Post by Sound and Furry on Jul 16, 2019 12:56:25 GMT -5
Say what you will about his talent and drive, but Bryan Worthy looked like a star.
Six foot four, two hundred thirty five pounds of low BMI beefcake; perfectly proportioned to meet the Western ideal aesthetic; if you traveled back in time and showed Worthy’s picture to Michaelangelo he would have taken a hammer to David out of the sudden realization over how much he failed to meet the mark.
Even casually dressed, in an off the rack corduroy blazer, jeans, and a vintage WCF tee shirt, his presence revealed the network executives in their thousand dollar Burrberrys (Burrberries?) as the carnies they were.
Of course, looks only got you so far in “Dis Bizness”, which was why Bryan Worthy was here, taking a meeting; begging for scraps from a consortium of current and former wrestling promoters on whose theoretical cards he would have barely rated a dark match.
“GrappleVision,” Bryan helpfully identified the syndicate by name, “is an inspired idea. You see the value in what less astute observers of the sport consider failures. By pooling the libraries of your defunct organizations, you have created a service that before it spends a single red cent has thousands of hours of content that cannot be obtained anywhere else. With next to zero investment you’ve become a player in the media-service provider market. But you’re not willing to stop there. You’re filming new material, exclusively for your platform.”
Buzz hit a key on his notebook, prompting the projector it is linked to to display a logo:
TAGGING WITH TEMPTATION
(Imagine the lettering’s fancy; a size 36 Cyberspace Raceway font colored in blend of glossy platinum and gunmetal grey. I’d do it, but I’m terrible at coding and it’s just pointless fluff anyway. Pyro and ballyhoo! Buy yourself a ticket to the Theater of the Mind and visualize it as techno-eighties noir, okay?! Okay!!!)
“‘Tagging with Temptation’ follows a simple, successful, tried and true formula: put fourteen disparate, dynamic personalities in one house and film them interacting. The hook is: six of them make three tag teams. The remaining are independent wrestlers tasked with proving themselves more deserving a place in one of the established teams.”
“So, it’s ‘Tough Enough’ meets ‘Temptation Island’,” Vim Pompadour, Chief Executive Officer of GrappleVision summarized the way a member of the network hivemind would.
Bryan nodded, not just at the promoter’s accurate and concise diagnosis of his idea; but also towards the realization that despite the constant planning and legwork involved in putting this concept together it does not escape the taint of hackfraudery typical of even niche mass media. The moment was more than a little humbling. He, a man who once pinned Alex Richards (back before he figured shit out and Got Gud), a three time Newzy nominee, was now a carnival barker for derivative programming that only had a chance because the internet was infinite and its gatekeepers needed to find something, anything, to fill it.
Then it dawned on Buzz he was thinking like John Gable, and that REALLY stung. Chastened, he rationalized his hucksterism by noting ‘Tagging With Temptation’, while perhaps not wholly original, was a show that dealt with ideals necessary not just for being a success in wrestling, but life as well: putting your best foot forward to forge alliances in order to achieve a common goal.
“Tagging With Temptation will showcase the bond that exists between tag team partners,” he told his audience, “Bonds that will be tested, not just by the stress and hardship that can come from competition, but by outside forces seeking to break them up.”
“So these teams will be wrestling each other? Wrestling against the non-aligned talent?” Tiffany Pompadour, GrappleVision’s Vice President of Programming asked, “Because we’re not looking to book.”
“The wrestlers will all be independent contractors working for other promotions. We won’t be able to show their matches, but that’s not the focus of the show. We’ll be looking at what goes on between fights, which, in reality, are often the source of the most compelling human drama.”
And the cheapest to license. And the simplest to broadcast. And the easiest to control. Buzz didn’t say this, but he didn’t have to. Not to this crowd.
“Who are the faces, and who are the heels?” ‘Outlaw’ Tug Treadwell blurted out.
Everyone stared aghast at the territory era promoter. He gave them the stink eye back.
“Aw c’mon, there’s no marks here. Let’s speak plainly.”
“We’re not, uh, there’s no plan to put forward a narrative where any member of the competition is, ah, cast as being in the moral right. The goal is to allow these wrestlers to learn about themselves. What they can offer to the sport, also to learn about the others in the pool of talent we will establish, and to decide who among them is best suited to help them achieve success,” Buzz tossed a big old plate of word salad in hopes it would satisfy the old timer. Or at least confuse him enough to keep him quiet. Which it seemed to do.
“What can the other wrestlers do to try and break up the tag teams?” Nelson Ruffiano, Assistant Director of Marketing, asked.
“Anything that is within the law and their own sense of morality.”
“Then they’re the heels!” Treadwill said in exasperation.
“Brah, fuck that. This show, this is real life,” Nelson, a former booker for several east coast companies, was once known as the biggest promoter of tweenerism in the industry, “But you gonna want Thots in those spots, brah. Makes for better TV.”
Worthy again prevaricated, “While we don’t want to force anyone into a certain role, the unaligned wrestlers will be given extra motivation to become part of the existing tag teams. $10,000. Teams that stay together will receive the same.”
“What’s it going to cost us?” was what Nawaz Kapoor, GrappleVision’s Chief Financial Officer, wanted to know.
Buzz gave a number. The execs asked for a hard copy of ‘Tagging With Temptation’s’ prospectus, which he provided. Then he was asked to wait outside. He spent the time on the phone; texting back in forth with his producer who wanted to know how the meeting went, and what were the odds of the show getting greenlit.
After ten minutes a PA poked her head out of the conference room and told Buzz to come back in. When he did he saw all the executives had left by another exit. His prospectus was left behind where he had been sitting. Notes had been hastily scrawled in the margins.
“They said figure out how to half the budget, and you have a deal,” the assistant said.
Her gaze shifted from him to the chair.
Buzz understood. He sat down, powered up his notebook, and began crunching the numbers.
Transition:
“It’s for the best we’re reducing the size of the cast,” Bryan would tell his partner via Facetime, “It’ll tighten the focus of the show.”
Worthy took a bite from his celebratory dinner: a Protein Style In and Out burger. He was seated at the desk of his hotel room, hunched over, arms tucked into his chest tyrannosaurus-like as he ate, so as to not to get any food on the screen to his phone in front of him..
“It will give us less to work with. Everything we film will have to be good enough to broadcast,” Bryan’s producer was exaggerating, but not by much.
“Then we’ll have to make sure we pick the right wrestlers,” Buzz noted.
There was a file on both men’s computers. In it were forty six video applications sent in by people who wanted to be part of ‘Tagging With Temptation’. Nineteen teams, twenty seven singles. Buzz and his producer had viewed them several times, and had whittled the list down to what they thought were the best candidates.
Now they would have to do it again; only one team (the couple) and four solo wrestlers (the ‘thots’) could make the cut.
“Let’s go through them all again,” Worthy decided.
“Really?! Shit, Buzz, we had it down to twenty. Let’s just pick from them.”
But Buzz was resolute, “We need to get the dynamic perfect. Some of those wrestlers we thought would work because of who they would be sharing the house with. Now, if we take out one person another might become superfluous.”
Bryan finished off his shandy and set the empty bottle atop the desk. He wheeled his chair over to the room’s mini-fridge to pull another from the six pack he had bought. When his face appeared back on screen he was smiling broadly.
“I suggest you go find yourself a drink too,” he told his producer as they prepared to review the applicants all over again.
Six foot four, two hundred thirty five pounds of low BMI beefcake; perfectly proportioned to meet the Western ideal aesthetic; if you traveled back in time and showed Worthy’s picture to Michaelangelo he would have taken a hammer to David out of the sudden realization over how much he failed to meet the mark.
Even casually dressed, in an off the rack corduroy blazer, jeans, and a vintage WCF tee shirt, his presence revealed the network executives in their thousand dollar Burrberrys (Burrberries?) as the carnies they were.
Of course, looks only got you so far in “Dis Bizness”, which was why Bryan Worthy was here, taking a meeting; begging for scraps from a consortium of current and former wrestling promoters on whose theoretical cards he would have barely rated a dark match.
“GrappleVision,” Bryan helpfully identified the syndicate by name, “is an inspired idea. You see the value in what less astute observers of the sport consider failures. By pooling the libraries of your defunct organizations, you have created a service that before it spends a single red cent has thousands of hours of content that cannot be obtained anywhere else. With next to zero investment you’ve become a player in the media-service provider market. But you’re not willing to stop there. You’re filming new material, exclusively for your platform.”
Buzz hit a key on his notebook, prompting the projector it is linked to to display a logo:
TAGGING WITH TEMPTATION
(Imagine the lettering’s fancy; a size 36 Cyberspace Raceway font colored in blend of glossy platinum and gunmetal grey. I’d do it, but I’m terrible at coding and it’s just pointless fluff anyway. Pyro and ballyhoo! Buy yourself a ticket to the Theater of the Mind and visualize it as techno-eighties noir, okay?! Okay!!!)
“‘Tagging with Temptation’ follows a simple, successful, tried and true formula: put fourteen disparate, dynamic personalities in one house and film them interacting. The hook is: six of them make three tag teams. The remaining are independent wrestlers tasked with proving themselves more deserving a place in one of the established teams.”
“So, it’s ‘Tough Enough’ meets ‘Temptation Island’,” Vim Pompadour, Chief Executive Officer of GrappleVision summarized the way a member of the network hivemind would.
Bryan nodded, not just at the promoter’s accurate and concise diagnosis of his idea; but also towards the realization that despite the constant planning and legwork involved in putting this concept together it does not escape the taint of hackfraudery typical of even niche mass media. The moment was more than a little humbling. He, a man who once pinned Alex Richards (back before he figured shit out and Got Gud), a three time Newzy nominee, was now a carnival barker for derivative programming that only had a chance because the internet was infinite and its gatekeepers needed to find something, anything, to fill it.
Then it dawned on Buzz he was thinking like John Gable, and that REALLY stung. Chastened, he rationalized his hucksterism by noting ‘Tagging With Temptation’, while perhaps not wholly original, was a show that dealt with ideals necessary not just for being a success in wrestling, but life as well: putting your best foot forward to forge alliances in order to achieve a common goal.
“Tagging With Temptation will showcase the bond that exists between tag team partners,” he told his audience, “Bonds that will be tested, not just by the stress and hardship that can come from competition, but by outside forces seeking to break them up.”
“So these teams will be wrestling each other? Wrestling against the non-aligned talent?” Tiffany Pompadour, GrappleVision’s Vice President of Programming asked, “Because we’re not looking to book.”
“The wrestlers will all be independent contractors working for other promotions. We won’t be able to show their matches, but that’s not the focus of the show. We’ll be looking at what goes on between fights, which, in reality, are often the source of the most compelling human drama.”
And the cheapest to license. And the simplest to broadcast. And the easiest to control. Buzz didn’t say this, but he didn’t have to. Not to this crowd.
“Who are the faces, and who are the heels?” ‘Outlaw’ Tug Treadwell blurted out.
Everyone stared aghast at the territory era promoter. He gave them the stink eye back.
“Aw c’mon, there’s no marks here. Let’s speak plainly.”
“We’re not, uh, there’s no plan to put forward a narrative where any member of the competition is, ah, cast as being in the moral right. The goal is to allow these wrestlers to learn about themselves. What they can offer to the sport, also to learn about the others in the pool of talent we will establish, and to decide who among them is best suited to help them achieve success,” Buzz tossed a big old plate of word salad in hopes it would satisfy the old timer. Or at least confuse him enough to keep him quiet. Which it seemed to do.
“What can the other wrestlers do to try and break up the tag teams?” Nelson Ruffiano, Assistant Director of Marketing, asked.
“Anything that is within the law and their own sense of morality.”
“Then they’re the heels!” Treadwill said in exasperation.
“Brah, fuck that. This show, this is real life,” Nelson, a former booker for several east coast companies, was once known as the biggest promoter of tweenerism in the industry, “But you gonna want Thots in those spots, brah. Makes for better TV.”
Worthy again prevaricated, “While we don’t want to force anyone into a certain role, the unaligned wrestlers will be given extra motivation to become part of the existing tag teams. $10,000. Teams that stay together will receive the same.”
“What’s it going to cost us?” was what Nawaz Kapoor, GrappleVision’s Chief Financial Officer, wanted to know.
Buzz gave a number. The execs asked for a hard copy of ‘Tagging With Temptation’s’ prospectus, which he provided. Then he was asked to wait outside. He spent the time on the phone; texting back in forth with his producer who wanted to know how the meeting went, and what were the odds of the show getting greenlit.
After ten minutes a PA poked her head out of the conference room and told Buzz to come back in. When he did he saw all the executives had left by another exit. His prospectus was left behind where he had been sitting. Notes had been hastily scrawled in the margins.
“They said figure out how to half the budget, and you have a deal,” the assistant said.
Her gaze shifted from him to the chair.
Buzz understood. He sat down, powered up his notebook, and began crunching the numbers.
Transition:
“It’s for the best we’re reducing the size of the cast,” Bryan would tell his partner via Facetime, “It’ll tighten the focus of the show.”
Worthy took a bite from his celebratory dinner: a Protein Style In and Out burger. He was seated at the desk of his hotel room, hunched over, arms tucked into his chest tyrannosaurus-like as he ate, so as to not to get any food on the screen to his phone in front of him..
“It will give us less to work with. Everything we film will have to be good enough to broadcast,” Bryan’s producer was exaggerating, but not by much.
“Then we’ll have to make sure we pick the right wrestlers,” Buzz noted.
There was a file on both men’s computers. In it were forty six video applications sent in by people who wanted to be part of ‘Tagging With Temptation’. Nineteen teams, twenty seven singles. Buzz and his producer had viewed them several times, and had whittled the list down to what they thought were the best candidates.
Now they would have to do it again; only one team (the couple) and four solo wrestlers (the ‘thots’) could make the cut.
“Let’s go through them all again,” Worthy decided.
“Really?! Shit, Buzz, we had it down to twenty. Let’s just pick from them.”
But Buzz was resolute, “We need to get the dynamic perfect. Some of those wrestlers we thought would work because of who they would be sharing the house with. Now, if we take out one person another might become superfluous.”
Bryan finished off his shandy and set the empty bottle atop the desk. He wheeled his chair over to the room’s mini-fridge to pull another from the six pack he had bought. When his face appeared back on screen he was smiling broadly.
“I suggest you go find yourself a drink too,” he told his producer as they prepared to review the applicants all over again.