approached the project differently. He wasn’t interested in creating propaganda or fan service. He wanted to document truth—even when that truth became uncomfortable. That meant examining violence, manipulation, obsession, cult-like fan loyalty, and the emotional cost that ECW left behind for many of the people involved.
That approach created enormous challenges during production. Interview subjects often contradicted each other. Some intentionally distorted facts. Others blended reality with wrestling mythology until even they no longer seemed fully certain what was true anymore. John explains how difficult it became to untangle truth from performance in a business built on illusion. “There’s your version, my version, and the truth,” becomes one of the underlying themes of the entire episode.
The interview also becomes an incredible lesson in documentary filmmaking psychology. John talks openly about learning how to interview subjects without appearing threatening, judgmental, or overly fan-driven. Early on, wrestlers viewed him as “just a fan,” which often limited access and credibility. But over time, he learned how to position himself more like a filmmaker and investigator rather than a superfan seeking validation. That subtle shift changed everything. Referrals began happening. More wrestlers agreed to interviews. Trust slowly built over years of persistence.
And then there are the unbelievable production stories.
At one point, John describes interviewing New Jack while the wrestler casually held a machete across his lap during the interview. The tension wasn’t performative—it felt genuinely dangerous. Yet John also reveals something deeper about documentary work: often the filmmaker’s job is to stay calm long enough for the truth to reveal itself naturally. Some of the documentary’s most memorable moments emerged not from controlled interviews, but from simply allowing unpredictable personalities to exist honestly on camera.
The crowdfunding section of the conversation is equally valuable for independent filmmakers. John offers brutally honest lessons about Kickstarter, budgeting, rewards fulfillment, and the hidden costs creators rarely anticipate. He explains how many crowdfunding campaigns fail not because the project lacks passion, but because creators underestimate logistics. Shipping costs, rewards, travel, licensing, and production expenses can quietly consume an entire campaign budget if not carefully planned.
Perhaps the most powerful takeaway from the episode is the sheer persistence required to finish independent films. Barbed Wire City was not made with studio financing, giant crews, or guaranteed distribution. It survived because two filmmakers refused to let the project die. Over thirteen years, the documentary repeatedly stalled, restarted, evolved, and nearly disappeared entirely. Yet John continued gathering footage, building relationships, researching wrestling history, and refining the story until the film finally became real.
And in many ways, that persistence becomes the true story behind the documentary.
Not wrestling.
Not ECW.
Not nostalgia.
But the simple reality that independent filmmaking often becomes an endurance test between the creator and time itself.
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Alex Ferrari 0:46
Enjoy today's episode with guest host Dave Bullis.
Dave Bullis 0:49
Joining me today is John Philapavage. John is the co-director and producer of Barbed Wire City, the unauthorized story of extreme championship wrestling. John, how are you?
John Philapavage 2:05
I am well. Thank you for having me, man.
Dave Bullis 2:06
Oh, my pleasure. The last time we saw each other was at the premiere of Barbed Wire City
John Philapavage 2:12
Correct! And full disclosure, because Dave's being awesome, I wasn't positive I had met Dave, and I probably had, like, a conversation with him, but as he noted to me, I was running around like completely overwhelmed, trying to like help run that channel. So I thought that I met Dave, but I did ask him off air if I met Dave. Yes, that would be April of what, 2013 We did that, so almost two and a half years now.
Dave Bullis 2:40
Yeah, I do remember that. I, and believe me, John, I've been there, man. I know how it is. You know, you go into, you go into, you're doing these events, and it's just like everything blurs together, people and events and time and everything. It just sort of all go meshes together.
John Philapavage 2:59
That whole night was such, it was a culmination of like 13 years of work, and not like I shouldn't even say it like that. It was, you know, got the idea in February of 2000 Started making notes. I was working with Kevin, the other co-director who worked with me on this project, and he's a childhood friend of mine. We were working together at a car wash. I started. I think I wrote four names down, and I said, "Hey, would you do this for me? And originally it was like I wanted to write a book, because a writer, and we did, you know, quote unquote "stoy" was videography. We were like, you know, even in 2000 I would have been.. I would have just turned 19 that month, actually. I was 19 when I had the idea. I wrote four names down. I don't even know that we interviewed any of those four people, actually. I think one, I think one, actually. And yes, this was 13 years later, 13 years and one month later, or two months later, we finished it, and like everybody that I ever know was there, plus all these amazing people I met through the raising funds through Kickstarter, including yourself, I had to, like, you know, so DIY, I had to, like, help run the thing. I was telling you off there that I said to somebody, like, "Okay, we have to do the Q and A, so I need to find these people and, like, let them in. I told them to come to this door, and, like, "Who's getting the cheesecakes? And one of the other people said, "Well, I have to do this, and now the person said, well, I've got to do this text thing, and so I had to run down to Tony Luke's and get the cheesesteaks that we had promised people for to do a Q and A with me, so I didn't get to have an ego moment and feel like a star, I had to go get cheesesteaks and give them to people and answer questions. The point is, it was like an amazing night that I never thought that we would get to that point, that was a big deal, and like you always want to do more stuff, but it is one of those things where you go, if I could just do this one thing for the in public, I'm not for the public, because really, I mean, let's be honest, you're doing a lot. It for yourself, you have an urge within yourself that you have to do, but it's amazing to get not just the validation, it's the buy-in from people. So, just meeting all these people that, like yourself, interacted with online, who showed up for it, and they seemed like almost like they knew me, and they were proud of me, because they had interacted with me so much over these months, but that was like this really cool feeling, you know, to do, to do that. But yeah, it's that whole night is like both I have memories of it, and it's also this blur. I just remember downloading somebody's, I think it was the Torches Pro Wrestling Torch, which is for those of you listening to this who don't know, wrestling, that is one of the major publications going back to the late 80s for wrestling. They did both men, Wade Keller and Bruce Mitchell, appeared in the film, and they did like a two hour and 15 minute, like a review of the film, and kind of a talk about history and different things. And I dropped my friend Gene off around, I think, 245 in the morning, and I drove back to the Lehigh Valley, listening to that, and that, for some reason, that memory of just being by myself and being like satisfied that I completed something is something that, like, it's that solitary thing sticks with you. Yeah,
Dave Bullis 6:14
Yeah. Well, you know, John, I heard a story that on the set of Quintin's last film, he had to get cheesesteaks for everybody, so don't feel bad.
John Philapavage 6:21
Oh, I'd like to have his career. I'll tell you that,
Dave Bullis 6:28
So you know, John I always usually start off with the same question for everybody, and that question is, could you just give us a little more about your background, and you know how you got started in the doing film?
John Philapavage 6:40
Sure, I let's see. I was born in 81 and I ended up very quickly living in Allentown, Pennsylvania, which, for you wrestling fans who are also history geeks, I grew up like three blocks from Ag Hall, which is where WWF, which is now WWE, used to tape their television. In fact, my first wrestling show ever was in, I think, 1990 like September of 90, at Ag Hall. And the reason I'm going on about this is because through an alleyway, which is like half a block away, there was an alleyway that kind of ended right near my row home yard through that alleyway. If you went directly from my yard through that path was a house that we nicknamed the Karen Mansion, and that's because when I was two, my mom took me on a walk, and when you're two, like, you can't go very far. So we went around the block, and there was a little boy playing in a plastic swimming pool that was blue and it had alligators on it, and I thought that was the coolest, and I said, "Mom, I want to play with that kid, but I was like really timid, so I probably hid behind her, and luckily Jolene, Kevin's mom, was outside, and my mom talked to her, and I ended up meeting this gentleman, Kevin Kernan, when I was two, and that's been my creative partner ever since, and so it's we just passed July. I met him in July 34 now, 32 years that we've been attached to each other in one way or the other. So, yeah, we got in here, but we were doing creative projects when we were kids. We used to make movies with those over the shoulder VHS cameras, yeah. Well, Kevin's dead ball, Kevin's dad traveling. He's like, I'm actually sitting in their property right now. He's like a second father to me. They, they not only helped kind of raise me, but they still, they still kind of take care of me, even now, and look out for me when we do holidays. A lot of times, I go to their house, I at least spend two hours with them, pretty much every holiday, regardless of whether Kev or his sister Emily are in town. Our studio, like I said, is on their property. I don't mean to make it like they're rich, by the way, when people hear me say this, they always think that Cass family has a ton of money, they bought when we were six, they bought this dilapidated old like farmhouse property, like it was just a mess, and there was like this building that, like in real people's terms, would have been condemned, it just wasn't like a public public building, there was a spring house, because there used to be a national spring on the bottom, and I remember being told very specifically, you were not allowed to go in there, because if you open the door at the top, there was nothing there, but there was no floor, and I remember being 16, and Kev took me out there, and I didn't know, I hadn't really been spending time around his house, so I didn't know, and I remember, even at 16, you know, you're near adulthood, I remember saying him, like, like, like, yeah, we're not supposed to be going here, like, it was weird to me that he was taking me there, because he's not a mischievous guy, and he opened the door, and, like, his dad had completely reservice, his dad's like a DIY handyman who like always has side projects for weekends and stuff, and he completely changed it into this like cool, like it reminds me like Lord of the Rings, like, like the kind of the kind of place that you like, the secret world you fall into, and it was like the place where he'd go to write children's stories and smoke his pipe, because he used to smoke a pipe at the time, and we took that shit over right away, dude, in ours, if we were 16, you know, we're going on almost 20 years, and I am sitting in it right now, and I love this place. So, this is where we, we started making tape to tape VHS to VHS editing on VCRs. Remember that stuff? Oh, yeah, do that. We made a comic book when we were 94 ish, 1994 93 We were really into making comic books, and I tricked one of my uncles into getting us like a computer program, which seemed amazing at the time. I'm sure now, if you looked at it, it would look like MS, the first version of MS Paint, you know. So we had a comic book, we used to make videos with the whole family, they'd let us write it and kind of direct it, and then they would just kind of push us and nudge us in directions, and then we started just making like silly short films, and I convinced Jeb to do the Barb Wire City Project, just because I had a fascination with the UC Dubs Arena and wrestling in general, and now this poor guy, who has never ever, you know, paid for a ticket for wrestling, and never was forced to watch it when he was a teenager, knows far more about wrestling than the average, you know, the rank and file wrestling fan who isn't an obsessive fan, so I guess I'm sorry for that, but at the same time it's fun, because now I can do wrestling jokes with him, and he gets it, so,
Dave Bullis 12:05
But basically, you know, I can imagine when you actually sat down, you know, with Kevin, and actually like put on wrestling for the first time, I could imagine his response probably would have been something like, what the hell we watching,
John Philapavage 12:19
He was always, he was never kind of defending about it. He would put his foot down here and there. I remember there was like a WCW pay-per-view in the early 90s, one of the ones where they were working with New Japan, so it was like from the Tokyo Dome, and like anything that was from a foreign culture was fascinating when he had a kid. I just thought foreign cultures were so interesting because they weren't my daily life, and I remember I got him like watching stuff on Saturday mornings when I'd sleep over, and then we'd wake up early, and like he wouldn't tell me, like, "Turn that crap off, or this or that, and he'd make comments about stuff, so like I was always trying to manipulate him into being a fan, so I had a friend, because I didn't have a wrestling friend for years, and everything, you know, it was like, especially by the early 90s, like it was uncool again. It was like you'd see, you were a loser if you watched it, and I kept watching, trying to keep it quiet, Dave. I couldn't tell people, but Kevin already knew, so I was always trying to manipulate him, and so I tried to get him to like buy the tape review, and that's when he was just like not a fan of this, and no, sit in the room if you watch it, I'll be nice to know. And then slowly but surely I got him to do this project, and over the expanse of 13 years, off and on, you know, now I get a kick out of the fact that, like, he's he's friendly with Mike Johnson, the wrestling reporter, so like, he'll, Kevin has this gimmick where he texts me random things, where his, he pretends his blog is called The Outsider, and the gimmick is that it's a person who doesn't really understand wrestling here and isn't a fan, but reports on it, so anything that Mike puts on his feed, he just like makes a joke of it and texts it to me. Hopefully, Mike doesn't listen to our Kevin will be in trouble.
Dave Bullis 14:08
Well, you know, it's funny you mentioned that there's that thing, KFAB news.com that I always first of all was sold. I was like, what the hell is this? I have you seen that?
John Philapavage 14:18
You know who showed that to me, Kevin, he He, I think that's pretty much kind of where he got the gimmick, although, like, I believe his idea, like, I'm sure it existed, but Kevin wouldn't know, he didn't spend his free time, usually, like, I think one of the people he said yes to on Facebook, when we, he had a lot of people trying to Facebook friend him during the film because I was everywhere and I was saying his name everywhere because I had to do all the media, he would, he did, I think two interviews, and I think they were both with Mike Johnson, because we're friendly with Mike through making the film, we became friendly with Mike and. Um, so Mike would kind of press him into it, and they were both like in person, because he would just bail on it if it was on the phone, but like Mike was there and had his like hot to Adam, like, can I do this, but yeah, he, yeah, I only know about it because I guess he saw it because one of the fans he said yes to on Facebook was posting stuff, and he kind of went down the rabbit hole one day, and when we got to the studio to work on on something else, like this is after Barbar City, he he showed this to me, and he and I was like, "Is that what you got that idea or something? And he's like, "No, but it's the same thing, I think I'm just gonna steal their ideas, like, just joking, so, but yes, I'm aware of it, because, because he's the one who showed it to me, oddly enough,
Dave Bullis 15:48
Yeah, I, you know, who showed up to me was the Blue Mini, and
John Philapavage 15:51
I love Brian in the world, and I'm sorry, like, I always call him Brian, and I'm not sure, I know in wrestling there's like, it's weird, because, like, it's Brian's a personal friend of mine, and I'm not gonna call him by, you know, no offense to him, I'm not gonna call him by, like, a pretend name, because he's my friend, like, I've been to his house, we've gone on, like, road trips together, you know, for conventions and stuff, like, he's the best man in the world, I'm sorry, I just had to say that
Dave Bullis 16:22
You don't call him like, 'Hey, mr. Meaney, like you know, you don't say, 'Hey, mr. Meaney, or should I call you Blue?
John Philapavage 16:28
I don't.. I don't remember my first.. I'm sure my first conversation with him.. like, I would call him whatever he wanted, and then at some point I just had a conversation.. I think he introduced himself as, like, Brian. like, I think somewhere in there, like, post interviewing him when he reached out to me when we started the Kickstarter thing. We just had a conversation. I'm calling by, and he never, like, said anything about it. And finally, just because I'm me and I'm super detail oriented, and I want people to be comfortable with everything, I said to him, like, is that, you know, is that okay? Like, I just feel weird calling out, like an actual friend of mine by this name, but if you think it's like disrespectful, because within your industry, you know, kind of like the thing where some guys you might be really good friends with a guy who is a heel in a company, and if you're, if you're, if he gets a comp ticket to sit in the front row, he kind of expects you to boo him, you know, in fact he wants you to really give it to him, because that's his job, you know. So, if he asked me to do something like that, I would, but you know, fortunately, I became friends with the guy who's like never going to be a heel in any room he ever steps into, so I don't have to worry about things like that.
Dave Bullis 17:38
Yeah, you know, just as a little side story. One time when I, when I was helping King Kong Bundy, and a friend of mine was training under him at when he was in wrestling school, and I would come and I'd help set up like the chairs and stuff like that. And then I, then he was like, "Hey, we help set the ring, and I was like, "Sure, you know, I'll help out. It was for free, whatever. So finally they came to me one day, and they said, "We want you to want to do an angle where this, this like this heel attacks a fan. So, my.. so this is when my friend was going to be a fan next to me, right? So, here's the thing. Okay, so we're sitting next to each other, my friend and myself, and one of their heels is coming out, and he says that, and he cheats to win, right. So, my friend, like, we now, he know, he has all his friends have found me there, and he didn't tell anybody about this, except for me. Now, I was only in on this, so he gets up, and he yells, "That's bullshit, you're a cheat, motherfucker, Pierce says, blah blah blah. So, he's getting into a brawl with his heel, and I have turned, and his fiance, and everything are looking at him like, what the fuck is going on here? And it was just, I couldn't stop fucking laughing, and they ended up, you know, scuffling in the ring, it's broken up, this and that, but it was just, it was hilarious. I'm sorry, that story really had much to do. We're talking about, but I thought,
John Philapavage 19:03
By the way, this is primarily a filmmaking podcast, right?
Dave Bullis 19:07
Yes,
John Philapavage 19:09
Most of your listenership have no idea what we're talking about right now.
Dave Bullis 19:13
Oh, they probably tuned out already, they probably heard me talk about, you know, wrestling by now. They're like, oh well, we'll come back next week, Dave, but no, but this is
John Philapavage 19:24
Glad I'm such a channel changer. Those are circumstances. What are you gonna do?
Dave Bullis 19:30
No, they're gonna hear me talking about King Kong Bundy, you mean like, oh well, he did work Richard Pryor at one point, so maybe Dave is a pointier, but you know, this is, this is film centric, you know, but I mean, we're, you know, we're talking about the documentary, and you know, it just happens to be about wrestling, so I just want to show that story, you know, personally, I think a lot of viewers will love this, because I actually have requests to do more things about documentaries, so
John Philapavage 19:59
My bad man,
Dave Bullis 20:07
Yeah, so I know people will definitely be interested in this, and you know, so I wanted to ask you, is you know, as we talk about your documentary, Barb Wire City, you know, how did you go about finally starting to put this all together, you know, in those initial stages, meaning, like, you know, how did you get started putting together? Like, okay, I have a list of people I want to talk to. Did you know how did you start going about, you know, reaching out to these people?
John Philapavage 20:33
Okay, let's see here. I am not good with brevity. I'm going to try to condense this, because it is a 13 year story. Luckily, at least I can sort of spin the tail at first, like I said, I think I said this on the podcast, and not when we were talking beforehand, I had a list of like four people, like I wanted to write a book about my like almost like a Hunter S. Thompson-esque, like fan journal of going to the arena, and why it was important to people, like it was a cultural thing. And I've always been fascinated with sociology, and I was one of those people when I was finally old enough to, and I got my license. I would go to the, in fact, the first two times I went to the arena, like, my aunt drove me there with, like, two or three friends. I just wanted to go so badly. I didn't get, I was one of the people who didn't get their license right away. I don't know, it's weird now for me to like think back why. I just think it was just I just probably figured my parents, they're not gonna like let me drive a car, and I don't have money, so like why bother. So it wasn't until I was 18 that I could drive myself down, and regardless, we would just stand in line outside, and, like, I know it's a status thing to sit ringside, and you don't have to show up until five minutes before the show, and you know this guy, like John Bailey, the straw hat guy, takes tickets, so you go in the side door and give him a hug, and all that stuff, and that's not well and cool, and I'm sure if I had that option back then, I would have taken. I eventually ended up taking that option, actually. Now that I think of it, but at the time I thought it was really neat to get in a car at 10 in the morning, take the long way, so to speak, get down there around 1130 noon, and be part of this kind of like carnival outside, especially in the later days. By the time I started driving down with friends in later 99 is when I actually started driving down. People were already lined up, like I like. We would show up the one time, I think we got there by like 11:30 We were nowhere near the first people in line outside of the arena, we were probably the 30th people in line, frankly, and I saw some crazy things in that line, you know. I think maybe only one or two things. The very final ECW arena show, I actually stood in line by myself, and I had a camera, and I shot footage, and I think maybe a total of 10 seconds made it into the film proper when we released it, and one of the scenes is actually like what I'm thinking of, which is that like people in line set fire to a bunch of like cardboard and discarded wood, because there's kind of this mythology about that area. It's really not a rough area, like if you go a block, like it's it literally is under I 95 and it's in kind of like this industrial kind of dead end, which is kind of commercial, low rent commercial space, and industrial park-ish stuff for a block or two, but if you go to the other side of 95 those are old ethnic neighborhoods, and I spent a lot of time in that area walking around, shooting footage in 2000 2001 2006 and then in the year before the film, carnivals in the summer. They're the kind of neighborhoods that still like get permits to close off roads and like rent those moon bounces, and like have vendors. Like, it's one of those neighborhoods where everybody kind of knows everybody, and they all know a guy who does something, so you can get these kind of things probably for free, and it's not rough, like I would. I have a nephew who's nine, I'd take him and walk around that neighborhood, you know. But on show nights, I wouldn't have taken him taken into Swanson and written a street. I'll tell you that, you know, the memory I was thinking of was these like set stuff on fire, and then we're chanting stuff, and I think partially that made it into the film. There was another where some underage kid was drinking like a handle of hard liquor all day, and then was out of his head and like slumped down against the post, and people were voyeuristically watching him, and then he threw. Up on himself, and just sat there, and people were chanting things, and it was both entertaining and bizarre. And now that I'm older, and kind of disgusting of people, still something that probably should be kind of documented. There's a good side and a bad side, all those things, and I think we definitely kind of touched on that in the film. If anything, my sadness is not being able to break it through to more non-wrestling fans, because they're such, like, you even joked about, like, there are people who probably turned off the podcast because they're like, "Oh, they're talking about wrestling and this guy did a wrestling thing. He probably, yeah, there's still this meme that, like, Dana White brought it up this week, you know, people who watch wrestling must not know it's quote unquote fake, which is a horrible word for it. It's kind of offensive, I think, and I think that's where the emotional knee-jerk reaction comes. I just don't think fans articulate it well because they get emotional, but it's this idea that you must be so dumb and low rent that you, you know, it's 1930 and you've been conned by the carnival that comes through during the summer, and that's not really it, you know. But unfortunately, it's a bad name, so we weren't able, except on very, in very small moral victories, to break it through to people who just were fascinated by sociological events and niche culture, it's in my opinion misunderstood, and that's really what the film was about, you know. I had some very combative interviews, I think, when I, when I promoted this the second time around. The first time around was Kickstarter to raise money, and you had to go - the wrestling circuit is where it kind of had to go, you know, so you try to intellectualize and talk about whatever, but you also have to be like, yeah, all your favorites will be here and all this stuff, and you're not lying, it's just you're playing your audience, and I think by the time it came out, and I would read reviews, we got a lot of positive reviews, but all the knocks would be like really to me fanboyish wrestling centric critiques, which I think is a generous word, considering what these people express, but that made me sad, because I realized that the film was being completely viewed, or 90 to 95% being viewed through the prism of pro wrestling and pro wrestling releases, and I think there was a massive difference between what we did and say what WWE would put out and call a quote unquote documentary, or what you know, even like high spots or RF video, you know, I get messages like, how come this is like this, because RF video did this, and I'm thinking, like, no offense to Rob, because obviously we licensed footage from him, and like, I have a fine relationship with Rob Feinstein, who the owner and operator of RF video, but like that, he's a rest, he's a guy who does wrestling tapes, you know, and I don't, I don't mean to say that derisively, but in comparison, when you're comparing like a documentary to like shoot interviews, that was really my beast, you know. Sorry, I'm jumping so far ahead, and like, your questions, yeah, that's something that was like, so, so these interviews like became sort of combative for me, like it became kind of like this intellectual battle to to make my point without being like a condescending dick to people, because I just I didn't have any more patience for like one interview was like the question wasn't, I would get these questions that weren't questions from these wrestling podcasts that were like the Dudleys in ECW, and now they've already seen my film, so they've seen us sort of take to task the idea that Paul Heyman allowed things to get out of control, and you know, the Dudleys would just go out there and bait fans, and it would result sometimes in, you know, at the low level, it would result in, like, yes, a lot of heat, but a lot of it was just creating an atmosphere that was kind of uncomfortable, unsafe for anybody who wasn't like a male in their early 20s who wanted to get drunk and like get crazy, and at its worst, it was like physical violence, you know, but the question will be like Dudley's UCW was pretty crazy, right? Where do you think it was crazier? Was it Dudley's crazier and failure in like the Elks Lodge? And so the whole premise of the question, it's not even like a really a question, it's more like, tell me how awesome it was that you guys did this, and I don't know that it was awesome, that's the thing, you know, like I don't, I think it was, you know, not even specifically the Dudleys, but the things that they were doing, I didn't think were necessarily good for them, I think it built on the cultishness, it built on the mythology, But I don't think that it helped them, obviously it didn't help them in the long run, you know. And I don't think it would be done, and well, certainly wouldn't be done today, because of the standards of the Lakespore usage, but also I don't think Paul Heyman would do it, even if those standards didn't exist. I think he would have realized and put the brakes on. One thing I do believe, when Paul Heyman has done interviews, and for some reason Steve Austin, like, really liked our film, and anybody who sort of even tacitly related ECW, he asks about, I all drove off the road the one morning when I downloaded the podcast to listen to him talk to Hayman, because to this day one of the most fascinating people that that I would ever research or would ever cover in any way, I think that I'll be 80 and I'll still, he'll still be top three at worst, and Austin brought Barbar City to him, and he said that he had never seen it, which may or may not be true, but that's kind of irrelevant to me. What's more relevant is that he said, you know, people always talk about the Hayman Kool-Aid, and all this. He's like, nobody drinks the Kool-Aid more than me, and you know, we kept damping up things, because part of the question, to Austin's credit, was about, like, you know, the violence, the way we covered the violence, and if he thought, looking back, it was necessary to go over the top, you know, did it hurt things in the long run, and his answer, I thought, was actually really honest for him, not that he's a liar, but I think he knows how to speak to an audience, you know what I mean, I think there's portions of truth, and there's portions of manipulation in anything he says, but he did say, like, he blames me, but I was the one drinking, like, it's my money, I was throwing all this money at this thing, and I believe him, you know, I believe, and I've talked to a lot of people that are, you know, that have been close to him, are still closer than, and UCW would have become very similar to early ROH, had it existed. It wouldn't have been a carbon copy of it, but that's the way he saw the landscape going, and it also would have had a much bigger mixed martial arts change to it. He saw that coming. I mean, I still see that guy as a visionary. If I had millions and millions of dollars, and I wanted to do something in the pro wrestling genre, or you know, or some version of that, I would be throwing money at Paul Hammond to join me.
Dave Bullis 32:36
Yeah, you know, when East W was in its death rows, I remember he was talking about bringing in guys like Spanky Brian, who was Brian Kendrick, guys like CM Punk. He actually had, yeah, Loki, he had, he actually was talking about these guys before anybody had a clue who the hell these guys were, and this isn't just him saying it's because they all brought this up too, that they were like, hey, you know, Paul Heyman, one guy who I know. Again, I'm sorry, going a little off topic here. One guy who I always wondered why he was in ECW was Mad Man Pondo, but that's a whole, you know, that I.. that's always something I'm always like, you know, I don't get why he, because he was wrestling in the 90s, yeah. And you know, a couple of, always wondering why he didn't go to ECW, even just for a tryout match, but any, but you know, but you know, with the way that's like I said, change, you know, I know, you know, in Japan they have a league that is similar to that, I think it's Pancreas, no, it's not Paincrease, is it what it's, could do, because they do like k1 fights, and they do some of like mixed martial arts, and they also have progressing bouts, and I can't remember the name of the company right now, top my head. Do you know what
John Philapavage 33:50
I know that those existed? Well, Pancras was the argument first pure MMA.
Dave Bullis 33:57
Yeah, as soon as I said, I know I was wrong. I'm wrong a lot on this podcast, by the way. John, just so you know, my audience knows not to believe a word I say about anything.
John Philapavage 34:11
Well, they basically like, there were several promotions, and I don't even know that they really exist in the form you're talking about now, but there were a bunch, like MMA and pro wrestling in Japan, even in the 70s, before MMA, like, really truly existed, like Antonio Inoki used to fight, used to always bring in people, and then smarten them up to, quote unquote, the business, like Muhammad Ali is the most famous example, and he didn't actually want to lose to Inoki, which is why they ended up having this horrible fight in Tokyo in 76 but like that whole mixed martial arts thing was a gimmick that Inoki did, because he had been to Brazil and trained jiu jitsu, but his goal was to make it so that pro wrestling was a fighting discipline, almost as like um. For work, okay. I'm trying to.. I should speak for the rest of the audience. He wanted to be part of storyline. That is the simplest way to put it. Was it the idea that pro wrestling itself was a fighting discipline, in the way we think of karate or jujitsu, or something like that, and he would bring these guys in and pay them a lot of money to lose to him these authentic people within their discipline to further the idea with his fan base that pro wrestling was a better fighting art, and that's really how UFC started, anyway. It was like the boxer versus the wrestler, or you know, this guy, you know, this guy does this versus taekwondo guy. So, yeah, I mean, that's always been intertwined in Japan, you know. That's why Pride was people look at Pride, which was an MMA organization that was huge in Japan, and they romanticize it, but like, if you go back, it's like a lot of pro wrestling stuff, or pro wrestlers fighting MMA fights, some of the finishes were like somewhat manipulated, you know, so yeah, that's existed,
Dave Bullis 36:04
Yeah. And, as you know, just as a side note, you know, guys like Sakuraba, you know, his whole style when he fought in Pride was Japanese professional wrestling, like when everyone had their, you know, they would say, like, their name, their weight, age, their weight, and the style, his style was Japanese professional wrestling, and that's, and that's when he was the Gracie Hunter.
John Philapavage 36:25
Yeah, I mean, and there's a guy who comes from UWFI. There were all these like splinter groups that splintered off of his little geek history for you and your listeners. In the 80s, there were all these like groups of people who trained in the New Japan Dojo, who then would be lower card guys, and then they'd split a group of them, would split her off, and they started like the UWF. Then there was a second UWF, and then there was the UW FI, which is something Universal Wrestling Blah Blah International, and they were like early stages of work shoots. Some of the sites would kind of be like real psychish thing, where they knew the finish, but they didn't care how they got there, and some of it was just a mimic, and the idea was like we're realer than pro wrestling, like those guys are phony, but we're real, kind of a thing, and that's where Sakura came from, and he would bounce in and out of New Japan, and he decided to be a straight up shoot fighter, and you know, tried to kill, I mean, look at the first try, pride only existed because I think, how do you say his last name, Tanaka or something? There's a wrestler, no, he, oh, I'm butchered, you know, I'm there, somebody yelling at their iPod right now, there's a gentleman who was, who was in the UWFI, and and was their champion, and then he had some big fights with when they were falling apart. He had title matches with the great Muda at the Tokyo Dome, and then another one, at least one more with Hashimoto, who was another new Japan star in the 90s. And then, and then the first pride was him, and he was essentially just a pro wrestler who pretended to be a shooter, you know, and he had, he had rudimentary skills for the times, sure, but he wasn't like, you know, Sakura, and the first pride was him versus one of the Gracies, who trounced him, by the way, and the big comeback was Sakuraba, you know, he was a Gracie honor, he was defending the honor of pro wrestling, that was the quote unquote storyline of this legitimate shoot promotion, you know. So they, they would blur lines too, even though they were, they were a shoot promotion in the way that pro wrestling would blur lines and work fights.
Dave Bullis 38:36
Yeah, I know who you're talking about. It's, I think it's pronounced no, you know, yeah, it's Takata, but it's a first names like Nobu keys, Caccato, yeah, Takata, you know, and I know, yeah, I know exactly what you mean, but, but, yeah, and you know, that's when all those promotions started, and I remember, you know, a lot of guys just sort of coming up at it, you know, through the ranks of pride, too, and you know that's we really to me that was the last time where you really saw somebody like the fighters who really knew what they were doing, and what I.. here's what I mean by that, they all had one style, meaning like soccer, Rob Hijab, professional wrestling, Mirko Crow Cop was a kickboxer, you know, Igor Chanchin, you know, he just did heavy boxing stuff like that. They didn't, you didn't see like the UFC. Now everyone sort of high as a hybrid style, where everyone does, you know, day one is Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, the next day some Muay Thai. You sort of get a jack of all trades and a master of nothing to a training like that, while in pride, I mean, you really could just tell just by the way the guy worked, that the way the guy fought, the way he moved, you know, whether he was like a Gracie guy or if he was a stand-up fighter, I mean, it just, I really wish it would go back to that in a lot of ways, and you're watching some of the Japanese fights now, it still is that way, because there's dream right now, and there's a guy that I, you know, absolutely love to watch, and that is, of course, I wonder, I just blanked out on his name, that is, I forgot his name, but I, I will post it in the show notes, I promise, unless I can remember it quickly, but I don't think I can, so, but you know, back to, you know, your, you know, everything was, you know, you, and in Barbed Wire City, you know, this documentary was about the subculture of ECW and all the crazy things, and professional wrestling, and people call it fake, but you know their injuries are all real, and you know if you've got guys being paralyzed, you've got some people real bleeding, and then it requires real, real stitches,
John Philapavage 40:58
It's just an irrelevant argument to me, because it's, it's like, it's like, if I really like the show Sopranos, and you kept telling me, and I would get, like, really into the storyline, and we were having a discussion, and you're like, "No, you know, it's fake, John, you know, they're not really mobsters, they're like fake. I'd be like, "Yeah, I know they're actors, I'm really into the show, the presentation. It's the way it's world building. They built it, built a world correctly. The narrative is good, and like that. I mean, I, you're doing a good job. You're giving the answer that a lot of, like, intelligent people give, but I even think that is almost too much of humoring these people who say these kind of things, because what they're inferring is that you're what they would call in wrestling a mark, which is kind of an offensive term for wrestling fans. It's like the N word in some weird ways, certainly not to that degree, but it's its derivative is from the carnivals, where, and I've heard different stories about, like, like kind of the mythologizing of the term, I think Dutch Mantell, in the late 90s, used to do a blog I read where he said he had always been told that when a carnival would come into town, they'd have a guy who went around and acted as though he, he was like poor and homeless and needed food, and if you know somebody was nice enough to give him food, he would mark with, like, chalk or something, marking a very subtle x in front of the gate to the house or the front walk, and what that meant was not that they were a mark, but that's what the term became, but it meant these people are willing, they'll kind of fall for your story, kind of a thing, but you can go house to house and get food or something like that. There was some sort of like manipulation there within that I'm that I'm kind of forgetting about, but that's one of the old wives tales that is probably not true, but is a great story. The point being is that Mark is this negative term, meaning that you're a fool. That is where it came from. When you're, when you, when wrestling people call, and it's not nearly as prevalent, because it's completely different. It's an entertainment industry now, but even, even in the late 90s, when ECW, ECW was like the last territory, you know, because wrestling needs to be in a territory system, and it wasn't a national thing, and there was some old school things, as they say in wrestling to it, and like calling somebody a mark is really like saying that they're a dumb person who believes that you're, you know, that you're balls mahoney, and you hit people with chairs in your daily life, and you're not John Reckner, and you don't have, like, a day chop or something, you know, or a cat or a wife, you know, you're dismissing logical sea monster who only comes out every third Saturday to the CW arena and tries to kill somebody for real, and I believe you, that kind of thing,
Dave Bullis 43:56
You're telling me Balsa Honey does not actually walk around blowing fire at any people with chairs.
John Philapavage 44:02
Well, now Baldone might, but it's another story entirely.
Dave Bullis 44:09
Yeah, like the one guy who I actually could seriously see living his gimmick 24/7 is New Jack.
John Philapavage 44:19
I think there's some validity to that. In a sense, he's crazy, but he's crazy like a fox. I was very impressed by him. He did his interview with me. Now, I told this story before, but you have a very different audience, and it's been at least two years. I was very nervous about interviewing Jack, and originally we were going to get him when we shot all the footage at the Extreme Reunion, which was a reunion of a lot of the ECW guys, and they were going to do a show. What was it at the point that they did the show? It was like 13 years or 12 years after it had shut down, something like that. And we had a room at the motel that they were all staying in, and we were grabbing people into. Interviews in our motel room, then across the hall we kept hearing this person yelling, and it's funny. Rob Feinstein, who I mentioned before, does this thing called shoot interviews, which is kind of a dying thing, because this podcast, because of what we're doing now. Back in the late 90s, he didn't create it, but he was one of the people who figured out how to monetize it, and it was before wrestling was very, very open as far as the gentleman wrestling talking as themselves, the person talking about their experiences. He would film that, and he would put it out on PHF tapes, and so he was actually doing one across the hall, and the person yelling and carrying on was Jerome Young, aka New Jack, and we put in a call to somebody working with us, who put in a call to Jack to get him across the hall to sit with us for 30 minutes, and he wanted to know how much we paid, and now we didn't pay for a single interview, so at that time he didn't want to do it, and then through some connections and machinations we ended up sitting down with him at one of these extreme, whatever that promotion became, they changed their name, extreme rising that was it, and he did the interview with me with a machete on his lap, and it was very.. I could.. Kevin did not feel terribly comfortable while shooting this, and I part of the gift of Jerome Young is that she's very charming, but he never wants you to fully feel comfortable. That's part of the control and the power of what he wants out of those situations, and so I pretty early on said I pointed to the machete on his lap and said, so is that so, is that for me? I forget exactly what I said, I would have nervous, I'm sure when I said it, but hopefully I pulled it off well enough. Basically, like that for me, if this goes bad, and he just gave me the crazy eyes, and then smiled, and I actually put me at ease, because it was one of those things where I was like, he knows what he's doing, like he's not, he's not here to mess with civilians, so to speak, in quotes, and we had the best interview, and in fact, like, I think on the DVD, we actually put an extra, like eight to four, it might have even been 14 minutes of like outtakes of stuff. He talked about so much stuff that had nothing to do with our narrative, but was so entertaining, and we put it on there. He is by far the person that non-wrestling fans come to me and say, I found him so funny, so entertaining, so charming, and all these things are true. And then I would say we finished signed the release with no trouble, and he made a joke, going like, you were nervous until I signed this, you know, making it, you know, official that we could use it. We shook hands, we chatted, we were packing up, and then he literally assaulted a fellow wrestler in front of us, and it scared the shit out of me, man. It was because you just see that visceral, real violence in front of you. It's, it's different, you know. I think at times we become desensitized, especially when we see it through a TV and things like that. You know, violence is an interesting thing to me, because I love MMA. I used to work briefly for about a year, year and a half. I worked, you know, part time for an MMA website or seven, and we used to go - we got press passes, and I would - I would be media at ringside and do live blogging and stuff like that. And it's kind of that same feeling, watch MMA on TV, and guys get knocked out, and you're like, "Oh, wow, that was great, and here they're alive, like you know, feet or meteor low. Generally, these things is like what, 10 to 16 feet away. It sits right there at cageside, and you get like these like light heavyweights, heavyweights in the ring, and they hit each other. You feel the vibrations, then there's that kick like out 15 feet away, and you cringe is very visceral and real, and in that moment you go like, "Oh, wow, that hurts. That doesn't just hurt, that could kill somebody if Dungall, you know, like that is something different. And that's kind of what I felt with Jack, like he's crazy, like a fox is the best way to put it. He knows exactly what he's doing at all times, and the trick is to charm you, but also make you think that this guy might do something. So, why did he assault another wrestler? That's the whole.. you know, what I don't even know that I can tell. I'll give you, like, the cheap version, because the truth is that it was very detailed, and I used to be able to tell it, but this happened like three years ago, and I don't remember exactly. There was a problem. Okay, so the other.. this isn't like non.. it's not common knowledge, but it's not like I'm not telling secret out of school, there had been a problem between New Jack and Balls and Pony, who we had mentioned before at the first reunion show, and this is the second one now, in like June, I think, and they had gone back and forth, and there was all this stuff, and like, in fact, when I got to the building, I ran into somebody who's like, "Are you interviewing Jack today? and I said, "Yes, and they said, "Oh, you better watch out, he hasn't generally heat, no, yeah, it was. He said he's gonna kill balls, and I kind of smirked and said, like, oh yeah, but see, I think I really think that Jack was working in again. I have to explain for people to understand. I think there's a weird thing about wrestling, part of Jack's income over the last decade, because he pretty much can't get a job with wrestling industry, shrinking his style, going out of vogue, some, and him just kind of being a nutty guy, it's hard for him to get work within wrestling, and part of his income was derived from doing shoot interviews, and he's smart, like I said, so Jack knows to do a shoot interview and have people buy it, and therefore make yourself a commodity that can demand, you know, two grand or four grand, or whatever you were getting paid for just sitting down and telling stories for three hours on one day. You've got to have stories, so if you do a lot of shoot interviews, you run some stories, and people don't want to buy it anymore. And I think that Jack likes creating hysteria, so that he would be more marketable. That's part of that whole Carney thing, that wrestler persona. And I really believe that Jack, I had a conversation with him earlier in that week where it seemed we were met in person because he was in town in Philly, and it was for that we both had to be somewhere for different reasons, and we ended up being around each other for about two hours, and talking for about almost one of them. I would say we did most of my talking with him, and my impression is that he knew that he didn't really have a problem with John Reckner, the person, or Balzac Mahoney, the character in real life, but he was creating one, and if he pushed hard enough, balls would say something that would lead to there being more kind of hysteria around it. This is how goofy wrestling is. I think that he was creating a situation, like in wrestling tolerance, they would call it working angle, but in real life he was kind of creating this storyline in real life, and not.. and I don't think balls, mining knew that he was part of a fake story, you know what I mean. So apparently, and I don't even think that this was true, but I was told, well, you know, balls is balls, no one is in the building already. Okay, so they're really gonna be a thing. He's like, oh yeah, balls showed me got like a little gun or something in his bag, and I'm like, so I was on edge, and and then he walked up to him, and balls might have said, like, two words, like balls tried to talk to him, like, and this wasn't other than myself and Kennedy. There was nobody in this room that was a fan or something, you know. It's like Stevie Richards was in the room, John Finnegan. It was a people I was friendly with, actually. You know, John Finnie is an old referee for ECW, and he's worked a lot of other places. He wasn't trying to fool fans to make money in that way in that room, but he was for real. Like, I, it's so weird, the psychology of these, especially I don't feel like the newer wrestlers, that's the thing they see it as entertainment. They all grew up on WWE, and they want to be good corporate citizens and apply their trade for the most part, or do it for the art. You know what I mean. The journeymen who get a lot of buzz on the internet, they do it kind of for their art, and because they love it, and in some cases, because they don't want to grow up, because you get to be an angel of the baldies for me from later today. ECW said to me, he's like, it's like you're always in high school, and every weekend is like a high school party, you know? You never have to leave. I think that all these factors go into this kind of thing, and then after a while, you don't know what else to do. It's not a transferable skill, pretending artfully to beat somebody. Got plan isn't something that you can go across the street and say, hey, I would like to sell cars for you, or I would like to sit in a cubicle and do tech support for your tech company. So, in this case, Jack created something, and I guess balls kind of fell for it, and that's all he needed, and he just walked up to him and punched him in the face a million times, and to Ball's known his credit, he never tried to strike Jack, which is, you know, somebody hit you in the face, you know, as soon as he just defended himself in covering up and kept trying to talk sense to him, you know what I mean, and I will admit that I'm the person who finally said, you know, this is going on way too long, and I ran and got one of the promoters, and I got Atlas Security, and they ran in and clapped.
Dave Bullis 55:54
Well, that is a hell of a story. I could definitely, you know, I remember seeing something about that a couple years ago with balls and new jet had a problem with one another.
John Philapavage 56:07
Postscript, by the way, they did do a shoot interview with Rob Feinstein.
Dave Bullis 56:12
Yes,
John Philapavage 56:12
Afterwards, and I've never seen the whole thing, but from what I saw by that point everybody was clued in, wink wink. I mean, Rob did this. I don't know, I haven't talked to Robin in quite a while, but Rob swore to me, even after it was shot, that, oh, it was real, and we got an off-duty police officer, And I was kind of shocked, because either he was trying to, quote unquote, work me, as they say in wrestling, which is like, do the whole fake thing, do the lie thing, or he just really believed it was real, and he pissed away money on an undercover cop to do security for this. No, I, by that point, I don't think that I think everybody knew what was going on, so to say, but they made their money.
Dave Bullis 56:56
Yeah, and you know that whole thing, you know, this whole story kind of reminds me of, you know, some of the obstacles you'll face when making a movie, but these are some of the obstacles you face, you know, making this documentary was, you thought that some of your, your, the people you're interviewing were going, you saw some of your subjects, you know, were going to assault you at any time, particularly New Jack,
John Philapavage 57:18
Yes, or lie to me, that was another thing, there's a lot of, we had so many theoretical slash, I hate to use this word because it's used in a dirty way, which kind of sucks, but intellectual debates, and what would, what would you call it, we would watch footage and there'd be three people saying three different things, and we would have to talk about, like, and it's also dealing with wrestling. You're dealing with something where people within that industry, they interchange truth and the real world with what they call working, which they have their own term for lying. It's called working. It's okay if you flat out lie to somebody, even like your wife or your best friend, if you're working now, if you're lying, that's horrible, you know. But if you work somebody, that's okay. So we would have these debates where you'd sit at the end of the day, but two of us would finally like kind of like shy and look at each other, and he has a return saying, like, do we know that so and so thinks this, or that he believes this, or do we know this to be true? Because now I'm the go-to wrestling guy, so I have to talk about the backstory of these things, and like what I've learned through research. So, a lot of this game was knowing all the stuff, you know, I did a lot when we, when we decided to finally do this and finish it. I spent two months diving back into every piece of notes, and then every, every, like I mentioned in newsletters before. I read every newsletter saying about ECW at that time. I would call journalists, and I'd have off the record chats about things, and that gets murky too, because the journalists aren't buddies, and they have different masters they're serving within, like any reporter has sources in that industry that they are trying to protect, and that might be personal friends, and they all have different perceptions about things, and so it can be a mess to untangle, you know, you have to worry about there were a lot of times when I interviewed somebody and they'd say something and I'd either my first, you know, cynical thought was, "Well, they're lying to me. Well, this is great. And then, you know, I'd watch the tape again, and I think, you know, I put all the pieces together and go, they probably think what they're saying is true. Now that I think of it, it's not. I know it's not that they don't know, you know, I mean, like, look in the movie, Balds Mahoney thought that ECW was being restructured. You know, I was, uh, I was barely 20 when I did that interview with him, and I had the legal documentation of the filing of Chapter 11. And I, you can see it in the film, we're talking about it, and he's like, "Oh, yeah, Chapter 11, restructuring. Yeah, there's a lot that you don't know that I can't say. And what are you supposed to say to that guy? Like, you know, no offense, but I'm pretty, you know, even being 20, I was relatively well connected. Obviously, I'm doing this project, you know, so I knew what the score was on that, but obviously his head had been killed by, you know, not only wanting to believe these things, because who wants to lose what they consider their dream job, but he also probably had people telling him just hold on, just hold on, you know. I got that a lot from people, even well, you know, 12 years after the fact, when interviewing people, you know, I have a whole role of people saying they just wanted, talking not only about wanting to believe, but talking about their emotions, either if they went to the last show and noble, nowhere that they, that they did, or several months later, when Paul Heyman, the owner of ECW, walked on to WWE live broadcasts, they do every Monday, which is raw, that's a big topic, topic with people, you know,
Dave Bullis 1:01:19
Yeah, and you know, again, you know, for all the listeners out there, you know what John is talking about is, you know, for anyone making a documentary, you know, he had to worry about, you know, not only obstacles of, you know, someone's gonna assault him, but also, you know, people were, would actually lie, and you know, I have had other people who've done documentaries about different subjects, and you know, that's some of the things that they have to worry about, too. Is mainly that, and I'm glad you brought up John. Is are people telling the truth? Because this is, you know, sometimes it's basically like the truth according to them. If you know what I mean, there's an old saying, and I forget who said it, but you know, there's there's there's three versions of the truth, there's your version, my version, and the truth, or what really happened, and I mean, you know, and you know, you took, you know, you just said, you know, you took over what, 12 13, years to, you know, get all this documentary footage and put it all together, and, and actually make it, I mean, so you, you were in this for the long haul to make this documentary,
John Philapavage 1:02:22
Yeah, I'm always quick to state just because I'm like an obsessively factual person, and I don't like, I don't really like mythologizing what I do at all, because I feel that flying and that phony, and I always think, like, well, if you go with this, you're gonna get trapped in Ohio one day, we weren't working every day for 13 years. We were working a lot in 2000 a ton in 2001 a little bit in 2002 Then it sat on the shelf, and then I think, oh, five, we worked for like half a year on it, and it sat on the shelf. And like, during this period, there would still be times where, like, you know, somebody would call me and go, 'Is Paul Heyman's email. Do you want to talk to him, blah blah blah blah blah, or here, do you want to talk to so and so, and this and that. And then I think once we made the decision in late January, early February of 2012 at that point it became an every day, 12 hours a day thing until not just the premiere, like I'd say until probably July, July of that year, every day, because that is the thing that you know there's so many things to worry about, like you talk about documentaries, like another thing you stress about is releases. Well, this person said a release, oh, this person walked in, I had one shot during the balls, I see the same people keep coming up, it's so goofy. You think this film was like so super balls, Mahoney centric. During my initial interview with Balls Mahoney in Virginia in 2001 a gentleman named Rob Van Dam, well, that's his wrestler name, walked in purposely, in fact, walk into the shot to say hi to Ball and to say some stuff to the camera, and then you know, follow that up by like, if you want to use this, you need to release, you need to talk to my agent. Now, he had no idea, and I already spoken to his agent the month before to try to get him. At the time, he was a hot commodity, I think he ended up in the WWE within by the summertime, and his agent wanted, like, two grand to sit down and talk to him. He just thought it was impossible for these people to wrap their head around the idea that anybody outside of the wrestling world would want to talk to these people, and in the wrestling world you get paid for it because they're shoot interviews. Like, now that's broken down again, but especially at that time, and it didn't help that I had been a wrestling fan, and that was, that was another pitfall, too. How much do I tell these people in pre-interview stuff? Not only when I make the call and we confirm everything, but I like to talk to my subjects, because I'm, I'm kind of a believer, like I'm in charge of the room, like Kevin would come and he would do all the tech, and he would film it, and then I would. Allow him for the co-creative process, you know, whatever is on my end, he has feedback on, whatever is on his end, I have some sayings. So, during the interview, I would, I would, he would just interrupt here and there if he thought I missed something, or if I would turn around and say, "You have anything at this point? He may or may not have, but in the room, before you even turn the cameras on, these people are picking your brain and trying to see what your quote unquote angle is, because they come from a world where everybody has an angle on screen and off. So then I learned very quickly to minimize the fact that I was a fan, because they view fans as the lowest common denominator. I mean, kind of the way people argue that WWE promotes to their fans, they're thinking of the dumbest yokel who doesn't understand anything and needs complete expository dialog and very simplistic angles with no kind of like real shades of gray. That's kind of how I felt a lot of wrestlers viewed fans, and it was my job to control my perception, I felt to get the interviews and to continue dialogs and get people to sign releases, and I'm not saying lie to people, but I just mean by the time we came back to it, I was a lot older and I knew how to like present myself, whereas I'm, I think I did an okay job when I was like 18 19, 20 21, years old, but I would get very nervous, and I didn't always know how to answer a lot of questions about things, you know, and by that time I knew that we didn't come back to it because I was a wrestling fan, and I always thought that's something that I think there was a big push in my interviews, too, was like, without asking me, they, I was being presented on radio interviews and podcasts as like a super fan, and they thought that helped, because in their mind it was awesome that a fan was doing this, and this was some kind of love letter to UCW, and that's not what it was at all, my job as a filmmaker was to document the truth, which was hard to get at. Some people would say, well, what is this? Is this just like an attack piece, or is this like they basically want to know there the paradigm they kind of set up, you know, was it's either a something that's relatively promotional, where they can lie, where they can just, you know, make up their own reality, or be I must be trying to get it on all things negative and bury them because they're martyred. That was part of the CW fanship, was that you were you were part of a revolution, you were part of something very like guttural and DUI, and you were a family, and anybody against you, there was a martyrdom about them, and there was, you know, it was the term revolution, and what it really means, you know what I mean, it's people kind of getting together, almost like a what do they call that, a flash mob of sorts, and doing something about a regime, it's usually political and involved countries and wars, and it's about a regime that you think is wrong, you know what I mean. There's all these ideological things that are attached to it, but basically that's what I had to penetrate. So it's like at least the regular documentary, if I was documenting, I don't know, an interesting guy who I don't know, like made billions off of popsicle sticks, and then disappeared, and I had the one interview with him, at least, like when I'm interviewing his family and everybody else, and then I finally do an interview with him, but they're not gonna.. I don't think they're necessarily gonna go into it thinking that I'm a bad guy, you know what I mean, or thinking that they need to feel me out, you know what I mean, and every everybody either like was questionable about us or didn't want to do it at first, and all these things, and like the funny thing was a lot of these people would be interviewed by me, and I don't know, I think it's almost egotistical to say that they respected me, because I think they did, probably, but it's not like somebody said I really respect you, and even if they did, I'd be like, well, you're a wrestler, so I don't know if that's true, because you'll just say things, maybe you want me to edit you favorably, because you just thought of something you said in like the 40th minute that we, you probably shouldn't have said, but I do, but the one thing that came out of it was a lot, a lot of referrals, a lot of our, you know, jumping through to get everybody had to do with one person liking us after the interview and saying that we were fair and that we were thorough and that we were that we presented ourselves well and wanting the project to succeed, and therefore calling other people and saying hey, and vouching for us, essentially saying hey, these guys are doing this documentary, and I think we were also very lucky, because when we started, we were just young enough and dumb enough to be likable, apparently and not a threat, and at the same time professional, professional enough to get in the room with these people, you know, which is like perfect. We lucked out, because if they thought we were just super fans, he had nothing to do with us, but if they thought we were like real journalists, well, the first thing you thought, especially when we started, the first thing you thought was, oh well, this is going to be, is this real or fake, and just an attack piece about how disgusting it is, you know,
Dave Bullis 1:10:38
Yeah, I, and you know, I know exactly what you're saying, and you know that that is also something you know that's important, is you know how you matured as a filmmaker, and how you choose an interviewer when you were going from, you know, obviously when you're interviewing them from your 20 to a few years later, but you know, you know a lot of what you're saying there is so important because when another, you know, some people, some of you are trying to make a documentary, they always wonder, how likely is it I'll be able to get to these people, because eventually, you know, you're going to have to, you know, talk to me if you want to do a documentary on the Beach Boys, for instance, at some point you're going to have to sit down with them and talk about them, otherwise it's just sort of this piece that sort of is about them, that now you know what I mean, not with them, but about them. I don't know,
John Philapavage 1:11:26
Then do they want, they want a piece of the action financially, do they want creative control? There's all these things. Yeah, I mean, we talked about that, even after, after Barbara City, is like, oh, what's the next project? And we took a little time to decompress and run the business aspect of it, and then you come up with ideas, and then you'd right away. I always think in terms of like logistics of the filmmaker, because one of the other big things, licensing, not just bringing people to sign releases, but licensing. So somebody would say something, an idea, Kevin, I would kind of studio kick around ideas, and I don't know, maybe he'd say something, trying to think of, he never said this, but I'm making this up. He'd say a comic book writer that was really hot a decade ago, Bendis. I forget, I forget his phone in, but I'm just gonna use him, so right away. Well, if you're gonna do a documentary about Bendis, and you know under the premise, like, well, he changed the way comic books are. It's okay. Well, first we have to prove if that's true or not. That's not really my genre. It's just kind of something that peripherally was, you know, I had friends that would tell me about him, but right away it's like, okay, well, where did he raise, where did he grow to be? Well, he writes like half of Marv Marvel's monkey book. Okay, well, now that's a problem, because you can't do a good vendor documentary unless you get Marvel on board, because you're going to need to show the stuff he drew or that he wrote, right? And that's in that a Marvel thing. Well, who owns Marvel? Oh, Disney. Okay, now you're dealing with Disney. How do you deal with Disney like those are the kind of things we'd have to talk about and think about and logistics. Oh, well, where did he live? Okay, well, who are the main players you'd also want to interview? Well, you do two months of research and you come back and you go like these 10 people, where do they live? California, Florida, Arizona. Well, okay, now your costs just went up obscenely because you've got to get them to say yes, and you have to have a few days in all these things, you need dominoes to fall. That was a big thing, a huge thing for us very early on was getting Todd Gordon. I remember I would bump him on the phone all the time, and when I lived in Philly, I went to the University of the Arts with Cam, and his jewelry shop was maybe a mile away, and I would walk there once a week and bug him. It's like this 19 year old kid, and he'd say, "Well, who do you have? And I remember saying to him, like, the three interviews we had at the time, like my marquee guy was like John Bailey, the Straw Hat guy, who, for those of you who don't know, was a guy who sat in the front row of every CW Arena show from the beginning, and he was just part, he was emblematic of the fans, you know, and he said, "John, you seem like a really nice kid, and I respect it, like you just don't want to give up, but you know, my time is really precious, and I've only ever done one other interview since I left UCW, and Todd, by the way, in case I get buried the lead on this, as the founder and the original owner of ECW, and he basically said to me, like, I don't know that I have time to do an interview where the only other guy participating is like the straw hat guy, and thankfully I said okay, and I didn't know what to say to that, and I called him back, and I pledged to him, I pleaded with him rather, and I said, "Todd, you know, I get where you're coming from. I totally do. You're that person, though. When other people ask who you have, I'm going to say Todd Gordon, and then we go from there, like, just give me a chance, and we didn't have all of our stuff to. Other, necessarily, like it was just so wide at that time, so my questions were like five pages instead of like a one sheet, and he sat through two and a half hours of us, you know, doing this stupid interview, and he made calls for it, to his credit, you know, that's the kind of stuff, though, that's the stuff you work about, getting these people dominoes falling, dealing with Disney, for us, a lot of it was, did you know, did Paul talk to you? Did Paul Heyman talk to you? Well, no. Well, I don't know if I want to talk to Paul, didn't, and those, a lot of those people came back and apologized to me once we did it, and said, I'm sorry, you know, I was worried about, you know, my where I was going to go after you, she got you, and you know, I didn't want to offend Paul, and this and that, in case you know jobs, because he was tied in with WWE, which is the biggest, you know, pro wrestling company in the world, kind of monolithic now, and some of them even ended up doing interviews with us after the fact.
Dave Bullis 1:15:56
Have you ever seen Escape from Tomorrowland?
John Philapavage 1:16:01
I never finished it. Yeah, that's the gorilla, the one you know, very stylistic gorilla filmmaking in Disneyland. Yes, was it Disneyland or Disney World? It was one of them. Yeah, they went in and they.. yeah, that's fascinating. That whole story.
Dave Bullis 1:16:16
Yeah, I.. I actually saw that one day on a whim, and I was just blown away by, for a couple reasons. First off, I got it, you know, it was kind of David Lynch in going for the other part of it was I had to look up to see what did Disney think of this, and there's a fascinating story behind it, but I, you know, I will link to that in the show notes, though. Everybody, but there's just a lot of moving parts, and Disney did find out about it. But you know, I don't want to take.. I don't want to take away your story time.
John Philapavage 1:16:55
Well that's nice of you.
Dave Bullis 1:16:58
To start talking about, you know, escape from tomorrow, but you know one thing I wanted to ask you about, you know, you ran a successful Kickstarter for this, so you know what, what sort of tips could you sort of give that you, that you could give to any, any people out there who are thinking about making a documentary and putting it up for crowdfunding?
John Philapavage 1:17:19
I have a big caveat to that, I may not, I might have more, but off the top of my head, my biggest one is I ran the campaign from mid August till mid September of 2012 So basically, we're coming up on the anniversary, is three year anniversary of running that campaign. I don't know what the perception, and or as fat, if you want to call it, of Kickstarter is that I know there was a lot of pushback from some people, the idea that you're giving away free money to people, and I know that some people on Kickstarter have famously burned people, the one that the one that I saw that always sticks with me, and this was thankfully well after we had made the film, or a year after, there was a guy who, like, yes, he was writing like trade paperback novels, I think that was it. Anyway, something printed, and he collected all the money, he actually made them, but he was doing everything by himself, and there's a bit of a temperamental arty type, and this is the problem, is like, you're dealing both the beauty and the horror of it is, you're dealing with artists most of the time. Now, some of the stuff is just pure commercialism, sure, on a low level, but, like, I mean, you're dealing with us. I'm not.. I know that this is another kind of, like, intellectual.. this is another dirty word.. artist. I never wanted to be an artist when I was younger. I wanted to be in the entertainment business, you know, that's how I look at it. And what's funny is, most people, when they're teenagers, they want to be artsy, and then they kind of quote unquote sell out and just want to be, they understand how business works, and they're willing to make concessions to be in the industry of their choice, and they know the reality of it, and it happened in the opposite way for me, because I wanted to be an entertainer. It was funny, like I would joke with Kev when we got older, like I was more vocal about it, but I, but he went along with it, and I think he, I think he admitted to me at one point he did feel this way too, when we were like, you know, 16 through like 24 we we wanted to be not literally rock stars like communications, we wanted to be rock stars who make films, we wanted to be media presences, you know what I mean, that was part of it, and we didn't want to just make crap, sure, but we wanted to be personalities first and foremost, I think, and what changed in both of us, especially me, more me than him, was that I really became more of an artist, and I think people are embarrassed to say things like that because they think it sounds pretentious, there's this whole cliche around it, and a lot of times I think people are afraid of it because. When you call yourself that, I think they think it infers like that you're successful, that your art is valid, and that your art is something really deep, you know. It's really, it's something that a normal person might not understand anything, and that's just not true. That's not fair. You don't have to have commercial successes to be artsy or think like an artist, so to speak. And that's something I slowly came to grips with. That's just kind of how I am, you know. They tend to be, I'm not a money person. Geez, I've given.. we have nobody shoots yourself in the foot or drops things on principle more than getting in and I, and we have real far less money to show for it. And in some cases, it was when it came down to it, it was about like I don't want to do something and look back in five years and be like, well, I did that for money, you know, because that's what is that, that's a prostitute. There's one thing like that, like, look, we all have to work day jobs a lot of time, most of us do. That's when I have to be a prostitute, you know. I don't want to do it with something that I feel passionate about, so yeah, I'm sorry, you get off on a whole thing. So my point is that artists, and thank you for sitting through this time again. I really do enjoy doing these things, and just talking to people, you know what I mean? Like, I hope I don't come off as somebody who's in love with their own voice, because I just, I love the back and forth, and the sharing, and all the stuff, and talking about these experiences. Yeah, you had asked about Kickstarter, you're dealing with temperamental artists a lot of time, and that can be troubling. And the biggest, I always think of this guy who collected all this money, he was doing everything by himself, and he got sick of. and I've experienced this too. Look, whenever you do, I think that the final tally for us was like 440 some people gave us money, maybe it was 480 some, it was just below 500 There's 500 separate entities giving you money, you know, most of the time it's person to person, and they believe in you enough that they gave you money, or at least your product is interesting to them, but the percentage of them are just going to be crazy people, and I don't literally mean crazy people, like you know, they would be in a mental institution, I mean they don't, that they're just not the type that have a lot of social graces, and they're dealing with you through a computer anyway, you know, so they can say whatever, so I guess this guy was.. I've dealt with it too, but I guess this guy could not deal with people going, "Where is this? I paid for this, I'm going to sue you, or some, some such nonsense, you know. And some people will probably, you know, I think the pressure probably got to the guy, just.. I'm sure some people were just like, "Hey, man, give your money six months ago, where's the books, you know, and so he puts up a video on Kickstarter of himself yelling basically the people who paid for this and burnt, and then shows video of him burning the first, like 300 or something crazy, he threw them all in a fight. He threw the first run of it in a fire pit and started burning them, and then threatened, like a hostage situation, threatened to keep burning the rest if he got any other messages, and said you'll get them when you get them, basically. And stuff like that gave, like, you know, artists on there like bad press. I don't know that the golden goose has kind of been killed. I know that in wrestling, I remember I remember being interviewed, actually, by Mike Jonathan Backsneijia, the show about three and a half months before the premiere, and he taught we were talking about Kickstarter on, and I think the video is still on YouTube. I'm much fatter, I won't watch it anymore, but um, he, uh, he asked me about Kickstarter, and I said I worried that people were going to kill the golden goose, and the question was specific to wrestling documentaries, because there was a whole rash of them at the time, and I learned nothing too. Even people would come up to me and ask me for advice, and they tell me their idea, and I'm just thinking, like, you know, I don't know that I'm necessarily even a filmmaker to this day, you know, in a true sense, but I have some know-how, and certainly Kevin Kiernan does too, and we accomplished a goal, and we had something behind it that was more than ain't this cool, and I was talking to people who seemed like really nice kids, who I could just tell I'm like, this is going to be a disaster, and this is going to hurt anything going forward for wrestling documentaries, and I don't know whether that completely bore out, but I do think that the fad kind of died down somewhat. I think the biggest thing is to personalize it to get people that you're not selling your film necessarily, or whatever your artistic endeavor is. Is you're selling that in tandem with yourself, and hopefully you find something like I was smart enough to know that I had to appeal to the wrestling internet wrestling and newsletter reading population. It was the only way that I was going to get enough money to properly fund this, you know, with all the licensing and all the other costs. Budgeting is really important, you know. I'm jumping around here. I apologize again. Basically, when you do these interviews, you have to talk about your real story and why you care about this thing and why it's relevant, and you have to convince people. And another thing is that this is what we realized for doing this, is we should have been picking a pre-order system. There's this idea that you're getting free money to do something. Actually, we screwed up our budget because the person who did our budget, who isn't myself or Kevin, and I don't want to say the person's name, because we have no relation to them anymore, but he was another person who was helping to produce this, and it's kind of a deal with the devil thing. After a while, and I knew that deep down, but I didn't want to fully deal with it, you know, because I needed this to get done. I didn't want to die knowing, like every few years people would say, 'Hey, man, whatever happened to that documentary ship? Yeah, I never did it. You know, I never completed it. I couldn't, I couldn't bear it. So I had the opportunity, and I had to be talking with the ones I did. Once you go down that road, you know, you're you're either all in and you're not. And unfortunately, we didn't have a proper budget, because not only is a pre-order system like it's basically like, hey, you give me money to complete the film and you'll get the film, but it's also, you have to give so many gifts that, like, I think, honestly, we probably spent, like, a third of the budget on, I mean, that's not a completely factual figure, but a good percentage of the budget went all the gifts we had to give people, because, first of all, even the film, even if you pledged just to get the film, I had to print the film myself. I had to send it to disc makers and get it professionally done. There's a cup, there's cover I had to pay for that, you know. Mass production, mailing it out myself, you know. So then you got to deal with, like, shams.com or the post office every day. Posters, posters cost money. Well, one of the, one of the things that made this possible is funny. I, you know, I haven't spoken publicly about this, haven't done this. The gentleman who co-hosts Ric Flair's podcast, Conrad Thompson, he's really the person who made this possible. At the end of the day, because I was, we were down, we had used up 20 of our like 30 days on Kickstarter, and we still had it was going to come down to the wire, if you did the math on it, it was like if we incrementally average this much every day, which we have been, we may or may not have this still at the 11th hour, and a gentleman named Conrad Thompson saw it on, I believe, Dave Meltzer's website, who is the author and editor of Wrestling Observer newsletter and website, and he gave us, I think, four grand, thanks, good amount of money, but here's the thing, because that, that at that level, I then had to go get a wrestler and fly to him and give him a private screening the week before, and that's costly, you know, for some reason, he really wanted Jane Douglas.
Dave Bullis 1:28:43
Oh, cool.
John Philapavage 1:28:44
Who's Troy Martin? And it was really.. I got to be is really neat. We flew down there. Conrad has a beautiful home. And real quick to wrap that up, once Conrad did this, it became obvious to everybody they're going to make it, and that's the funny thing, people, you realize in hindsight, people weren't giving you money, not because they didn't care about the film, but because they weren't, they were a lot of people still to this day think that you donate money and then never get it back, which isn't true, I never, and I also never had the other misnomer is that I handle your money. I don't know if it's exactly the same, but at that time, Amazon Payments, which was a subsidiary of amazon.com they did all the financial work for Kickstarter, and they take that's the other thing, they take a percentage, Kickstarter takes a percentage, Amazon takes a percentage, so off the top, 10% gone, roughly. You get, you don't get the money until you don't see any money in your bank account until like three weeks after this thing closes. If it's successful, but because it was successful, because Conrad did that, rather it exploded, and we actually got.
John Philapavage 1:30:10
More money than we had asked for, and thank God we did, because every penny got spent, man. Because nobody did a budget on what it would cost, what it would cost to get Shane Douglas on board, for that we were friendly with him, but he wasn't going to take a weekend away from his family, his boys to go to this place without, you know, being flown there, being, you know, being put up at least in a hotel, you know, and then we had to fly there because I had to be here too, you know, and it was a great experience, you know. Shane actually spent the entire afternoon answering every question in Conrad, Conrad, Conrad, and his family had probably the greatest shoot interview ever, in that you're it's an interactive shoot interview with a real human being who's not, who's not being filmed, and therefore not playing up things, and and then we all watched the movie together with Shane and myself commenting to Conrad, almost like a live director's cut before the film even used people, so this is really great experience, but it was a closely experience, had to rent the arena, which is a story within itself. That arena, we weren't going to get that arena until two months and a half before the premiere. It was announced the day we signed the deal. We did not think we were getting that building for the longest time, and we were worried about where in Philly there was going to be a career, actually.
Dave Bullis 1:31:43
Where in Philly's gonna be a career?
John Philapavage 1:31:46
No, a premiere.
Dave Bullis 1:31:47
Oh, premiere.
John Philapavage 1:31:47
Where we were gonna debut our film, you know. So, I guess be yourself, show your passion, answer every question, have an answer for everything. Hopefully, you pick a topic that has a fan base where there is media to promote to those people, because imagine if I picked I did the best documentary ever on checkers, which sounds silly, but I've seen some documentaries, honestly, where I didn't know anything about the subject, but I took a chance, and I said, this is amazing, and it doesn't matter if you're a fan of this or not, and that's kind of my pitch for my own film, Byron City. I mean, it's not really about wrestling, it's about culture, it's about the culture, it's a journey of people, and in this case, they don't, at the end of it, you know, Rocky doesn't win, you know, they don't win, that's the crazy thing about it, and like, where are they now, and how has this affected their lives, you know? So, yeah, I would sell all the things I just said, plus budget correctly, and realize that you are going to have to pay, realize 10% is coming off the top right away, and realize that you have to pay for all these benefits that you're giving to people, so that they will give you money. That's crazy thing. You're every time somebody pledges, you're closer to goal, and yet sort of further away if you don't budget properly, because they're they pledge, and I've never done the math on it, because I'm afraid to, and now it's over, and I don't have to. But there were certain pledges where I'm sure that at the end of the day it was kind of like, well, we're giving all that money back. I don't actually even remember how much it cost to fly down to see Conrad and to bring Shane and all that stuff. We probably gave so much money back to Conrad at the end of the day.
Dave Bullis 1:33:36
Yeah, you know, I mean, one of the things I've, you know, learned about in crowdfunding campaigns from doing them too, is the perks, is you know the perks can get you, and we've had, you know, other filmmakers on here like Dawn Fields, who spoke a lot about that, and crowdfunding gurus like Eli Rigollatto, who would always talk about that too. So, I mean, that's good, you know, now, John, because if you do another one at some point, you know, you have that knowledge to build that into the price points, so you can break the breakdown list, so you know if it's $100 perk. Okay, well, we're getting $60 back, that's 60% of the perk, and $40 goes to the entire cost of making it, and you know stuff like, you know, and I think that is invaluable, because I mean everyone makes mistakes with our first crowdfunding campaign, you know. I certainly did, and I know other people have as well, but you know, and that is an amazing perk, by the way, is having somebody actually fly down to watch the documentary, because that's something you know, if I had the extra money, that would, that would be a perk that I would have looked at as well, because that sounds absolutely phenomenal, especially being able to get the wrestler, I don't know if I would have picked Shane Douglas, though, I may have actually picked, for the hell of it, the blue meanie, because I think he'd be a silent
John Philapavage 1:34:44
Pushing that, because it would have been so much easier, and he was a personal friend of mine. I pushed meanie because it was one thing I was scared to death of, like, what if they pick like me, then I have to fly new check down there, like maybe I'm the zero to hell room with him, because of cost, I don't know, you know, and I will, and I. I feel young, but I also, who knows what's going to happen here. I mean, it's kind of like having that crazy friend you take to a bar in your early to mid 20s, and you're like, oh, Jimmy, Jimmy's a great guy, he's a little like he plays it fast and loose sometimes, you know, every third time Jimmy's starting a fight, he walks up a few weeks and he's like, hey, man, that group of guys give me a dirty look. I'm gonna jump one of them. You got my back. You know, I have been in that situation with people, and then, like, oh my god, Jimmy's become a liability. Like, I don't think we could go out with Jimmy anymore. That's what I was afraid of with doing this. So, I was, I had a conversation where I was like, Conrad, don't you like the Blue Mini? Isn't the Blue Mini the coolest? How about Jerry Lynn? You know who's really cool and loves cats. Amy Richards loves cats. Let's all hang out. He picked Shane and Miller. It worked out great. I had a great time, and I am forever thankful to Conrad, who is a really fun, cool guy.
Dave Bullis 1:35:58
You know, what would be funny if he had picked someone like the Sandman
John Philapavage 1:36:03
That would have been trouble. Yes, that would have been trouble.
Dave Bullis 1:36:06
I have actually been around the salmon before, in like non-wrestling, you know, non-wrestling environment, and he is a guy who was exactly the same smokes like a chimney, is you know that this was like 2004 I met him again, but actually I heard recently that he's a completely clean and sober now.
John Philapavage 1:36:32
That's really good, because I know he, a few years ago, had some trouble and lost a lot of very long time friends who ended up kind of cutting him off. I mean, this is what I was told. It's hearsay, but I have it from very good sources. Certain people that are identifiable to him don't talk to him anymore, or they didn't for her quite a period of time. So that's the first time hearing that. I think that's really great. I didn't have the greatest experience with him in 2001 but I will say by the end of this whole thing, I heard a lot of horrible things about him. I've seen him be a really trashy guy and say a lot of horrible things, but having said that, my lasting memory of him, so you, he died tomorrow. The story that I would tell is I was at, you know, filming at one of the extreme reunion, extreme rising shows, and I went out back, coincidentally enough to smoke, because I have a horrible nicotine habit. So quit or don't start if you're listening. It's been very hard to, you know, going off and on with that. So I went out to the car to get away from the craziness of these shows and smoke, and there was this old guy playing like softball, or like, like a whistleblower with kids, and in the park in the adjacent parking lot, and I thought, well, that's weird, because we're kind of in an industrial area, but it's kind of charming to me, and he just seemed he was kind of like, hey, you go here and you do this, and he's like, "Oh, don't worry about it, buddy, you get the next one, and I'm listening to the voice, and I start hearing it, "Tyla, tell him that, let him let him back again, that voice, and I realized that old man is that hack, Jim Fullington, and I just found it such a great juxtaposition, and I also found it charming, in the sense that, like, the real human being, the one thing that I've never heard anyone say is that he wasn't good with his kids, and I saw it there, you know, he came in, I think he, I think he did it for free, that show, I think he did it as a favor to one of his old ECW friends or Shane or something, and he brought his kids, and they played whiff ball. He did his one run-in, everybody popped, he drinks his beer, you know, Metallica plays, and that was his night. And he just did it to steal friends and hang out, and really, he just, you know, he just spent time with his kids, and he introduced his kids to his crazy old family from the 90s, yeah, that's something that I can say about him.
Dave Bullis 1:39:05
Yeah,
John Philapavage 1:39:05
That is a positive.
Dave Bullis 1:39:07
Well, you know, I have a funny story for you too. He, when I used to work at what was called EB Games, which was an old, which was what was GameStop before GameStop became GameStop, and EB Games, we saw, you know, and I was up in Broomall, Bruma, Pennsylvania, and we're in this, you know, and it's kind of like an upscale shopping center we were in. Well, one day in 2001 in comes the Sandman, and he's got his kid with him, it was Tyler, and he's talking about buying a PlayStation, or PlayStation Two at that point, and my manager had no clue who this guy was, and I'm like, oh my god, it's a six. I was like, what, maybe it's 2001 so I'm thinking I'm like 1617, and I'm like, oh my god, it's a sandman, and I'm trying to, you know, and he's like, yo, what's up, buddy, yo, you got that vs two. Okay, hurts my voice. Yeah, exactly, exactly. And any.. and you know, I was like, yeah, sure, buddy. And so you know, and he ends up leaving. I was like, oh my god, save me. I just came in here, and we sold a PS two, and my managers like, who was that guy? So I ended up bringing in some VHS tapes of ECW. I showed him, and he was laughing his ass off at who he was, and he wanted to bring him in into the store to have a wrestling match with our assistant manager, who was this obese guy who was just a biggest curmudgeon, he had these like he had a completely bald head, he had like these like bulbous moles, he looked like a cartoon character, he looked like a real-life Homer Simpson, if you can imagine that. Okay, so he said to him, "Hey, I'm gonna bring the salmon in, and you guys have a wrestling match here in the store, and he wouldn't like, he wouldn't tell him it was a joke, he was trying to get him to believe it was real, and I just remember finally the assistant manager flipped out, was like, "No, I'm not gonna wrestle the sandman in the middle of the store, and it was like it just kind of hit me, like that was one of the things I never thought I would hear in my life was somebody refusing to wrestle the salmon in the middle of a retail store, just one of the funny members to have a Sandman,
John Philapavage 1:41:24
And real quick, because we bury the lead again for the people who are, who are saints and have stuck with us. There's a Sandman, the wrestling character, real name Jim Fullington, also goes by Hack to his friend, was a wrestler in the early 90s who carried around a kendo stick, which was popular at the time, because Michael Fay got in trouble in Singapore. It was this kid, he was this teenager who I forget what he did, but they ended up guilty of the trial.
Dave Bullis 1:41:54
He spray painted those cars.
John Philapavage 1:41:56
Oh, okay, right, right, right. And his punishment was they would whack him 10 times with a quote unquote Singapore cane, so the Sandman snake, which was originally that he was a surfer, very miscast in it. He maintained being the Sandman, but he was a guy who would come out in like Zuba pants, and then later jeans, once that when somebody told him that bad was over, and he would come out with that in a T-shirt, drinking a beer, smoking a cigarette, and hitting people with distain. This does not necessarily sound like the wrestling you may have grown up with, or even the wrestling you see today. It really worked in that environment. He became a cult hero. A big thing with ECW, which you could never do today, was the original music. They didn't use generic music, they used hits that were identified that you then identified with that person, and then you would hear on a radio, and they would be rock and metal, and maybe hip hop and rap. In the time when that was just now, it's that's music. Now hip hop is just a part of music, it is the dominant form of music, and Rock's chair in Music slips day after day, but at that time it was like a very forward-thinking thing to attach hip hop to some of the acts, and Haman was a Paul Heyman, the creative guy behind UCW, and eventually the owner, he gave him Sandman Enter Sandman by Metallica, which is a pretty big.. it was one of the biggest hits ever. And I hear that song to this day, and I think of it, and he would come out.. half of the fun of him was this five minute entrance where he, the music would build up, and he'd come out, and he started coming out in the audience, and he would drink a beer, and then smash it over his head, and he'd actually cut himself with bleed from the beer again, from smashing it, and he would go up to people, and I saw a million videos of this as I was going through the collection for our footage that we used to VCW. He'd walk up to a kid and go, are you 18? It's kind of like the worst version of a bouncer carding somebody ever. You walk up and go, are you 18? And the kid would go, yeah. And then you go, cool, and he would just dump a beer down the guy's throat from like a very high angle, and it would get all over the kid's face, and then he'd high five this interactive experience. And that's the family, that's the worst, the guy who basically leaves his gimmick that Dave and I just talked about.
Dave Bullis 1:44:26
My dad actually used to work in Wilmington, and it was right up the street from Hacks Bar and Grill, and that is, you know, I had friends who would, because eventually wrestling shows are happening there, but they said, you know, you could go in there and there would be the same man, just living the gimmick, drinking stuff like that. I mean,
John Philapavage 1:44:45
See the raw footage of our interview, it took place in there, and he didn't seem to understand that playing commercial music during our interview over the loudspeaker of the bar would hinder the process, considering we couldn't license us. Yeah, I'm sorry, continue, but yes, I know that bar, because we went there, and he wanted to just do it at a random table in his bar.
Dave Bullis 1:45:07
Well, you know, when I was at the premiere of Barbar City, I had, I was laughing when someone actually said to you during the Q and A, they said, 'Oh, I would just use a WF footage, and told Vince McMahon to go fuck himself, and I remember your reply was, well, maybe you have a very good entertainment lawyer who is a very expensive, you know, who's on, you know, the family or is on the payroll, you know, that would be a hell of a lot of money to pay to even sit down with them to talk about using footio footage.
John Philapavage 1:45:39
Oh, I had people steal the movie online, and when I would write them and say, 'Hey, I'm the director, like this is a really small thing that I hope you know to make money just to reinvest in us. I'm not trying to get you in trouble reporting to anything, like, could you just not? And they would be like, 'Oh, man, I'm just trying to spread it, you know? You know, stopping people from doing this is so un ECW or something, and I'm like, what the people who you a will use anything to justify what they do, but also be that again, circling all the way back, a big problem that I had was just these wrestling wrestling fans, specifically old ECW fans, they just don't get it, like you said, like I should just tell this giant worldwide global corporation that stock traded F you are using your footage like that. You would have never even been in the premiere. They would have sent a ceasing to shift months before that. I would, I would still be paying them today if I did that, oh, and for forget about today, it's only been three years, I would be paying them well into my 80s, I wouldn't have had the money, and I'd probably end up in jail or something. Yeah, oh, you can't do this,
Dave Bullis 1:46:54
Yeah, absolutely. And which is why, whenever, whenever he said that, you could just tell that he's never experienced on this path, but, but you know, John, I wanted to ask you, you know, Sue, you know, I've been talking to you, me, we've been talking about two hours now. I wanted, wanted to, I wanted to ask you, you know, what's next for John, you know, what are you working on next?
John Philapavage 1:47:16
Oh, we're pains me to say we are in a holding pattern right now. We managed to make enough money to really reinvest in ourselves, and we still have a few things that we want, you know, production wise. We wanted to upgrade. Like one of the things that you should know, first of all, go to Barbar city.com If you have not seen the documentary, you can download it. There are no more DVDs left. I have to go bug the guy who does our website, because I just.. I don't look at these things, because I made it, and I'm, you know, in a weird way, it's like it was over for me the moment the after party wrapped, and then I still had to deal with it, and that's like the creator part of it, you know what I mean? Like, I, I had lived it, I had accomplished it, you know. So I don't go to Barbed Wire City, because I know it's there, you know. I made the movie, but apparently I just saw last week randomly I wanted to see what the website looked like, and they're still.. it just says DVDs are sold out, and I'd say like once a month I get an email from somebody saying like when is that going to be restocked, and like it's just not everybody knows, like in February, in late January and early February, we did a kind of a going out of business kind of sale to liquidate our DVD stocks, because when you have a normal life and like a day job that you have to do in the real world, it's really difficult to then like run home and like find out what the orders are, and you know, run to the post office and send these things out and just manage the business, you know, it was just, it was, it was that time, so there there's a VOD there, I shouldn't say a VOD, but a direct download [email protected] that you can purchase if you want to see it, my point to bringing that up, other than a shameless plug, is it's in standard definition, and a lot of it was shot on a handycam in the early 2000s you know. Obviously, upgrade a lot of stuff, some of it we did have, but it made no sense to intersplice that into our phone, like it just would have looked like a mess to me. And so, obviously, everything has to be HD, and that we wanted better sound, we wanted better lighting. We wanted, you know, we wanted a lot of different things, and once we got near that, we started talking about different projects, and we finally settled on one, and it was going to be about gentrification, essentially. It was going to be urban renewal, which is like the promotional press release version, because we're going through that in, in the city I grew up in, which is Allentown, and the whole Lehigh Valley in eastern Pennsylvania, and we wanted to really study it. Does it work? Does it not work? I mean, there's a lot of things involving money. I had worked down there during, during, you know, it's still going on, it's like a 30 year time check. And they built an arena. The arena was supposed to draw all these businesses in and draw all the people who were in an economic state to spend money down there and stimulate the economy, and all of a sudden you know the dilapidated downtown area that people are afraid to go into will become this beautiful, you know, almost tourist attraction that the locals spend money in as well. And I just said, this is just such a good story, and we don't have to travel. When we looked at all the boxes from what we learned from making a documentary. We said, "This is awesome. It's in our backyard. We know some of the players, we know the people to talk to, we know the journalists, you know. In some cases, we knew them first person. And I spent a week researching, and I had a long three hour conversation on the phone with Kevin. We had another one in person, and then we even shot some test footage, we went down for the second event at the arena to interview people about if they were excited about the arena, what they thought, why this was good for the city, and I just figured some, there's got to be some weird financial thing going on here, it's like there's this special zone called the Neighborhood Improvement Zone and the state just gives that money back to the to the people who are developing the lands, and I was just like, this is a guaranteed their money back, and we're talking millions of dollars, and just from working down there for a few months, I was like, there's something about this, who's who's watching this, where's the oversight, you know, and Kevin said, like, look, you know, he was Kevin right now is in Alaska, he's Alaska for six months, he left mid-June, we had, we both had to go to a wedding of a mutual friend, and then two days later I helped pack him up and drove him down to the Philadelphia International Airport to fly out, so he wanted to put the whole thing on hold. He just said, "There's no point in starting this, and then me leaving, and this all being on your back, especially because he's far more tech savvy with the filmmaking. I'm the dreamer who puts the story together. I'm a very capable editor, but I'm nowhere near Kevin, you know, and he was just like, it's going to be a mess, you have to get a replacement person, and you're kind of running cat and running the creative vision when you interview people or shoot footage, so we kind of put it on hold, and maybe even like won't do it, kind of a thing, and then like two weeks ago, maybe three big headline article in the local paper, the FBI, like, rated the mayor, downtown mayor's office, and a bunch of other offices, and, and I guess in Redding, this happened to, or Lancaster, I forget, and now a lot of people, including the main developer, who is making a crazy amount of money off of this are under investigation, apparently by the FBI from afar. I emailed him the article, and I just wrote, like, of course, this would happen. We would have been.. when did we test footage, September, and I did all my research, so we would have been pretty thick into this by now. We would have almost been a year in, and we would have had the contacts and had everything, and we would be on the ground, kind of shooting as it happened, kind of a thing. And which is something that he does not like sit down, interview, tell the past kind of stuff, actually. His favorite parts are the more active parts at the reunion. In our documentary, we used a reunion of these guys, as I mentioned before, kind of his tent poles that we kept coming back to, bouncing between the present and the past. That's his favorite stuff. So he would have been in love with all of this, and now it's all you know, something is going on in that story that we kind of felt might be an angle of it, and we're not covering it. That's a long way of saying, like, hey, would you have liked to see this documentary? Yeah, well, we would have to, but right now we're in a holding. Did manage to make a wonderful five minute video for my nephew, though. So, for all of you concerned,
Dave Bullis 1:54:25
Hey, you always got to be creating, John. That's right.
John Philapavage 1:54:29
It was an outlet, and it was a great way to.. we did it not only to make, you know, make my nephew feel important, but also it was a great way to test out a lot of new stuff we had in Netflix, because it's something where you don't have to be perfect, you know, a little kid doesn't care if something's washed out or if the lights don't, or the mic, the new mic doesn't work right, or you're messing with the settings of your new, you know, HD camera or whatever. Yeah,
Dave Bullis 1:54:56
Very true, you know, and so. You know, John, I want to say, you know, thanks again for coming on the show. I know you know we've been chatting about ECW, and a lot of things that, you know, like I'm definitely gonna have the show notes filled, by the way, everyone. So, if there's anything John, I talked about that you're kind of like, "What the hell was that? Trust me, I'm gonna put a ton of stuff on the show notes, because I have a lot of notes in front of me right now. John, where can we find you out online?
John Philapavage 1:55:23
Oh, I'm kind of hiding from social media. I mean, if you Google my name, you'll find I don't do a lot of Facebook. I've been.. I've gotten back into Twitter only. It was a promotional thing that I really listen, you, if you're still listening to this, you know, I can talk, you know, I may, I may not be able to do 142 characters, so the Twitter thing is a little bit of a mess, but you can find me on Twitter, I don't even, I honestly don't know my handle, but it's the eye, there's only two John Phillip averages in the world, and one of them is my dad, and he doesn't know how to work this stuff, so you'll find
Dave Bullis 1:56:01
John's Twitter handle is at BWC Film.
John Philapavage 1:56:04
Change that, by the way. I don't know how to change it.
Dave Bullis 1:56:10
You can change that.
John Philapavage 1:56:11
Okay, good. Because, like, that was something that was literally just created for the film, and now life goes on. Like, I don't appreciate you having me on, and it's fun to talk about this stuff, but I do have friends who do podcasts that they have me on for different reasons, and always like you, come on, and you can promote Barbed Wire City, and I'm like, can I just not be the Barbed Wire City for once? Can I just have an opinion that's just valid because I'm me, and maybe I can present myself well,
Dave Bullis 1:56:41
So that's why I had you on. I want you, I mean, it was more of how to create a documentary in general, crowdfunding and stuff like that. Now, granted,
John Philapavage 1:56:49
Oh yeah, I wasn't throwing shade to you. I do need to change that, so I'll have to talk to you. I'll have to mess you. I'm like 45 minutes late to meet a friend who flew in from California, by the way.
Dave Bullis 1:57:01
Well, hey John, I want to say thank you, and please apologize to your friend for me, John Philapavage, documentary filmmaker. John, it was a pleasure and honor, sir. And I can't wait to see what you do in the future.
John Philapavage 1:57:12
Thank you so much, Dave. I had so much fun doing this, man.
Dave Bullis 1:57:15
Oh yeah, same here, buddy. And I will talk to you very soon. Let's catch up. Let's not make it another like three years before we talk to each other again.
John Philapavage 1:57:22
Definitely,
Dave Bullis 1:57:24
All right. Take care, John.
John Philapavage 1:57:57
You too, man.
Dave Bullis 1:58:02
Bye, bye.
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