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Its been over a decade since the death of Extreme Championship Wrestling, a promotion known for its excessively violent product, edgy storylines, boundary pushing style and cult following, primarily booked and owned by one Paul E. Heyman, in the 1990’s ECW acted as the catalyst to the evolution of professional wrestling and in many ways inspired WWE’s highly acclaimed and successful Attitude Era.
Many documentaries have been made documenting ECW’s impact on the world of professional wrestling. In 2004 WWE released The Rise and Fall of ECW complete with original footage with them owning the promotions video library, insight from the man behind it all Paul Heyman, someone many fans feel embodied the company Tommy Dreamer and it would go on to be one their most successful releases.
There has been Jeremy Borash and Shane Douglas’ Forever Hardcore DVD which while entertaining and informative is also very kind to the product with most people having little negative to say about the company, its style or anything behind it with some exceptions. You have to understand it was also to market their Homecoming event which attempted to compete with WWE’s ECW One Night Stand.
Barbed Wire City: The Unauthorized Story of Extreme Championship Wrestling presents a very reality based look at the company, its fanbase, the “revolution” it attempted to concoct, the performers who felt like without it they were meaningless and the vision Paul Heyman seemed to legitimately give his life towards as many explain early on in the documentary.
Whereas WWE’s portrait of ECW paints it in a light Paul Heyman would want you to see it in, Barbed Wire City paints it not only in the light the wrestlers who lived it see it in, but how top wrestling journalists at the time of recording including Wrestling Observer’s Dave Meltzer, PWInsider’s Mike Johnson and Bruce Mitchell of Pro Wrestling Torch saw it and most interestingly the fans such as “Straw Hat Guy” and Tony Lewis, the leader behind a fan movement which promoted ECW to a wider audience through the Internet.
The documentary comprises of interviews with ECW alumni from both 2001 just after the promotion had closed down and 2012 during Shane Douglas’ inaugural Extreme Reunion event, fan cam footage which to me is very important in telling the story as it delves deeper into the violent, sexual nature ECW showcased than WWE’s Rise and Fall would have even dreamed of and headlines from wrestling publications and some local Philadelphia newspapers.
It is a very well directed piece, there’s no strange cut offs or editing issues, as a story is told with the footage available to them quite effectively, they provide examples of the events being discussed – one being Lou D’Angeli and Atlas Security members speaking on how Bubba Ray Dudley would antagonize audiences while footage showed him leaping over guard rails to threaten fans or begging one young-adult to hit him, screaming in his face “this is your fifteen seconds of fame!”
Unlike Rise and Fall or especially Forever Hardcore it doesn’t glamorize the extreme nature of the company and instead paints it in a realistic image – due to the nature of the product ECW was always doomed to fail because you can only go so extreme and when the fan-base sees this they begin to turn until someone goes to a further extreme and it becomes a thing of them jeopardizing their anatomy.
It gets pretty emotional, especially when discussing pay-per-view and the struggles to convince distributors to carry such a violent product. Tony Lewis, nothing more than your average fan was so determined he began a campaign for people to phone, email, fax, write or even knock on the door of Request TV and Viewers Choice offices to get ECW on pay-per-view – he never got paid for it, but for him Barely Legal was the reward for his effort.
Lewis isn’t the only one praised either as many past performers acknowledge the enthusiasm of the fans are their undying love for what they did in the ring, but it isn’t all plaudits as the fans bloodthirsty nature is brought to light and how despite so much blood being shed and skin being torn they never seemed satisfied, it even being said without humor that it were though the fans wouldn’t be satisfied until someone died in the ring.
You hear all the familiar stories which are by now synonymous with the company. They go over Mass Transit, what went down and how the situation arose. The disappointment setting in when they realized TNN used ECW to test wrestling on their network while they negotiated a deal with Vince McMahon’s then World Wrestling Federation and Paul Heyman’s inability to pay his employees.
Without recent views of Paul Heyman this documentary isn’t any less intimate. Footage of Heyman from interviews at conventions in the late 1990’s and promos of his during live events are what fills that void, but the image painted of Paul is neither positive nor negative and instead showcases him as a great promoter, businessman and creative mind, yet a liar and charlatan who never even informed his employees about the promotion folding and instead simply popped up on Monday Night Raw to commentate.
Utilizing footage from Shane Douglas’ Extreme Reunion event held in April of 2012 you are shown the consequences of being extreme. Axl Rotten and Balls Mahoney are two men proud of what they did but the scars, wear and tear are overly obvious on their faces and across their bodies, the final scene from both men in the documentary show them holding towels to their bloodied heads after a war in the ring over a decade after they originally destroyed one another’s bodies.
By the time credits roll and everyone has said their piece you sense some closure to the story, like this were the final story needed to explain what Extreme Championship Wrestling was about. It wasn’t just about the violence and pushing limits, it was about the relationship between the rabid hardcore fan-base and the wrestlers who took a small promotion in a bingo hall in Philadelphia and got peoples attention.
A couple things are missing from this documentary. As tired as I am of hearing the story there is no mention of Shane Douglas hurling the NWA World Heavyweight Championship to the ground to fan of the flames of the often described “revolution”, or the working relationship between WWE and ECW to promote Barley Legal or how the excessive violence could be attributed to the deaths of so many young wrestlers.
Barbed Wire City does exactly what it states in the title, present an unauthorized look at Extreme Championship Wrestling from the perspective of not only the wrestlers, staff or journalists but the fans too, capturing the insights and opinions of those who craved, lived and loathed the ECW product from its inception to its death, some still unable to let it go continuing to journey for that rush to this day.
I recommend Barbed Wire City: The Unauthorized Story of Extreme Championship Wrestling, directed by Kevin Kiernan and John Philapavage, and which can be found on Highspots.com to anybody who loved ECW, anyone who wants to know the truth about ECW and anyone who wants to see the effect that excess can have on a group of human beings. This is a story of a promotion that played and died by its own rules.
Checkout BarbedWireCity.com for all the latest on the DVD’s progression plus screenings!
You can follow me on Twitter @JasonPatrickWE
And checkout my website WrestleEnigma.com