The Choke Points in the Entertainment Business (and Wrestling)

One of the recurring refrains in Todd Henry’s The Accidental Creative is the importance of unnecessary creating or back-burner creating. The creative work that you do that’s not on spec or on demand, but something that’s done because you’re curious, refining new skills, or simply interested in the subject.

My accidental creating often revolves pro-wrestling, where I’ve done the occasional fanfic project for the Total Extreme Wrestling game and take deep dives into the mechanics and business of wrestling storytelling. This has often spawned insights here on the blog, the occasional paid writing gig, and countless ideas that have informed my practice as both an author and a publisher.

This week, I listened to one of my favourite wrestling storytellers, Paul Heyman, being interviewed by the 90s pro-wrestling cultural phenomenon known as Stone Cold Steve Austin. A huge part of the interview revolved around why Heyman’s 90s wrestling project, Extreme Championship Wrestling, ultimately folded and got bought out by the industry leviathan WWE, and Heyman broke down not just the wrestling industry, but the whole damn entertainment industry, into a three-chokepoint system where a failure at any single point will doom your enterprise.

For Heyman, a successful entertainment company needs Content, Financing, and Distribution. If you don’t have the content, you don’t have a company, and in a balkanised industry like TV where different providers traditionally provided one component of the triad, there’s a hunger for content that we’re seeing play out in new ways via the new distribution systems like streaming channels. 

If you don’t have the financing to produce your content, then you’ve got no way to forward your vision to the world. There’s a reason superhero films and fantasy epics became way more popular as CGI made them cost-effective to produce, and this applies on both the blockbuster scale (where the CGI is good) and the low-budget arena (where you can do sub-part to serviceable CGI on a home computer now if you’ve got enough time and patience).

The third chokepoint in Heyman’s model boils down to distribution: if you can’t expose your audience to your product and give them access to your work, it doesn’t matter how much content you have or how much you invested in it. Exposure and access are what pay your bills and deliver a return on your financial investment. The more exposure you have, the more options that open up for you beyond your original concepts.

THE THREE CHOKEPOINTS IN PRO-WRESTLING

Heyman’s three choke-point model makes for an interesting way of looking at the history of pro-wrestling, which has routinely gone through big shifts in the landscape as new players or options changed assumptions around one or more chokepoint.

Heyman’s company, ECW, frequently gets positioned as great content with a terrible business owner at the helm. That framing arose largely because the company, as a content provider, lost its distribution, which meant they finally closed owing 7 million dollars to various stakeholders, wrestlers, and employees. 

Intriguingly, their pay-per-view provider owed ECW over three million by the time the company folded, but the provider held back once ECW lost their TV deal. The assumption was that the provider would pay pennies on the dollar of what they owed while the company was in bankruptcy, and thus it was better to let them die (although, as Hayman note in the interview, that same pay-per-view company was hungry for content a few months later, and got held over a barrel when negotiating with new providers).

In contrast, a wrestling company that launched in 2002—TNA—could happily lose the same amount of money in a month because they were funded by millionaires, and are seen as something of a success despite making a loss for nearly two straight decades before finally being sold (unsurprisingly, after losing their TV deal, which led to distribution problems).

Meanwhile, the WWE made its name by embracing new distribution models and becoming the first truly national wrestling company by broadcasting on coast-to-coast network TV. WWE consolidated its dominance by providing an industry-standard, company specific digital network to handle its own distribution of shows and pay-per-views on a worldwide scale, although in the US those same shows are now moved over to NBC’s Peacock streaming service because (dun dun dah!) the new streaming service was hungry for content to make it competitive.

Meanwhile, the internet—which enables cheap distribution and dramatically lowers the financing costs of producing a show—has created a new wave of “big” indie wrestling companies that are cult hits among fans, many of which created names that were capitalised on by plucky newcomer All Elite Wrestling when it launched in 2019. Like TNA, AEW is funded by a millionaire, which has opened up many options for them, although unlike TNA their content has improved as they’ve gone along instead of becoming a tedious chore to follow.

The history of wrestling companies are basically an endless chain of companies booming, busting, and evolving in response to those three chokepoints and changes that take place around them. 

Which leads me to an interesting thought: 

Aren’t Books Entertainment?

Which connects us back to the talk of Unnecessary Creating, and why it’s so valuable. After thinking through the implications and history of those chokepoints in wrestling, I immediately started looking at the things that will kill a writer or publisher. Despite being very different industries, they’re still entertainment…and the chokepoint is still the same.

But this post is already quite long, so that’s the topic for another day.

This post originally appeared at my Eclectic Projects patreon, and exists thanks to the support and interest of my patrons. If you’d like to get early access to my fiction and non-fiction, you can join them at www.patreon.com/petermball