Furloughed WWE Producer Shane Helms discussed working with Vince McMahon and the creative process that takes place, in an interview with WrestlingInc.com:
“My interactions are very similar but just what he expects from a producer is different from talent,” Helms noted. “That was a different, unique challenge for me because as a talent, he wants you to go in there, be bold [and] tell him, ‘hey, this sucks and all of that.’ As a producer, not so much. As a producer, he wants the ‘OK, yes sir! I’ll go try and make this s–t happen.’ I’m still that guy that goes, ‘this sucks.’ That might be why my ass is still furloughed too.”
“Just throwing that out of there, being honest about everything, but for him, he still is all about the business. He’s still all about going forward, building the brand. During this whole COVID era, he wasn’t going to sit back and just let things happen, look into the future. He’s just a visionary guy. The hardest-working human beings, at least one of the hardest-working. I don’t know how he doesn’t sleep. It’s just amazing.”
“All of those stories are absolutely true, and there were several times back when I had a suggestion and he tweaked it. And I was like, ‘OK, I want to see how that goes,’ and then he would be absolutely correct. It’s real easy, because he is the main guy, to lump all that negativity toward him and not all of his ideas have been good. Nobody has, but still, to this day, there’s still a lot of knowledge there.”
“It’s just like a book. If you dissect every single chapter of a book, there’s going to be some chapters that just aren’t that good. They’re set-up chapters to set up something down the road, but Vince is always a bigger picture guy and sometimes, things that are going to happen on this episode, and he’s like, ‘we’ll fix it later,’ and he’s just that bigger picture guy.”
“When you’re focused on that segment and as a producer, whether I have one or two segments on that night, sometimes I would lose focus of what was happening on the other show, but you got to be careful about that because I want this segment to be the best because that’s my segment. When you’re the guy on the top of the mountain and has to look at everything, you’re just going to have a different perspective.”
