Paul Heyman Interview: Talks About The Original Plans For ECW + More
On Sunday, July 30, 2006 at 3:47 PM EST TheSun.co.uk has an interview up with Paul Heyman who talks about the relaunch of ECW.
Among other things Heyman says:
On the relaunch of ECW: "It was all thanks to the fans.
The Rise And Fall Of ECW DVD is constantly flipping with WrestleMania 20 as the No1 selling DVD in wrestling history.
Take those sales and add the phenomenal buy rate for ECW One Night Stand last year and the fact that in this tiny little Hammerstein Ballroom - which only holds 2,800 people - they took almost $500,000 and everything we were touching was going through the roof. There was obviously this huge audience clamouring for this product.
And the decision was made that if the audience was demanding it then we were compelled to make this thing go full time again.
Internally, what originally happened was Rob Van Dam said to Vince McMahon: "This thing can sustain."
Vince took it under advisement but then as the public was clamouring for it, it became a corporate tidal wave.
ECW wasn't meant to be as big as it is right now. This was going to come back as an Internet-only show.
It was going to be this tiny little spin-off, almost like a boutique promotion to satisfy the niche.
Then as we started going down that path, the enormous response to the rumours that ECW was coming back opened the floodgates.
All of a sudden we heard there was network television interest and worldwide syndicated television interest in this. People in Japan, Italy, Germany, Australia, South Africa and the UK were saying they wanted it on their TVs.
We realised it was a lot bigger than we thought and instead of this Internet-only show, ECW was going to be a prime time cable network television programme."
On the subject of ECW's first show on Sci Fi being panned: "We were all disappointed with how the first TV show went. But that was to be expected going in.
We were taking a concept that revolutionised the entire industry in the 1990s and had achieved the status of urban myth.
Now you're bringing ECW fast-forward into 2006, with only two shows since its collapse at the beginning of 2001 and the rebirth in June 2006.
So that's five and a half years with only two shows and not enough time for anyone to adjust to the new concepts and direction of ECW.
This is beyond the old expressions of "growing pains" or "a work in progress", this was a dramatically different concept.
Of course coming out of the gate we were going to stumble on that first night, because even those with a clear vision of it had so much baggage attached it makes things very difficult.
Any other television show would take a year just to put a pilot on the air.
And we went from being an Internet concept to a big television show in under two months.
So we lacked that time to adjust."
Plus more...to read the entire interview go to TheSun.co.uk