Agent Confidential - Television production
By Ricky Steamboat
June 1, 2006
Agent Confidential is a new WWE.com weekly feature that offers fans insight into the minds of some of the most influential people within WWE - the agents. The WWE agent is directly responsible for the day-to-day operations of all live event shows. In addition, agents play a critical role in the creative and athletic aspect of WWE's television shows. Each week, a different agent will write a piece for WWE.com's Agent Confidential. This week's edition was done by Ricky Steamboat (more on Steamboat):
Today’s televised sports-entertainment events are so much different than they were back when I wrestled. In my era, we’d be in a small studio with about 50, 60 or 70 people and there was one camera mounted on a tripod sitting on top of a trunk. Then there would be one guy with a handheld camera running around the ring. Back then, I wasn’t as much into the production level as much as I am now, but I’m pretty sure that the cameraman with the handheld running around the ring had no communications to the production truck. So if that cameraman was able to get any kind of key shots, it was pretty much by accident. Looking back, I’m sure that there were many shots that were missed which didn’t help the small companies during that time.
Coming back to WWE and now being on the production side of it, I’m just astounded with what they are able to do and how the cameras are able to pick it up. The guys today have a much better luxury of being able to take whatever skills they possess and just have them magnified and multiplied many times over. Guys like myself and those who wrestled 25 years ago didn’t have this luxury. We didn’t have the luxuries of all the different camera angles being able to pick up everything we did in the ring. In today’s level of wrestling, guys can do something simple but have it mean so much. It’s like taking something that’s about a half an inch wide, which is a small item, and you end up growing it to three feet. That is what we’re capable of doing now and that’s what we’re able to do for today’s Superstars.
A lot of it has to do with emotion and being able to read the Superstar’s face and mannerisms. If you come in with two or three different angles of a guy’s anger and also the other guy who is on his hands and knees crawling and showing that pain in his face, then we are giving our viewing audience the “wow” factor. It’s almost like we are able to put the fans right in the ring with the Superstars.
I wish that myself and the other guys that really knew our business well had the same luxuries back when we wrestled. We really knew how to express our body languages and movements in the ring. We had lots of guys that I would say were four and five-star wrestlers. They could go out there and, as the old expression goes, have a broom stick thrown in the ring with them and the son-of-a-gun could entertain the fans with a broomstick. They were that good. We don’t have as much of that today. That’s where guys such as myself, Arn Anderson, Dean Malenko, Steve Keirn and Tim Horner, who just came aboard, come in. One of our many job descriptions is to sit down and explain to the Superstars 30 years of experience in however much time we are given to work with that person.
All the guys from my era wish that we would have had the production level that everybody has now. God, everybody looks at me and says “oh, Ricky Steamboat, you’re a Superstar.” And I of course thank them for it, but the guys from my day all sit at the round-table discussions and talk about what we could’ve become if we had the level of production that is available today. We’re called Superstars now, but what would we be? It’s just amazing.
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