Disco Inferno On Why People Don't Like Vince Russo, Martian Invasion Angle He Pitched In WCW, More
On the latest episode of the Sitting Ringside" w/ David Penzer podcast, Penzer was joined by "The Disco Inferno" Glenn Gilbertti. They sent us these highlights:
The pressure both Vince Russo and Ed Ferrara were under to get WCW's ratings up fast:
"This is the thing that people don't know about Vince (Russo) and Ed (Ferrara). When they were brought in their salary was based off incentives based off ratings. But when you're brought in to get ratings up you're not thinking, 'what can I do in nine months so we can make Prince Iaukea' a star?' You're thinking, 'what can I do to bring the ratings up from a 2.5 to a 2.7 in the shortest possible time?'
"Based on that, they were writing in different conditions in WCW than what they were writing in New York. They were just trying to get ratings. So, a lot of our (WCW) TV looked like what can we throw up on the wall and see what sticks, but that's what they had to do based on what their contracts looked like. Vince and Ed both said that after six weeks on the job, WCW was on them about getting the numbers up."
The "martian invasion" storyline Glenn pitched to the booking committee in WCW:
"We would meet at the Hilton in Atlanta in a meeting room every Wednesday after we got home from TV. One day I got to the meeting about fifteen minutes early and I wrote out a six-month angle of a martian invasion angle on a flip chart pad that would culminate at a PPV called a Space Odyssey. People in the room don't know what happened. This was never intended to be a serious. If you seriously think that I wanted to produce a CGI special effect antenna to pop out of Mike Tenay's head, I'm either insulting your intelligence or you're an idiot! This was obviously a joke!"
The "Bill Ding" nickname:
"The biggest fallacy of my career was Bill Ding! It was Terry Taylor's idea 100%. Terry used to be all about the names, like Hugh Morris, 'Perfect' Shawn, remember how he always had those names? Well then there was Bill Ding, the evil architect. He said Bill Ding would say 'I've got the plans for success' and 'I've got the foundations for winning'! Bro, that was all Terry Taylor! If you went up and asked Terry he'd admit that was absolutely his idea! But for some reason, whenever a crazy idea came from WCW – like the 'Invisible Man' – everybody attributes all those to me!"
The "Invisible Man" idea that Gilbertti pitched in a WCW booking meeting:
"OK, so there would be times in these booking meetings where nobody would be saying anything and literally it would be two minutes in silence because of writer's block. I just spoke up and said, 'what about this? Let's shoot 30 seconds of an empty locker-room and at the end, COMING SOON? The Invisible Man!' Everybody popped! But we never actually did it."
Why people don't like Vince Russo:
"Bro, most of the people I know in this business are all good guys, I don't know a lot of bad guys. Because a lot of people may disagree with you, they try to extrapolate that into you being a bad person, and that's not true. All the differences in philosophies in the wrestling business doesn't take away that most of the guys in this business are good guys.
"When Vince was doing his RAW reviews, which was him reviewing old RAW's that he wrote, he would be very honest and critical of his own stuff. I think Vince is an honest guy. I don't think he's going to lie about things."