Evan Husney on pitching “Who Killed WCW?” and entering “uncharted territory”

Evan Husney recently talked about the process of pitching Who killed WCW? to VICE TV and more. Husney spoke with Fightful’s Sean Ross Sapp about the series, which premiered Tuesday night, and you can watch the highlights below:

On pitching the show at VICE: “Well, it was a bit of a process though because it’s unique because it’s a four-part series. That kind of format isn’t usually common on television. It might be boring to some people, but when you have 10 episodes of something, it’s easier to spread the costs of a show and you can make it more economical that way. With four episodes, you’re compressing a lot of costs and that can be a bit difficult. So it was a challenge to get the price down to a price that made sense for them. When we pitched it, I think the initial reaction was that you guys had already covered a lot of this in Dark Side and we had just done the Bash at the Beach 2000 episode for Dark Side of the Ring, which I almost consider to be the pilot for this show, for Who Killed WCW.

“When I saw the reaction to Bash at the Beach 2000, I realized that there was a lot of intro in that episode, a lot more interest in a lot of other stories that we were telling that season, and people were really interested in reliving that time, to see the nastiness between all the characters involved. There’s still a lot of speculation and a lot of engagement around WCW and of course a lot of nostalgia. So that said a lot to me and was something that I showed them as well. It’s like, ‘Yeah, that’s going to be part of the story. We’re going to have to retell it somehow, yeah. But you can just see that the engagement with that subject matter is still so strong and people, myself included, have so much reverence for that time as well.’ So that was kind of the process of showing how it was going to play out. At first, we didn’t know what it was going to be. Was it going to be a standalone movie? Was it going to be something like a two-hour movie? Was it going to be a 10-part thing? I think ultimately we probably could have made it a little longer.”

On the challenges of making the series in four episodes:“I think four is a good compromise. We definitely packed a lot in. It’s very condensed. But I think what’s going to be really cool for people is I’m really excited to see the final episode. Episode four is very interesting because I think it breaks a lot of new ground. One of the really cool things that we got in terms of never-before-seen footage that’s used in episode one and also largely in episode four is that we found through Neil Pruitt, one of the brilliant minds. He’s in charge of the nWo promos and he did a lot of the feature film production that they had for WCW back in the day. Great guy. He turned us on to this guy who’s been sitting on never-before-released three-day documentary footage for over 20 years now that documents the final days of Nitro, so literally Panama City. The time leading up to the final episode of Nitro.

“So we have all this footage that nobody’s ever seen before, like Shane McMahon standing in the middle of the ring during the day, Bruce Prichard coming in, Gerald Briscoe coming into the Nitro set, everyone looking down and not knowing what’s going to happen. Interviews with Kanyon and Hugh Morris, guys saying, ‘I don’t know what’s going to happen. Nobody told us what was going on.’ Yeah, I think he was a cameraman who had worked for WCW and he decided to just go ahead and film. We only had to look at three days’ worth of footage, but it was so cool to go through all of that because it’s a time capsule of that time and that moment of the last Nitro. So people, the fans, are going to be really excited about it. That’s one of the coolest things about seeing that stuff for the first time, I think.”