Ed Ferrara co-booked the WWF with Vince Russo, under the leadership of Vince McMahon, in the late 1990s before leaving the WWF for WCW in a move that forever changed the booking structure of WWE. In this exclusive "Torch Talk" with Ferrara conducted Apr. 1, 2009, he discusses the hype leading into WrestleMania 25 and compares it to how he approached booking WrestleMania 15. This just a small sample of the entire 75 minute interview, all of which is now available in audio format to VIP members and all of which will be published in transcript format in upcoming editions of the Pro Wrestling Torch Newsletter.

Wade Keller: What do you think of the way the storylines headed into WrestleMania 25 have been paced, as you observe it, compared to what it was like headed into WrestleMania 15? Does it seem like they're throwing a lot more out there and moving it much faster, or have they slowed it down?

Ed Ferrara: Well, I remember thinking a month ago when it was, like, a week or two after No Way Out. I know for a week or two after that I felt, they only have two matches booked already? I mean, it feels like they spent so much time building to the point where the matches would get booked that they didn't have any time to build the matches after they announced them. Announcing Mysterio against JBL, having the announcers mention it during a match as that's how we found out that that match got booked? That feels like they had to do something fast. I think what happened is they thought they had something with Mickey Rourke and were putting all their eggs in that basket and that may have fallen through if you believe the stories. Who know what the truth of the matter is. Then they just started scrambling because they realized they didn't have their big celebrity, but it feels like the build to this WrestleMania has been really erratic. Some of the storylines have been really well done in terms of the amount and quality of TV time that they've had, but other ones just come off as afterthoughts - and meaningless afterthoughts. The Diva Battle Royal. Great, you're going to get all of those girls out there and that's a little bit of eye candy and everybody's going to get a payday, but how do you build that? You do it by having a 16 Diva tag match that lasts for two minutes? How are you enticing me to pay money to see this? There's so many other instances like that?

Ed Ferrara [photo by Wade Keller (c) PWTorch]

Keller: Look at the Money in the Bank. You have eight characters. At least three or four have compelling stories right now. Where is it they're going? I'm not sure people care a lot about Kane, Finlay, or Mark Henry. But look at C.M. Punk. He won it last year, won the World Title. There are so many stories to tell there. MVP, what a year he's had and boy have they dropped the ball on following up on that. Shelton Benjamin. How long is he going to just hang out as the seventh player on a 12 person bench, never starting, not being in there at crunch time, just kind of hanging out. There's a story to tell there and the Money in the Bank match is that chance for him to tell that story. And on and on with a couple other guys. I'm real surprised they keep finding time to give you main event matches that make the actual matches at WrestleMania seem too familiar, like reruns because you've seen them so often, but they don't have any TV time to tell the story of C.M. Punk.

Ferrara: Right, exactly. That's the big difference between what's happening now and what happened ten years ago. We would go out of our way - we were servicing the main guys, spending a lot of time on Austin and Foley and Rock and Undertaker. But we were spending just as much time on everybody else and we were doing everything in our power to try to build up the mid-card guys and make sure when the time came that they needed to be elevated up to the very top that they were ready. But at this point they're not doing that, they're not putting the time into the mid-card guys. I mean, look at Rhodes and DiBiase. Rhodes and DiBiase are married to the hottest heel in the business right now, but if they disappeared tomorrow, I don't think one person would wonder what happened to them because they've been pretty much a non-entity. They've been the equivalent of the Red Shirt Security because they're the ones who are taking bumps for Orton, but they're not getting anything out of it. There's a rub with Orton, but it's not elevating them at all when you have two very talented guys there. They should be going off and doing something with them.

With Punk they should be telling us a story. I was really looking forward to - I thought we were going to get an extended program between Punk and Regal, which I thought would have been phenomenal. The matches that those two could have had together and just the stories they could have told with everything that Punk represents and everything that Regal represents clashing head on with Regal's sense of honor. I thought it could have been the sort of thing where those two could have been hated rivals for months and have an extended program and I could have easily seen Regal coming out and saving Punk after that because Punk earned his respect. I'd buy that from Regal. What happened? They had a couple matches and then Punk beat Regal. It was meaningless. Nobody was elevated by it. It definitely didn't help Regal because he became forgotten. And Punk, he was just as forgotten. They put him in the Money in the Bank match and didn't think about him again. Okay, we'll put him in Triple Threats and Fatal Four-Ways and Six-Man Tags and Eight-Man Tags until we get to WrestleMania; that's taken care of. But what that does is it trots out the same guys week after week after week with no compelling reason, nothing for us to care about, and at the end the day we're sick of looking at them. So we're going into WrestleMania and we've got the Money in the Bank match with eight guys who we have seen fighting each other in different iterations for the past month and a half and we're not exactly lathered up to see them again.

Keller: Let's go back ten years ago and in a broad brush stroke look at the hype for WrestleMania 15. We had the gimmie match that would sell tickets in Rock vs. Steve Austin. That's a great culmination. We also had an undercard that all supported. But from a standpoint of where the business was then compared to ten years earlier at WrestleMania 5, there was tremendous change in the look of the product, the approach to the product, the types of characters that were being featured, I mean, dramatic change. I look now at where they were at WrestleMania 15 versus where they are now. Not just WrestleMania the card itself. I think it's even more telling to imagine what Raw was like. I don't think since you and Vince Russo have left that they've reinvented themselves. There are some things they've done well, some things they haven't done so well, but overall you wouldn't say they've revolutionlized what they're doing. And that surprises me. They've been successful. It's not like they're worried about paying rent, but I think there should have been more progress by now. If you had not watched wrestling for nine years and just started watching a year ago, do you think you would have been surprised that it almost seemed like you were only gone for two or three years?

Ferrara: In some ways yes, but in other ways I would have felt if I just started watching a year ago, I would have felt it had taken a step backwards. Like I was saying earlier, we didn't always succeed, but we would always strive to have the storylines make sense and to follow up. Anton Chekhov's Rule - you introduce a gun in the first act, it better go off by the end of the second act. It's the same thing. I can't tell you how many times I've seen storylines and angles dropped. They do something intriguing, then they never follow up on it. As an audience member, I want to take them and shake them and say, What you're doing is you're risking losing your audience because the entire product is about getting the audience emotionally involved and caring about what's going on. And the more time you tease the audience with something, start an angle, or present something intriguing, and then don't follow up on it. When you do that you start something interesting and the audience goes, Ohh, I can't wait to see how this turns out. And when you don't follow up on it, it's a letdown. And when you really want them to get invested in something else that you are going to follow up on, you're running the risk that the audience at some point is going to say, You know what, they're probably not going to do anything good with that, just like everything else. Rather than allowing themselves to get emotionally involved, they're going to keep it at an arm's length and take a wait and see attitude before they allow themselves to get emotionally involved because they've been burned too many times before. I think a lot of it comes down to logical booking and booking that makes sense and having the characters behave believably and having their actions be motivated rather than just doing things because we need them to do that to get to the next point in the angle. And that, I think, on a gut level the audience can kind of identify with that.

They compare themselves to shows like, they say "our competition is Lost and Grey's Anatomy and E.R." Well, if that's the competition, you need to really step up your game because those shows are really good at surprises and swerve and taking me on an emotional roller coaster ride. So if that is your competition, you really need to commit to those storylines. I don't know if it's not thinking them out that far enough in advance. I don't know if it's a matter of concentrating on the top tier of the card and nothing else and then just booking by the numbers as you go down from there. That could be it, too, because there's only so many hours in the day, so many days in the week from one Raw to another and that's not even counting Smackdown and ECW PPVs. So, I mean, there are any number of reasons it's done, but the bottom line is the product could be so much more compelling, I think the product could be so much more alluring if they would take more effort into having the storylines make logical sense, follow up on what they're doing, and also go back to taking risks. Go back to surprising the audience - not on a regular basis - but that was one of the things we always would try to do because as a wrestling fan and as a wrestling viewer, you get to the point where you're constantly predicting what's going to happen next. Oh, I see what they're going to do. They did this so they're going to do that. But they need to go back to what we used to do, which is take that role ourselves as we're creating the show and say, Okay, they're gonna think we're going this way, and everything is pointing that way, and that would be the logical way to go, so we need to figure out a way to go a different direction and have it still be logical. And it seems like it's one or the other. Either the product goes exactly where it seems like it's going to go and we get what we expect and that's not a surprise and it's a little bit of a letdown because we're used to being surprised by this and that's one of the reason's we're fans - because we like those surprises, we like being swerved, we like seeing the stuff coming out of nowhere and going, Oh my god, I never saw that, that's awesome. Or they're going to go in a different direction but not in such a way that it makes logical sense. They're just going to go in a logical direction to go in a different direction. And then maybe they'll explain it away in a week or so or maybe not. And that's where I think the product could really come up if they go back to that sense of realism, go back to trying to out-think the audience and see where the audience is going to anticipate it going and go in a different direction, but take the time to make sure that different direction also has a logic to it.

Keller: I think part of what we see, and it was born during the Monday Night War competitive culture, is the mindset that we can't afford to not have our top top guys in the main event guys and the semi-main event match ever single week on TV. They try to find ways to make that happen, and I think it sometimes ends up forced and sometimes it makes them show their cards before they should, and that takes away their pay-per-view buys. I'm surprised they're promoting the same way today as they did ten years ago when you were immersed in it, as if they have competition on another channel. I think one thing that I'm surprised they haven't adjusted since 1998-1999 is we don't have that same product on another channel competing with us where we have to be so frenetic and have the top guys out there all the time. I think one of the reasons they do that now still is they're not doing what you and Vince Russo tried very hard to do and consciously to do, which is build the undercard so people care about the undercard characters. They abandoned C.M. Punk and Regal assumed the fans didn't care. But I think if they had a stronger faith and investment creatively in the undercard wrestlers - undercard is even overstating it - just anyone out side of the Top Six. Then I think they wouldn't need to rush storylines and they'd be able to step back and do what you described, which is: Here's where everyone thinks we're going, where is another direction we can go that isn't arbitrarily a surprise that doesn't make sense, but that we preplanned that's a swerve that totally makes sense even when you rewind the tape and look back at the evidence. You see that clues were there for this twist and you just didn't see it coming. But when you have to promote these guys on TV every single week in the top spots because you don't have any faith in anybody outside of the top six, that's where I think you run into problems.

Ferrara: I think right now they're produced themselves into a corner where they are reliant on star power more than anything else. They are totally reliant on star power which is why they trot these guys out - especially at the end of the night - every week. And not that it was never about star power, but I think it's solely about star power now and that's all they're thinking right now, which is: How do we get Triple H out there, Cena out there, Orton out there, Taker, HBK, how do we get those guys out there because those are the guys that will draw that hour or that segment. I think if while they're doing that - it's like when you're building a highway, if you're rebuilding a highway, you don't just shut down the road and built a new one, you build a bypass while you're working on the new one. I think the bypass that they need to do is continue doing that, but at the same time build up that undercard, make it intriguing, and make it the show that people tune in to see as well as the stars. But right now it's not so much about the show, but rather when is Orton coming out, when it Triple H coming out, and in the mean time, we're twiddling our thumbs and waiting and sitting through a 28 Diva tag match that lasts for three seconds and in the mean time there's nothing really grabbing us and interesting us and pulling us into what's happening on the TV. It's missing that, and if they would just take the time to show that care and that attention and add the depth to the character on the undercard, then they'll make the show worth watching, and at the same time they've still got their stars and while they're doing that, they're also now doing what they need to do to build that undercard so that way you have the next generation of stars.

Keller: Do you think you and Vince Russo had an influence at all on downplaying the art of the pro wrestling match as a vehicle to tell a story as opposed to it being a necessarily evil that gets in the way of telling a story? Because Vince Russo has said his dream was to run a wrestling show without even a wrestling ring or a wrestling match. You talk about these less-than-two-minute 16-woman Diva matches and we've seen these competitive matches that, I mean, Cena and Big Show barely got past ten minutes. So I'm not saying it just started in 1997 or 1998, but I think Russo was a big influence on that, you're grouped with him, and I think it was a product of Nitro being on the other channel and people wanting to see something new and an angle and development and a cool promo, but now that there's not competition, I don't think they ever got back to pushing the idea that it's interesting to actually watch two people you care about try to win a match or not lose a match.

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The entire interview transcription will also be published in upcoming editions of the Pro Wrestling Torch Newsletter.

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