It is not often that the professionals who chart the storylines and narratives in the WWE, the creative executives, speak often about their time in the company but Brian Gewirtz, who had been the Senior VP of Creative Writing at the WWE in the past spoke recently to Talk is Jericho.
During the talk, he stated that he got the WWE job after The Rock put in a good word for him, "Yeah, we always got along great from the beginning. He's the reason I was even hired in the first place. Yeah, well, the whole story of that was how I came to be, I guess, in WWE, was there was a series of specials on MTV in the summer [of] '99. And my sister, who would eventually go on to win three Emmys at MTV, she was an intern back then, said, 'hey, we need a writer for these SummerSlam specials and everyone's too cool at MTV to know who Gangrel is, so would you want to write some samples?" He added, "We hit it off, right [from] the start. He was like, 'wow, you really captured the voice real well. Did you ever consider writing for WWE?' I was like, 'well, no. I don't know how that works.' He was like, 'yeah, well, let me put in a word with the WWE officials there and stuff.' And then, the next thing I know, I got a call saying, 'hey, would you want to come in for an interview in Stamford [Connecticut]?"
However, the most amusing bit from the talks was when he recalled how Bubba Ray Dudley power bombed him as the part of an exercise in which writers were supposed to experiences what wrestlers went through. He said, "Yeah, there [are] lots of potential lawsuits that could have happened. I mean, I took a top-rope powerbomb from Bubba Dudley once. Well, first of all, Shane [McMahon], coolest man alive, we used to have a ring in the studio where we'd work and he thought the writers, at the time, now, there may have been four of us, should kind of take some bumps to kind of experience what the boys experience and everything." Gewirtz recalled, "Bubba and D-Von were in [the ring] and he's like, 'lets do a powerbomb!' I'm like, 'what?' Now the boys are sort of gathering around the ring and everything. I can't chicken out, so I'm like, 'yeah, lets do a powerbomb!' And, again, today, never in a million years would they let one of the writers [take a powerbomb]."
