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On Monday, September 14, PWTorch editor Wade Keller interviewed former WCW President Eric Bischoff an exclusive multi-hour "Torch Talk" interview covering a variety of controversial subjects from the Monday Night War period, his days on WWE TV, his 2006 autobiography, and the "Rise & Fall of WCW" DVD.
The following is the latest installment of part four of the exclusive five-hour "Torch Talk" with former WCW President Eric Bischoff. Part 4(b) of our daily Q&As will be published here at PWTorch.com, which is unprecedented with our VIP-exclusive "Torch Talk" series.
To both READ and LISTEN to the entire interview, you'll want to become a VIP member, which also includes instant access to our newsmaking multi-hour in-depth hard-hitting "Torch Talks" with other top WCW players such as Scott Hall, Kevin Nash, X-Pac, Vince Russo, Ed Ferrara, Hulk Hogan, Goldberg, Chris Benoit, Eddie Guerrero, and others (ALL AVAILABLE AT THIS LINK FOR VIP MEMBERS). To subscribe right now and be the first to read the entire Bischoff "Torch Talk" and have VIP-only access to the audio, click here. The first audio segment and transcript installment is now available for VIP members.
We present today's latest question and answer from Part 4(b). Tune in tomorrow for the next series of Q&A's from part 4.
Wade Keller: You've talked I think less about it in your book than Vince Russo has in his public statements about Standards and Practices and limitations on where he wanted to go creatively. That's his number one excuse for his formula not working like he hoped it would. I want to talk about Vince Russo in a number of respects a little bit later, but from your perspective, creatively did you run into problems where you wanted to push the limit and you found that corporate wanted you to be more PG or were limiting the things you wanted to do?
Eric Bischoff: Of course, and I think we did talk about that in our previous interview and I did talk about it a lot in my book. Going back to August of '98 which I know I refer to often in my previous interview and indeed in my book when I went into that meeting at Techwood and was surrounded by 15 corporate executives, none of whom I had ever really met before who were telling me what wrestling was going to be and how it was going to be branded and what the content was going to be like. In that meeting, or shortly after that meeting actually, is when Standards and Practices reared their ugly head. Up until that point, honestly, not to sound like an idiot, but if someone would have called me up two months earlier and said, "We're going to send somebody over from Standards and Practices," I wouldn't have even known what the in the hell they were talking about. We had never heard of Standards and Practices inside of WCW for seven years up until that point I had been with the company. Nobody had heard of it before. It was an arm or a division within Turner Broadcasting that I had never heard of. And it was in '98. Vince Russo talks about it. Hell, I had been dealing with it for a year and a half or two years before Vince even conned his way into the company.
MORE TO COME TOMORROW WITH THE NEXT PART OF THE SERIES WITH BISCHOFF IN-DEPTH ON NITRO...