II
Storytelling means a lot to me.
At some point in my early days walking this earth, the idea was planted in my mind that one could be a storyteller. It was classified under the title: WRITER, and I think that ever since I heard that word, that’s what I’ve aspired to be.
It might sound stupid to some to say that I’ve been writing since I was five years old, but it is actually kind of true. I was at least telling stories. The oldest story I have was from Kindergarten when a class project had us write our own storybook. My Mom, who is the most creative person I’ve ever known and could literally make anything that she set out to make, helped me make it. Together, we told the story of SUPER-STRONG, a buffed-up superhero looking for some missing cookies. Thanks to my Mom, it was a cool book that undoubtedly surpassed all my classmates. There was a power in this experience that hooked me on the type of fuel that’s powered me every day since.
My Mom showed me a dream turned into reality.
Ever since I’ve been hooked on storytelling, I’ve explored it in different forms (screenwriting, comic writing, prose) and read everything I can get my hands on. For my birthday a few years back, my fiancé knew I needed to get my boxes of books into a more suitable home. So she had a bookcase made for all those books. It’s huge (and by now, I’ve run out of room), stretching across an entire wall in our home. Then on the other side of the room, there’s another bookcase for my CRITERION COLLECTION. These two bookshelves have shaped the way I understand storytelling.
What is that we want from stories? Some latch onto the escapism that stories give us. But, for me, the core of what we want from stories is to feel more connected to our fellow humans. We are all the same, deep, deep down. We want to live. We want to see those we love live. We want each other to live. Across my 37 years, I’ve learned that the stories I tell, in whatever form I tell them in, are essentially about humans. They do say, ‘write what you know.’
Movies give us that feeling in a way that can be inescapable. What always attracted me to film was the way it moved through you. The best movies don’t just take us somewhere; they make us feel something. SPOILERS When the donkey dies at the end of AU HASARD BALTHAZAR, it rips right through me. When you’re forced to wait with everyone else to see if the bell rings in ANDREI RUBLEV, my heart barely beats. For me, movies, cinema give storytelling its ultimate power.
But what about wrestling? This is a journal about getting this wrestling TV show off the ground; maybe it’s time to talk wrestling. Eric Bischoff has repeatedly said how crucial great storytelling is for wrestling. How you begin and how you end. The ride you go on. How it makes the audience feel. It’s true. The best feeling you can get from wrestling is when great storytelling happens.
I was at WRESTLEMANIA when Kofi Kingston won the World Title by beating the best wrestler of all time, Brian Danielson. The explosion of the crowd was unlike anything I’d felt before. It buzzed through me. The stakes were real. Everything about who won and lost mattered. Not just to the fans but to the wrestlers as well. Like I’ve been saying, this is what storytelling is about. Making you feel something for your fellow man and want to see them live.
The plan is to connect these two things, wrestling and cinematic storytelling, to create something you can’t turn your eyes from.