David Arquette still owes me for dry-cleaning. He doesn’t know he does, of course, I never met the actor best known for “Scream” and having multifarious siblings and exes more notable than himself, but that rich sonofabitch owes me, nonetheless. Perhaps I should start at the beginning.
In the spring of 2000, World Championship Wrestling was on its last legs. The WWF had blown it out of the water with better production value, better action and better media deals. Like nearly all failing wrestling promotions, they were just throwing spaghetti at the walls, hoping for lucky swings at the zeitgeist to save them. Dumb celebrity cameos. Bringing back washed-up brawlers for one last paycheck and a nostalgia bump, shock stunts with no sense of long-term storytelling.
David Arquette was starring in a film called “Ready 2 Rumble” that used WCW wrestlers in the supporting roles and, true to the desperation of failing wrestleshows, they had David work a few matches as cross-promotion. Not knowing the film was going to bomb both critically, as well as financially, as it was the cinematic equivalent of loose excrement, WCW doubled-down hugely.
They were taping the Thursday Night Thunder show at the Syracuse War Memorial and, per the downward spiral, they almost literally couldn’t give tickets away. That’s where I come in. In my matriculation at Syracuse University, I had friends in the Broadcast Journalism department who had nearly-limitless comps to the show through radio internships and hey, why not? Free’s free.
Suspension of disbelief is important in all of the arts but perhaps professional wrestling most of all. We all know these are performers, acting out a script through stunts and acrobatics, that they aren’t trying to kill each other. They merely want to appear as if they’re trying to kill each other.
But go stray too far from the internal logic of that imaginary world and the suspension fails and suddenly it’s no longer a beautiful fusion of grappling and burlesque, just a buncha sweaty men on steroids rolling around on each other. For example, write a match so a 150-pound actor wins the heavyweight championship, even if he’s written as the hero, the crowd will turn on you and start raining beers out the rafters, onto us college students with comped seats, way lower down.
Which is why he still owes me for the dry-cleaning twenty years later. One of the flying Labatts decimated my best jacket. Residuals from all eighty-seven “Scream” flicks should cover it easy.
Wil, one of my best film-production friends, worked pizza-deliveries at the time. He told me, it was the damnedest thing, he took thirty pizzas to a hotel where Arquette paid for dinners for all the other wrestlers. The real ones. Wil said he’d been sobbing, as he’d been told the fans would love him for beating the bad guy but instead was pelted with trash for insulting our intelligence.
A fitting punishment, for certain, but David still owes me for that goddamned dry-cleaning bill.
Loading comments...