Recently, NWA owner Billy Corgan spoke with PWInsider. During the interview Corgan discussed the first few weeks of NWA Powerrr, giving creative freedom to the talent and more. Some highlights from the interview are below:
On the reaction to NWA Powerrr from fans:“We’ve just been blown away. We certainly thought we would do fine, but the numbers and the feedback from the fans has just been overwhelming. I mean, we’re 20 times further along than we thought we’d be at this point. So, it showed that the last couple of years investing and working with different companies and building relationships in the business have really paid of. Word of mouth got around, and certainly, to AW’s credit and of course many others, New Japan. What’s called this alternate universe, this non-WWE universe professional wrestling is kind of kicking into another gear. We’re able to ride that wave at the same time as well.”
On how different his involvement in wrestling would have been if his Impact investment had worked out: “That’s a really great question. I think one piece of data that’s important is that, and it goes back to the court case that I was involved with against Impact or whoever it was. It was very complicated. Dixie Carter was certainly involved. The numbers as far as the debt of the company at that point were vastly under-reported. And so, if I had managed to take over the company, it would have been a far more complicated mess than I could have ever imagined. And so, along those lines, it’s hard for me to imagine I could have ridden out the debt. That said, let’s just set that aside, and let’s just play fantasy booking. I felt that, because I’d been there almost two years, that I understood the culture, I understood the talent. And I felt I could very quickly pivot towards something that’s similar to the vision of the NWA. Where it doesn’t match up is that the thing you cannot really wrap your arms around until you’re in it and until you feel it every day is once you take on the historical legacy of the NWA, and you start to really embrace what that really means to so many wrestling fans and how it’s commensurate with the vision that I had already, which was that traditional wrestling will always work. I don’t care trends come and go, but the idea of telling a good story, making people want to see it, and cough up some of their hard-earned money, which I certainly respect what that’s all about as someone who had to sell tickets for many, many years as a performing artist. Once you can put those pieces together, I think the NWA has offered an opportunity that TNA never could have offered me. The attraction, and I’ll be quick about it, the attraction for me with TNA was you were buying a culture that had already spent probably an excess of a $100 million in gross monies to build the infrastructure, the office, the relationship with vendors and stuff like that, and having to start the NWA literally from scratch. That’s a very expensive proposition. So, there was a wisdom there. But as far as the culture of that went I think it ended up being just perfect that we ended up with the NWA.”
On making Powerrr a studio show: “Well, I pitched the idea to Dixie Carter of taking over, I think it was… What was their B series? Was it Xplosion? I said I could do Xplosion cheaper than we were doing it in Universal if you let me do a studio wrestling. I couldn’t sell that internally no matter how hard I tried because I think at the end of the day there was never any real desire to let me take over the company creatively. I was simply there to be a chip that they can play for networks and/or money if they needed it, which of course turned out to be true. And Impact Wrestling continues because I created the bridge to get it from A to C. I’ve been pitching that literally probably for the whole the end of the last four years, and even with other companies that we worked with we talked about doing a similar concept in combination with their talent with the idea that we’d have a small NWA roster that we could integrate with somebody else’s talent, and then produce it a show, because as everyone can understand, producing studio wrestling is an economical thing. I thought, well, given meme culture, the way people consume content, the idea of a hothouse effective content on the fly, letting great promo people do their own business, not getting in there on every line and every period and comma, combined with the economics was something I really wanted to do, but the Ten Pounds of Gold series did illuminate for us over the last couple of years, and then, the series that Dave and I did called 30 Days, which was around some of my musical stuff. It illuminated for us very acutely that content culture is moving very, very fast these days, and you really have to be in the 24/7 business of content as you know with your site. People just consume content and if they want it, they want even more of it. So, it becomes about quality and it becomes about consistency. So, we learned a lot that maybe you don’t see necessarily on screen, but it has a lot to do with how we got there.”
On what level of creative freedom talent has: “Sure. Okay. So, let’s just pretend we’re talking about an imaginary wrestler. I would pull that wrestler aside, and say ‘Here’s what we’re trying to accomplish. Here’s where we’re going. Here’s the in and here’s the out. You’re on your own.’ And literally, we’re not even giving people time to use … We’re letting them run free. Absolutely. The only sort of stopgap measure is, we tell Galli or Marquez, ‘If you think it’s going long, you pull the plug on the fly.’ But that’s it. So, if an Eli Drake or an Aaron Stevens or a Nick Aldis is on fire, they can run as long as they want to go. There’s limits on our talent. Literally, the only thing we’ve said is let’s try not to curse, because we don’t think that’s necessary for what we’re trying to get across. But beyond that, talent has literal freedom as long as they’re within the lanes of the angle.”
On finding the balance between big names and fresh faces: “I think in this regard, I’m very much a Paul Heyman guy. I think Paul Heyman particularly with ECW showed that there was a lot of talent in the market that he was able to, by repackaging them, or booking them in a particular way that maybe supported their skill set. I like to think I’m that type of booker. When we talk about a talent, bringing in someone like a Trevor Murdoch, to me that’s a no-brainer. I say this with all due respect, it has nothing to do with his past. Now, it certainly had something to do with the fact that the business hasn’t gone for him the way maybe he would have liked. I don’t think of it like that at all. I see a super talented guy who knows exactly what he’s doing in the ring, and really, in many ways has been underutilized. So, I think it’s to our credit that we can show quite quickly why somebody like that has been underutilized. “Nick [Aldis]’s another example of somebody who’s been grossly underutilized, which is kind of laughable when we consider the work that he’s done for the last two years. And Nick was quick to point out that he was in Main Events in TNA. He was a champion. But like you said, and I certainly felt as a fan watching back is he never really got his just due. So, what we try to say to every talent coming in is like, “Look, we’re going to give you your best opportunity, and if you start to get over, no one’s going to stop you. This company is built for talents to get over. The greatest credit we could have in the next few years is that some of the talents that we work with will go on to brighter and bigger pastures because we’ve been able to show the world that the talent that we see is right there and it just hasn’t been necessarily packaged or supported in the right way. We tend to look at it maybe like a New England Patriots. We’re looking for the talents on the market that are undervalued, but we know their value, and we know if that properly supported they’re going through the camera like they should. So far we’ve been pretty right. We’re very excited about that.”
On if he’s worried about losing talent after investing TV time in them: “No. We’re not really particularly worried about that. We did have an incident where it was a few months ago, where we had a company steal a talent from us that was under contract. I was considering pursuing legal action. I went to a lawyer and the lawyer said, ‘You absolutely have a case.’ We decided in that case not to because we hadn’t launched yet and really didn’t want the adverse publicity because it would just seem like more drama shit show. To many casual observers, it’s like the last time they heard my name involved with wrestling was suing TNA. So, what we’ve done since is we’ve shored up our contractual situations. We made it very clear to talent what our expectations are in regards to the contracts. We take those risks just like anybody else does when those deals are up. We’re not particularly worried. We have our key talents. I think they’re pretty easy figure out who they are. I think as long as we feel we’re all in this business faithfully, under the letter of the law, that our expectations are pretty realistic. We don’t have a billion dollars to spend, so what we have to do is we have to offer something akin to a professional franchise that says, ‘Look, when you come in here, you will have a great experience, and when you leave, you will be worth more in the market than when you came in.’ And so, if we lose people because we can’t afford the value that we’ve helped build into them, I think it will ultimately just be to the credit of the NWA. So, we’re not particularly worried about that.”
(h/t 411Mania)
