During an appearance on Sean “X-Pac” Waltman’s podcast, former Smackdown Live writer “Road Dogg” Brian James talked about wrestlers having their promos scripted:
“And the biggest thing to me and I tell these people like ‘fail, fail at a hundred miles an hour, fail big, go out on a limb, don’t be afraid to make a fool of yourself, that’s endearing. Don’t be afraid to act a fool, too many people and too often, everyone tries to be strong, and everybody tries to be cool. Well guess what if everybody is like that nobody is strong and nobody is cool. ’So step outside the norm, think outside the box…. I don’t think it’s a separate page, I think it becomes a trust issue with who can cut a good promo and who can’t cut a good promo. And then it’s about trusting who can and who can’t. So do I have to script out the promo for the individual and then kinda be a stickler for sticking to the verbiage that was written? Or do I trust the guy to give him bullet points and the message he needs to deliver and then trust that he can go out there and make that verbiage his own, make that message his own but still stay on story? It’s very easy to go online, and go ’ this sucks, that’s great’. There is so much more that goes into this industry than anybody out there knows that isn’t in the know. It’s very important to have that trust with an individual. Daniel Bryan, you can tell Daniel Bryan the message you want conveyed and he can go out there and deliver that message and do it in his character. The big thing for me is that you have to earn that trust, but to develop that relationship where you can trust your talent and trust that you pick out which ones. Hopefully you can trust them all, it’s easier to just give them bullet points and let them deliver it in their own individual voice. So, the Road Dogg would not say something that way but Daniel Bryan might say it that way so Road Dogg writing it is not smart because then I am stepping on Daniel Bryan’s character, I need to give him bullet points and let Daniel Bryan put that message together. But some people are not so brilliant at it and so you gotta script their promos for them.”
