On the latest episode of the 83 Weeks Podcast, Eric Bischoff talked about Vince McMahon firing Paul Heyman as the Executive Director of WWE RAW. Here is what he had to say:
“I was disappointed for Paul in a way. But I could also relate. I took it not at face value, but having been in the position Paul was in, it didn’t surprise me. Paul is an amazingly talented dude who’s had a very successful career and will continue to have a very successful career wherever he goes or if he stays with WWE till the end of his career. I do know that Paul is respected enough in the industry, is talented enough and is still passionate enough that whatever Paul wants to do he’ll be successful at. I also felt relieved for him in a way. I’m not going to read the text I sent him or his response but Paul’s going to be just fine.”
On how he had to find a place to work when he would arrive at the arena for Smackdown: “When you show up at an arena, and every arena is different, some are bigger than others, some have better accommodations than others, but when you show up for a production like RAW or Smackdown, a live production, with a crew and the moving and just the requirements of space that is needed when RAW or Smackdown show up, there are no offices. Eric Bischoff never had an office, by the way. When I would show up, even though I was the head of Smackdown, presumably, the head of Smackdown, careful how I say that, the head of Smackdown, and have a team of 10-12 writers working underneath me, I didn’t have an office. So you get up, get to the arena, you show up and look for the closest place you can find that you can sit with a laptop that gets a signal, and there would be a writers room, sometimes they were the size of a small kitchen, sometimes, at Madison Square Garden for example, they’re huge and there is plenty of room for everybody because you’re actually in the journalist or sportswriters room that you use, so there was at least room and space for everybody to kind of be in the same area, but more often than not, there was zero office space, zero work space available, you had to make due with whatever you could get.”
On why he would often have meetings in catering: “More often than not, you’ve had six, eight, ten, twelve people crammed into a room that was built for three, and everybody is talking amongst themselves, across themselves, to each other, to others that aren’t even in the room on their cellphones and things like that, you’ve got this constant state of communication chaos going on that was all necessary, but it’s kind of hard to have a conversation with somebody, especially if it became a serious conversation, by serious I mean something creative that a talent wanted to talk about, maybe they had an idea or a concern, whatever the case may be, a conversation that required a little bit of privacy or at least quiet enough that you could actually have a conversation and hear yourself in the process of it. So occasionally, before catering would start, before they actually started serving food which was usually 11AM or 1PM depending on where you were, it was empty. There were these big, round tables in catering and often times they were empty or at least not overly crowded, and you could actually sit and have a conversation at those tables. That’s when I’d be in catering. Now I would eat during the course of the day. We’d usually eat breakfast on the plane, so it wasn’t like I had to run to catering and get something to eat first thing in the morning, I would wait until the afternoon, lunch time or once the production meeting was over and the agents meeting was over and we had a pretty good idea of what we were going to do, and the writers were back huddled up in the writers room, which was probably four sizes too small, rewriting the show that we thought we were gonna do when the plane landed, and during that period of time, if I needed to talk to talent or if I needed to talk to a writer, or if I needed to have any kind of meeting, yes, I would have those meetings in catering. That’s it.”
On how Paul Heyman spent more time in catering than anyone: “By the way, nobody spent more time in catering than Paul Heyman. Nobody, other than the people preparing the food, but Dave has a different relationship with Paul Heyman than he does with Eric Bischoff.”
