83 Weeks with Eric Bischoff - Episode 421: AFX Studios and WCW

Episode Date: April 10, 2026

On this special edition of 83 Weeks, Eric Bischoff heads to Atlanta, Georgia, for a one of a kind sit down at AFX Studios with special effects legend Andre Freitas.  In this fascinating and rare interview, Andre pulls back the curtain on the creativity and innovation that helped define the look and feel of WCW during its most iconic era. From the creation of the legendary Crow Sting character to the stunning makeup transformations of stars like Kevin Nash and Syxx, Andre shares the stories behind the artistry that brought these larger than life personas to life. Hear how characters like Glacier and Mortis were developed from concept to reality, and the inspiration behind one of WCW's most memorable mascots, Wildcat Willie. It's an inside look at the unsung side of the wrestling business where imagination, design, and execution collide. STEVEN SINGER - No one does real diamond jewelry better. Experience the difference at Steven Singer Jewelers. Go online to http://IHateStevenSinger.com  today! Always fast and FREE shipping is waiting for you. CASH APP - Download Cash App Today: https://capl.onelink.me/vFut/j5ojws30 #CashAppPod. Cash App is a financial services platform, not a bank. Banking services provided by Cash App's bank partner(s). Prepaid debit cards issued by Sutton Bank, Member FDIC. See terms and conditions at https://cash.app/legal/us/en-us/card-agreement. Direct deposit and promotions provided by Cash App, a Block, Inc. brand. Visit http://cash.app/legal/podcast for full disclosures. JCW LUNACY - Juggalo Championship Wrestling drops BRAND NEW episodes of Lunacy every Thursday at 7pm ET exclusively on their YouTube channel http://youtube.com/@psychopathic_records check it out! BETTER WILD - Right now, Betterwild is offering our listeners up to 40% off your order at http://betterwild.com/BISCHOFF  SAVE WITH CONRAD - Stop throwing money away by paying those high interest rates on your credit card. Roll them into one low monthly payment and on top of that, skip your next two house payments. Go to https://www.savewithconrad.com  to learn more.

Today's episode comes to you from the Blue Chew Studio right now. When you buy two months of Blue Chewold, you get the third for free with promo code 83 weeks at bluechew.com. All right, everybody, welcome to a very special edition of 83 weeks. No, I am not sitting in my treehouse in Cody, Wyoming, looking out over the Buffalo Bill reservoir in the Rocky Mountains. Not even close. I'm in Atlanta at AFX Studios and joining me, Andre Freitas. Special effects master extraordinary. It's great to see you, Andre. Good to see you, Eric. It's been a while. A ton of really cool stuff in your studio from movies, television series, but it all started with WCW, didn't it? Yeah, the early days. Yeah. How'd you get started? First, before you,

Before we talk about how you found WCW or WCW found you, what were you doing before you stepped foot into wrestling? In around 87, I found special effects by seeing some stuff in a kid's room that I was in art class with. He was making fake heads and my jaws, statues, and little tiny things. And when I saw that stuff, I was like, this is what I want to do, because I was already sculpting, drawing monsters. And I gravitated toward it reading Fangoria magazine, but there wasn't any internet.

So you go to the library, you buy that thing of the newsstand, and then you send away stuff in catalogs to get latex. And I started experimenting with special effects from 87 to around 1990. And then when I graduated high school, I've got an apprenticeship at the Smithsonian Museum as a technical sculptor and be part of their team. Well, let's talk about that for a minute. Let's let's skip over that part. So you're in high school and you got recruited. Well, how it all came about is there's a civics program in high school, like your history,

class and everybody goes up to learn about the U.S. government to D.C. My dad wanted to pay for that because he thought it would be better that we get some education about how the government's run. And when we did that, I thought it would be boring. So he went and called back channels and tried to figure out anything. And he got me a tour of the Smithsonian Model Shop, which is behind Union Station. It was 1111 North Capitol. And I took my portfolio from 1987 to 90 that I made in my bedroom of makeup. This is just you as a kid. As a young guy. Teaching yourself. Yeah. And doing that. And I took that portfolio and went to the Smithsonian. And I made the

arrangements with the teachers. There was an Uber. I had to take a cab over there. I leave the tour at some point. I go to the office of exhibits. And when I get there, it's all people like taxidermis and the people that made the exhibits for the Smithsonian. And there was, I mean, all crazy group of older artists, but they're all GS-14 and their government workers. But this place had plexiglass shops, cabinet shop, taxidermy, and then all the place where they made the mannequins and the models. And then they were restoring stuff as well. And when I went in there, it was like the first time I actually saw like a, not a effect shop, but something like a fabrication place that was beyond like some rinky d basements. What was your impression of that?

It was awesome. I would, these are like, I feel like, not kindred spirits, but I felt like this is what I'd like to do. And I showed them on my portfolio and everything I did. And then I left. And I came back and I think they were very impressed with me being a young guy and all the stuff I had done on my own. A letter came in the mail and they offered me an apprenticeship. And I was blown away. My dad was blown away. And then I remember the day after I graduated high school, even getting the handshake and your diploma at the Civic Center.

Everyone said, good luck of the Smithsonian. They voted me most talented. I mean, thank you. Congratulations, you're now. 18 years old, you graduated this wasted time called high school. Good luck. That's a Smithsonian. And the funny thing with high school,

is they, I would skip school to go home to do artwork. Of course you do. I'd forge my dad's name on the notes and I forged it on all the paperwork so that it coincided the signatures look the same. And at some points, I was skipping school five weeks at a time because in the art class back then, if you made a monster or something, they thought you were trying to make a bong in ceramics or like paraphernalia. They didn't really encourage it because it wasn't a career path.

And when I got the Smithsonian thing and I went up there, I stayed at, they put me up at American University, so my roommate was a lawyer. And then when I would leave in the morning, you'd take the shuttle because we didn't have cars. And everyone there was in suits going to the B-Pages or whatever at the Capitol building. And they were all going to school for law. I'm in a tie-died shirt, and I look like the wrong guy at the bus stop. And they take you to the BART station, then you take sort of like a martyr or whatever.

And I took it and walked to the buildings at 11-11 North Capitol. and then I started the internship there. And what I got to do there was a, I learned about mold techniques and fiberglass and a lot of old school ways to do things. And I showed them all the stuff I did. And then I got involved in this thing called Beyond the Java Sea, which was a full-size Javanese figure.

But the Smithsonian wants to be accurate. So they bring guys in from the Javanese consulate. And I learned how to say good morning and in Indonesian. I lived in Singapore as a little kid because my dad had worked for Lockheed. That's why we were Marietta because of the airplane company. But when I'm there, we bodycast the guy and then we have to sculpt his head. And then there's other people working with me. And we could complete a full figure, but it's to house and wear the ceremonial armor that is loaned from the Indonesian government.

So we had to take classes on artifact handling and shit that I didn't even expect. It's like I'm learning about not touching this thing that's like, you know, I'm being very careful. with it and they build all the crates. And then the exhibit called Beyond this Java Sea Open. And my figure is in the museum that I had help of all the people making. So the time I was there, I realized that they take a really long time to do everything. They take 15 minute breaks. They make stuff. And even though they wipe all the counters to alcohol, everyone has their tools labeled blue so that everything was very institutional. And people were very cool and nice up there. And when I came back after high school, I told my dad wanted me to go to college and I told him I need to go to L.A.

And I had a friend of mine that was in Georgia that moved out there in 87 and he told me I could sleep on his couch and come visit. And I was supposed to be there two weeks and I go out there and I told my dad, if I go to L.A., I'll come back and start college. And even though I didn't want to go to school, and then I go to L.A. and I stand my friend's couch. and then there was a guy that I had watched videotapes of of how to special effects. I got a tour of his studio. I showed him all my Smithsonian stuff, and he left me a voicemail message on the recording machine and offered me a job. So you're 18 years old.

I believe they're 18. Yeah. 18, 19, pretty young still. You go from high school to the Smithsonian. How long did you work at the Smithsonian? That was four months. Four months. Get a job opportunity in Los Angeles.

when I'm out there for two weeks. That's pretty amazing. It's a fast pace. Were you nervous at all about jumping? I mean, you're 18, 19 years old. That's a big jump. Well, it's even weirder is the guy that I watched all his VHS videos of the training videos. I'm now standing in his studio.

And his name was Michael Burnett, and he had these MBP videos. And they dressed everything up for production with like smocks. And the first thing I got there was like, where's the smocks? And why are you guys in band shirts? But it was like, you started realizing this is the curtains being pulled back. And then I was there and they offered me the job and I had travelers checks and sleeping my friend's couch. And I needed a bank account or whatever I got from CNS Bank at the time. But my friend would take me to work at Michael Burnett, who was another effects guy that worked at a famous company.

And Mike was famous too, but the other guys were like Academy Award guys. And he would, Mike took pity on me and would drive me to the Cannum shop at night so Steve could drive me home. And on the weekends, sometimes I'd work with Steve at the time. other shop. And I think I was there for like three or four months. And I saved all my paychecks. And then Mike and his wife who was the accountant are like, are you cashing your checks? And I'm like, no, because I'm not keeping them so I get back to Atlanta. I didn't know I'm scoring up their accounting because I'm like so, you know, and even at lunch, I'd stay around their studio and look at everything and not want to leave because it was like, this is all the shit.

What kind of stuff do they do? Well, he did Mask for Universal Studios. He did this movie, Dolly dearest. He did. I mean, he had all kind of like jobs, like he was running this foam latex for Swamping and Darkman, the movie, and all like the Liam Neeson. But I'm not getting a credit for that. They're subbing off work, like we're for chemical processing and they send the dark man molds or the mom and dad saved the world with Harry Gar and there's fish creatures and all kinds of stuff. So they would get pieces of other shops work in order to meet the deadline. So we're processing the skins and I'm learning on how to run all the chemicals. and I'm just part of the show.

How much was that was all new to you? I mean, to go from the Smithsonian, which was probably one style of effects, now you're going into feature films, which I would imagine is dramatically different. Was a lot of that brand new to you? Were you learning on the job? Well, I'm not only learning on the job.

The thing that I saw the Smithsonian is everything's perfectly clean, the 15-minute breaks, wiping everything down with alcohol. They take a 15-minute break, and the end of the day, they work their eight hours, and that's why the figures probably take six months to produce, and they're making great stuff, but they're also using materials there

that if they're making Betsy Ross mannequin and they're using the real Betsy Ross dress, they don't want it to off gas, but they're not as super realistic, and they're thinking fiberglass and dried and true materials. When I went to LA, it's like really badass artwork, but under brutal speed, and then, like, use all the,

whatever exotic chemicals and all the stuff I couldn't afford. So what I'm seeing is a fast forward technique of producing our work. And then I was experienced the more refined government approach to making things and the time schedules. And then there's guys, you know, just smoking part in the parking lawn and like come in Taco Bell for lunch and ripping jokes and throwing fireworks at you. And like it's a completely different dichotomy of that. And then I got to meet other effects people out there. And then Michael Burnett at one point, I don't know if it was my personality. he just said, you should start your own company.

And I took him literally. I thought that this is a guy from the videos and this, I should go start an effect. If he believes you, you should believe. And maybe he was just saying that. Came back to Georgia and I told my dad I was start an effects company. And my dad's, you know, like, thinking that...

Is he a military guy? No, he's like an engineer type person. He didn't have a college degree. He was from Hawaii. and he was a career, he did accident investigation and eventually for planes, and he dealt with C-130, skunk-works planes in California with the groom lake, and he was a world traveler. But he was a, my mom was an artist, and she passed away when I was young. I think he ever, my whole life, he supported me as an artist, but he never could financially give me money for it.

So like at Christmas, I want a mixer to run a phone light back, because he'd give me a sweater. And I was like, but dad, I need this. And it's like, I would never get that. And eventually I got a job at Ace Hardware to make money because I fingered tools and discounts. And I did that through high school, 15. I got out of the work program. And then 19, I'm also working at Ace Harbor, but I'm working in a nursery. Because they looked at me and said, long hair, you get a knife.

And you get, if a big guy, you get a load card. I'm like, I'm an artist. And I can let me make some signs, but it wasn't like how I thought it would be. Sure. But when I'm at the out in LA, the two things really were pivotal because they opened my life to, you went over the mountain where you've seen other guys stuff in their basements and local people, but to really see the people you read about in the books and magazines and be working for them and interacting with them, I was like, man, my shit sucks compared to what the standard is.

Sure. So I wanted to kind of like, when I set up my company, I found the studio, which is the same front door, and I couldn't afford the rent they were wanting, and it wasn't the whole studio, it was just the paint booth. Yeah, we should point out to the people watching and listening. we're in the studio that you started in. It's just an expanded version of, but you're in the same venue. Right. And then the studio you're talking about,

when I first moved in, the building is a 43,000 square foot old furniture factory, and a bunch of artists people took it over and they created a series of studios in it. And when I moved in, I remember doing a cut through from work and seeing some metal sculptor outside when my dad did,

and then we knew that at my tiny house that I lived with my dad, there was no basement, then there's no garage. I had already got rid of my bed. I had turned my studio, my bedroom into a studio. I gave tours out of my bedroom to the high school friends. I tried that once. Actually, I tried it twice. Didn't work. Those, those girls just did not want to take a tour. So I would, you know, I would do airbrush painting in there and stuff like that. I needed more room, you know, the bottom line. And when I found the studio and I had the job at the hardware store,

you know, you're making minimum wage. But back then, The rent was cheaper. The first studio was 400 square feet, and it was the explosion-proof paint booth of the furniture factory. So it was a sheetrock, looked like a trailer, like a two-car garage, this way. And it had a fan on one in and roll-up door or the other and the same front door. So that was my first studio. We got my business license hanging on the wall. Who were you doing work for back then? I mean, this is Atlanta. It's not Hollywood. No, I know. I put ads in the phone book for special effects, and I'm getting called for fireworks. And I'm like, no one's calling and I'm ready and I have the business license and the cards and the telephone and ready to make it.

Got a portfolio, got all kinds of you. You went to the, you worked for the Smithsonian and he worked for this gentleman out in L.A. So you got all the cred, but you're in Atlanta where at the time probably there were some movies being made in the southeast, but not a lot. No. So what ultimately happened is I put ads in the production guidebook, which was put out by the film commission. and then I started getting like prop jobs for like the war with Kevin Costner to make like bees high nest like buzz like boss nest that they could put bees in that could fall when the kids hit it. I wasn't getting real special effects. I was getting more props. They wanted like, um, Patsy Kensig movie had to make like chocolate statues of Venus de Milo and stuff for a buffet scene and weird like jobs and people would call me for sculpture. And then I started teaming up with local pyrotechnics people that my friends in California, had work with and they were doing some billboards for six flags with like g4's faces on them and

it wasn't a lot of stuff or stunt dummies for movies so when we work with the effects guys they might need guns molded or things like that and then once i put the ads in the production guidebook and then the local makeup stores i would advertise for Halloween makeup and almost like cut your grass or lost dog you tear off the little thing and it would be bright orange with me doing a monster makeup and people would call me for Halloween makeups but you also have to understand that my at the time, the landlords took pity on me, saw my portfolio, my rent was $150 with power included. And for me to be able to get out of my house and work at Ace Hardware for what I made at the minimum wage, working full time there, I could pay the rent and get the discount and buy

materials and with the cobbling of little jobs that came in that helped build my business up slowly. Let's fast forward then to WCW. How did you make your initial connection with WCW? Well, the same special effects people and those type of things and I'm landing movie jobs. I get a, I'm working on a, what I would consider a big budget movie at the time, 250,000 where there's actually 35 millimeter cameras and people in Dalton, Georgia. It was called Island Girl. And I'm the effects guy. I have to make the fake heads.

And it's about a lady with like a Ubingy lip tape that comes to America and to a rich neighborhood and like all the funny things that happen with her. It's like a dark comedy. There's the head in the freezer. She's eating, making stew. That's pretty dark, dude. But it was like funny type thing. Yeah.

And when I'm coming back from that job, which is a legitimate, like, real movie for me, that same explosives and effects guy, Bob Shelley, that he would give me a lot of jobs over the years, pages me because we didn't have phones. And he tells me on another job where I go to a pay phone call him. And he tells me there's a movie that they need cuts and bruises on. They're filming in Atlanta. And, you know, and then I say, okay, so I agree to do it. And it was called Atlanta Nights.

unbeknownst to me, it was like some fetish movie at the time with police officers and stuff. I go to the set and on the way there, Bob calls me again and says, Andre, make sure you get paid because I'm not going to be there because they don't have insurance. Because he can't do explosives and bullet hits and all that stuff. But that's what he tells me. So now my friend's not going to be there. I go to the set and it's in a metal fabrication shop in Atlanta. I pull up, there's all kind of nice cars and stuff out front and like Mercedes and there's

police vehicles and all this stuff. And I walk in and just coming off of regular movie set with clapboards and catering and makeup and all the normal stuff, there's a guy with one camera that looked at the old school wedding or TV cameras with a light coming off of it. There's no food, no script. And there's a shit ton of bodybuilder guys in cops there. And what this guy who ran the whole thing did is he put an ad out in gym saying, I want to be a movie, is 25 bucks an hour. So every jacked out bouncer and everybody showed up.

wasn't really a legitimate movie. And I did my cuts and bruises makeup and there was like bonded shit where there were tying guys up and like shibuka Japanese shit and like weird. And the guys were making up the script. Some real Jeffrey Epstein kind of shit. Weird. But it was like fetishy. There was one woman on set.

There wasn't like any departments. It was a camera guy. And when you talk to other crew people, I got a vibe that this dude was just like probably shot porn or he shot like wedding. I was getting that vibe. Yeah. I was waiting for that shoot. drop here. But when we're sitting there talking to people, there's guys from the Red Dog

Police Department there, like all with guns and everything, that's the real shit and SWAT vehicles. And I guess this chip guy was also some kind of security consultants. We had fake police cars and would do scenarios. Maybe it was just hiding his cop fetishes or whatever. But that whole thing, I meet Ray Lloyd, who was probably a guy in the gym that saw the $25. I meet a Curtis, something, the powerlifting guy for Olympian powerlifting. I meet the Red Dog guys. I meet some other wrestlers. Now, wasn't Ray Lloyd, who eventually went on to become Glacier and we're going to talk a lot about that, but wasn't Ray in law enforcement at the time?

No, his time. No, I thought he was. He was not the only, his dad, brother, and mom were all in their state troopers. Ray was a person that was in it. So Ray's trying to probably be an actor or whatever, and he's probably working Indies at the time. So I'd talk with Ray, and then Ray and them are into magic, like, he did magic tricks on set and, like, and we shop at the same Eddie's trick shop.

We probably bought the cup and the ball thing. crap and I buy wigs and stuff there. So I invited some of those guys to my studio after that low budget thing. And when I say the low budget thing, the guy, there was no sense of professionalism, like the guy in one of his production partners would leave to get lunch and they would go eat, and then you'd leave everyone in the warehouse and bring no food back. And then at one point, I had the strong arm the guy for my payment, and I went to their hotel, and it just so happened, And the girl that was behind the hotel, the clerk in high school, was the person who was in my homeroom high school and she gave me the room number.

So I went up to the hotel, made him go to the ATM machine and I got paid my $250. No one else got paid. And it was just a weird circumstance. But years later, Ray would come here and we decided to make him up as Terminator. So you became friends with Ray Lloyd because of that connection. And there was another guy there that I ended up using in a Kodocom Caveman commercial where I got this chip guy. I made him up as a caveman and became a billboard because he looked like a big guy that I could do face cast. I think his name is Chip Webb.

And he invented Moss Yokes like camouflage or something nowadays. He's done well for himself. Yeah, he has. Give me his name and number before I leave because I need some shit. Yeah, that was, but he probably tried out the Indies didn't make it or probably went and that went to the shows and all that stuff. But Ray kept in contact with me and over every Halloween, he'd hire me for Halloween makeup. And we'd split the prize money like Terminator or whatever. and I'd do his face with the lighted eye.

And then that's how I knew Ray over the years. And he would just usually come around Halloween or once in a while when he was in the area. I hate Stephen Singer. But you know what I love? Moms. Think about it. Before morning coffee and chaos. Before the day even starts, there's mom.

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That's I hate Steven Singer.com. So speed it up though. How do we, so how, so you meet Ray. Yep. What's the connection to me or to the first project for? Ray worked out at Maine event, which was Stinging Luger's Gym, which was up the street. And one day, I guess, Ray closer to Halloween or something,

he brought, like, disco by or he bought whoever, like, the friends buy a couple times or they'd be here when I do makeup, but they were all low-level wrestler guys. And then one day he brought Dallas DDP by. And DDP looked at everything, was like, bro, look at all this stuff. And then he went back and got you, and then you and Dallas came to my studio,

he showed up on bikes. And I didn't really know other than, because I hadn't watched wrestling in a long time. And there was a little kid. Then you showed up. And then we started talking about possibly developing, like, I guess you saw whatever I was working. Sure.

And then that maybe hit a chord to maybe develop. See, what I'm trying to figure out is, because obviously the whole glacier character was the first one, what I'm trying to figure out as I'm listening to you, because sometimes these memories, you know, it's 25, 30 years ago. But I'm wondering, did I have the idea, for the Mortal Kombat characters

prior to meeting you, or did that idea develop as a result of meeting you? I want to say it developed as a result because the other thing I guess Dallas was pitching about Ray was his martial arts background because he did Kung Fu.

And I don't know how proficient he was in Kung Fu. Not very. I know that later. I'm just throwing it out there. I knew you and like Sonny was World Forms champion and they've got pedigree and you can see the black belt magazines. But Ray, I guess

that was maybe the pitch. So, like, kind of help put Ray or sell him because he was a marshal. Well, he had a gimmick. He had something unique. So that, and being around seeing whatever I was working on, not necessarily that. Maybe we had already costumes and sculptures and prop armor or something.

That word sort of manifests itself. And then you sort of talked about maybe developing something for Ray. So then I automatically started drawing boards and all the stuff we showed you in the back. And I made, like, mood boards. and I took pictures of Ray and took his acting headshots and kind of did like a, because we talked about popularity of video games. Well, when you were first year, you got the tour of the studio

and then you said, well, come see me at my office. And I didn't know who you were. And then next thing I'm at CNN Center and, you know, going past Janie and I'm, fuck this, this guy on a bike. And then now I'm in this big building. And it's just a weird thing because it happened pretty quickly. But then the idea was to sort of develop Ray. And then it just kept getting bigger and bigger where I started,

I got involved in, first of all, I didn't make a lot of costumes. And I thought about hiring local seamstresses and people to make stuff, but there really wasn't anyone around. So all the stuff I had seen in L.A. on how they make armor and the way it's made was from that time period of all the stuff I saw when I was in Los Angeles, the techniques of making robot suits and everything. So I just applied all my working knowledge. And I had the bodycast Ray.

And I proposed all this idea for Ray. And then there was going to be some other characters, which ended up being Mortis, Wrath, and Ernest Miller. And then ultimately, Ernest Miller's designs were kind of rejected because it was too gimmicky. And they wanted reality base, sort of like a Johnny Cage character. And Ernest already had his own background as a true. It didn't make sense in retrospective to gimmick him up. Right. And then some guys like Chris probably needed a manager or because of the way he could talk on the stick.

So once I developed Ray, it just kept growing, but there was delays because I don't want to say Ray wasn't ready. It's like he had to like go to like test matches in Orlando, but there was all this time. Well, there was a lot of other things involved. It wasn't just your work, obviously. But I remember when you pitched this concept, there was a tremendous amount of detail. It wasn't just the gimmick. It was the lighting. It was the special effects.

It was the fake snow coming down. So from what I remember, please correct me if I'm wrong, because I will be. But it was the first time, I think, WCW ever took a character from concept

and included entrance, music, lighting. You know, at best, we would come up with a character and we don't want to look like a lumberjack. Exactly. What a funny lumberjack? with the Lisp.

You know, that was the extent of our character development, whereas at this point we're talking about music, we're talking about lighting, we're talking about special effects, it's pretty amazing. And I got the, I mean, it just kept getting bigger and bigger,

and then I ended up working with Turner Studios, and I would art direct with those guys that were the most badass graphic artist, and I would come up with these ideas, and they would show me stuff, and then we did the snowfall, because we were trying to rift off of kind of Mortal Kombat stuff. Oh, we're trying to steal their shit.

But we were also trying to hit a, the Saturday night audience. I wasn't really thinking as big as, because I went to the tapings at like the smaller arenas. But when I started, and of course, I now started watching a lot of WWE, so I'm seeing Kane,

or Undertaker at the time, and they're badass entrances. And I'm like, I'm pitching that. But when I'm telling that to David Crockett down in Orlando, when Ray's having his test matches with Pat Tanaka, I'm trying to figure out how to do a super kick

on the dark matches and everything. I'm there for all that, but I'm in a room with a bunch of bookers, like Kevin Sullivan, Jimmy Hart. Terry Taylor was there and Paul Orndor and then eventually David Crockett's in there in some of the

meetings. But I'm the only, Eric would put me in the meeting because technically I'm making this Superman thing and I've but they didn't even know why the fuck I'm in the meetings and they were angry about it and then there's probably guys that had shitty gimmicks when they were younger and there's all this weird. There's a resentment. Yeah, politics.

And it's, look, wrestling is just like any other business, even though it's evolved so much, especially over the last 10 or 15 years. But back in the mid-90s, there was still a residual kind of culture that kept wrestling a very closed product. People that were in it didn't want newcomers finding their way. And part of that, I think, is insecurity. Part of it was the way they were brought up to protect the business. And a large part of it was we were stepping into an area from a production perspective that none of them were familiar with or felt comfortable with. So it got a little intimidating for them.

But you add all those things up together and it's instant resentment. Oh, and I'm also coming from a background of working on movies where you have art departments and people cohesively coming up with ideas and you're showing mood boards. And you know to WCW and they're back there with a magic mark or pink shit on their face. Right. There's no makeup department. There's no props. There's not.

And then there's also like there's all the politics involved of it. Like they're mad indirectly of why. someone's getting a good gimmick and possibly a push, which they don't see it as, I'm trying to stop the guy from flipping the channels to make crazy shit like lasers and snowfall so that when you do this, you're like, what the fuck's this? And you want to watch it. I'm not necessarily responsible for who was cast for the part. And that happens on movies all the time. We design special effects. And if the guy's not the best actor or they decide to edit it out, that doesn't affect me other than the stuff either makes it or doesn't make it.

Tell me about the process of working with Ray because his gimmick, his wardrobe, was pretty complicated. And it looked great, but he still had to go into the ring and execute. How big of a challenge was that? Well, I thought of it, all the things I designed as two designs being to the ring, which is the shit they wear out. And then what they take off to wrestle. So ultimately, you have this flashy stuff. and then there's other factors. Like I would put makeup effects and everything and robot suits,

but then you start realizing like the cool-ass, like movie-type stuff I designed for his feet and the split-toed shoes that he wanted, they're not functional. And you have to switch stuff to sewing stuff. So it ultimately, and then the time it takes ready to get out of it by unclipping buckles and shit, and he's standing up there, you start to, once you start refining it, The first designs are really complicated and they look like toys, and that's what I was trying to design him like. But then as it refined out, it's more about the armor component and the mask thing, get rid of the helmet. We were trying to create backstory, almost like the urn hat.

I'm trying to build so much shit into one design, so you're almost over designing. And then as you start taking the TV tapings, you start stripping away on the unnecessary. And then you find out that what works practically like is leg things need to be switched to fabric padding, because they start ripping or something happens to them with airbrush on them versus fully sculpted robot legs. And you start realizing that when you're on a movie, you can stop filming and you can figure out, change things or fix stuff.

But in a live event, it's just got to keep going. So we streamlined it and we learned as we went. And it was a complete learning process on that first. Who was next? After Ray, after Glacier, it was Morris. Chris Canyon, the late Chris Canyon, had to be ecstatic to get an opportunity to get this extensive of a gimmick. And it was one that really, it's what he needed because you mentioned.

Chris was unbelievable, very innovative decades ahead of his time in the ring and had great psychology. But he was challenged by a microphone. And this was a perfect opportunity to take advantage of all the amazing talent. Chris brought to the ring and kind of work around, you know, his, his, uh, his, uh, Achilles heel. He had to be thrilled. He liked all the stuff. And Brian Clark when I did Rath, well, with Chris also,

even if he looked at his matches when he's being jobbed out, he sells awesome. He's still kicking his leg in the corner. You're like, even though he's losing, he's so good at the technical aspect of it. And he's flopping around and doing stuff like that. I was always impressed with that he, out of ever the whole group,

he did my character justice. And I made up. the name Mortis. I would look through a book on Death and Dying and the same like Glacier, and we came up with different names for him. So when you have, when Chris is there, I felt like he did my character justice, even though he got jobbed out. And he melted it as much as he could. And a lot of the same thing with the gimmicky stuff, like the staff, the York thing I made, and the mask. A lot of that, I was thinking of building and marketing because of like looking at the wrestling stuff they had for sale wasn't that good. So I was thinking that,

they're just going to put a big push behind these guys and make glacier toys. That wasn't the case when you get there and you start understanding the politics side of it, not just because you give them the coolest thing. And I had already studied all the wrestling. I almost like when I get a movie, I do all my research and read all the projects and what the guys directed and things in the executive producing. So that you sort of get a feel for what you're getting involved with. So I became a heavy wrestling, like, viewer from when I started with you guys through it.

And then I kept track of everything through the whole job. a rap. Was he fun to work with? Brian was great, but some of the guys, Brian Adams, Brian Clark, I already, things I noticed, I was trying to create these dynamics for the wrestler, but a lot of guys wanted their face to be seen. So like when The Undertaker walks out with a hat, and the pop and circumstance, and the dark thing and whatever, he milks that gimmick all the way to the ring. I was thinking that's what I'm creating these super badass things, but if the guy who's playing the part, doesn't want that, he wants his face to be seen. He just sees it as an inconvenience to get the helmet on or not wear it or wear the jackets because he doesn't

see the bigger picture of the marketing thing I'm trying to build into the design and trying to give them. See, that's a situation where the person is trying to get themselves over rather than get the character over. The character is where the money is. Yeah. And if you look at his past career, he played Adam Abolm, which is a gimmick guy with contact, Lent. and all this stuff, but he was pretty adamant that he didn't want anything on his face, and he wanted to take the shit off and be Bryant in the ring or as who he was, Brad. But he also needed Van denberg to talk for him as well.

So I already realized in wrestling, there's guys that have like the total package, the body, the look, the athleticism, the stick work, then you might have a big, giant obese guy that can talk on the stick, like Dusty Rhodes. It doesn't matter what he looked like. He can sell the shit to the audience. And then there's some people that might have a kind of. They might have the look and the wrestling ability, but not the stick work. And then you start realizing that not everybody has that.

And you try to play off their weaknesses by making whatever the costume, and then you put them with the manager, however it makes the thing work. This guy looks familiar. Yep. What a wimp. That was the one we did your body cast. And this was for that gimmick where we were going to make you, it was a map with Larry's Zabisco, where you were supposed to be like you gained a bunch of weight and didn't

do the training. Yeah. And then we designed the fat piece and we designed yakuza body of the valley of the skin tattoos for your body that were end obio theme. So the idea would be you look like your fat the whole time and then you take off the gimmick and then you have this full body suited tattoos and then you have the match. But this got scrapped because of the length of time to put the makeup in or you had some emergency obligation where you couldn't sit in the prosthetics process but you were here for the casting and it only got to that point. And it was a around the same time I was making the Hogan heads because you can see this stuff on there, and there's the silicone piece.

Well. And then this would be, when I did mortis, I would have to make his face piece, but I have to make it, I did it in a soft material foam latex with fabric in it, and that's sewn into his helmet, so he wouldn't get impacted, and it wouldn't stretch and distort. That's what the fabric was, and they were sewn into his mask. Even though if this got rotted and dirty, we would just make a new one every time. So when I'm re-perishing the mortise mask that I have, I have still have the old mold so I can produce the exact piece like I did in the day, which I did for Chris as he wore out the pieces. And then, but some stuff wasn't always sculpted and gimmicky.

If we're making stuff, it might be leather or sewn or fabric. So it has to do with what the concept is and what is needed, you know, for the job. Not all the stuff we could make custom like this. We'd have our bag of tricks. And then if you needed the six-pack guy to look like the Rick Claire, it might just be a witch's nose painted like the same color because of the time. But other things, we had the time to manufacture. And back in the day, I'll show you more in the other room.

I used to hand draw all the pictures. Now we use Procreate and Photoshop and we use all kind of graphics programs and AI that are stuff. I was going to ask you about AI. That's going to really change the game for you. Well, it speeds up design work, but a lot of people depend on it very heavily, which isn't good because they show us AI drawing. and then you look at it and go, well, this is going to be really hard to duplicate it because it just made it in a computer.

So you have to say that, you know, I'm designing like an economist desk bench. They did an AI and I'm like, we can't make these curves on the machine. And is the lighting and the photo coming from the bench or is it coming from the room? And people don't know because he just made it in AI. And I'm acting as a builder saying this blueprint may not work. So AI has its benefits, but it also has its drawbacks, especially because people see that picture. one exactly in that photo and some of that stuff. It's not possible.

Yeah, but it was a budget in time. One of the more, for me, memorable effects that you created for WCW, in fact, I still see it a couple times a year when it's the anniversary of my timeline gets loaded up with it. But it's the Hulk Hogan head that was presented. Walk us through that. So that's for a match for Sting and Hogan, which was leading to a paper. preview. My best guess is Starcade 97. I pitch you the idea because I had studied a lot of wrestling and I'm obviously trying to throw tons of special effects at everything I could touch. Of course.

Because you're expanding your new studio. Yeah. So I had seen maybe New Japan or a Japanese spot that, because I was literally watching all kinds of stuff and like the burning matches the ECW and like, why don't we do that? And it's like, I'm not thinking of safety programs. protocols. I'm making about... For insurance. And I'm also a pitch guy now at this point. I'm like a creative, I'm like a creative entity or like a creative producer, but I'm not titled that. I'm art director. And a lot of people didn't know what I did because when I got hired by Eric, I worked directly for him. So it's not like I'm going through the normal channels to get hired. But when I'm pitching this idea, I pitch him in the Japanese ones, they sent a head, which maybe was like a yakuza type angle of a Japanese wrestler. And it was probably wax or some shit. And they were using it. I don't think it was meant to be his real head. It was meant to be a psychological warfare. So I pitched the idea for Hogan to get the gift,

or they came up with it, maybe it'll be the gift at Christmas. And then on that show, it's in Macon, Georgia. He's getting limousines and girls in hot tub. Yeah, because I remember we were doing whatever we could to gain his favor. I don't know if it was, it wasn't his birthday, but there was something going on. It may have been Christmas. But it was us just going way over the top,

being so grateful for Hulk Hogan that we were giving them everything. Women, cars, motorcycles. Harleys and all the stuff. And then that last thing that came out was the gift. And I watched a race, and a crew member guy gets in the ring, which is a background guy or prop guy,

or whoever it was, brings out the box. And it was gift wrapped, so it looked like it was consistent with everything else we were doing. Opens the box, digs it out. probably has to get a bit of hole because he fucks within a minute. Then he pulls it up and he screams and looks at it.

Eric's reacting. And then the show eventually it cuts to, well, Brett Hart is also coming out at the same time. So they might think it's from Brett because he comes on a limo. And then at the end of the show, Sting is up above the nitro sign about the tarot light in on the, on the rafter. And then I think the show goes dark at that point. And then consequently what happened before that is in order to get Hogan to my studio,

we have to time it with the WCW Christmas party because they got to fly them in so the idea is to bring them to my studio make the head mold. Get them drunk? Yeah. And then take him put them in a mold. No, you were taking him afterwards. Okay. And then you were we went to the nightclub or whatever the reason. But was there a nightclub here we would go to?

Tosh. Oh, Tosh. Because you invited me and I couldn't leave because I had to stay with my guys. But it was me. Eric shows up with Hogan and we, you know, we do the headcast. I put him in a ball cap, sit him down. And that the, time we're making molds out of dental alginate, which now we use medical silicone, but we have to do the cast. Oh, this is still a little weird, just so you know. Still a little too soon in a way,

but tell me about this process. I mean, what do you got here? This is the actual mold, and these are pictures taken on the day when we were here. This is him at 44 years old. This is the plaster casting of him from that mold. How long did you have to, how long did it take to cast him? Roughly, I have to get the ball cap on him, about 45 minutes. And then we take it off them and clean them up, hot towels and stuff. What I decided to do with this piece was to restore. A lot of times we chip off the mustache in order to make the form for the fake head. But there's also distortion in the castings from the weight, gravity changes.

We corrected one of my sculptors, Ernesto. I gave him the project, and he's very lifelike in his detail. We went back in and recorrected everything, and we reestablished his famous mustache. We got rid of the ball cap, the lines from that casting. any deformations in the casting, and we use the references from the day of 97 of him at 44, not all the stuff that's out of him.

So we figured this would be a good, realistic likeness. It's his casting, and then we've just tweaked the poor texture, the surface, and corrected any anomalies from the casting, and the bowl cap. And then we re-put the sculpture,

which was the original hair. The reason we shave it off on the heads is when I lay a synthetic hair on it, it would stick out too far. Correct. And then we had used this form to send to Los Angeles. It was blue at the time, and I repainted it to manufacture the lace hairpiece. So they had the exact dimensions of his head, and then they sent it back to me, and then I put it together.

That was a Friday, and it's due not Monday, but the following Monday for the Macon show, a Nitro, before the pay-per-view, or however it timed out. And we mold him, he was cool. We took pictures with him, and, you know, like, gave him AFX clothing and all that stuff. And then we did the casting, you guys leave. The next time I see you is in Macon with the fake head, go to the tour bus show everybody. I clearly remember Terry Taylor bitching about the price, which he always hated my stuff and always said everything was too expensive.

And Terry Taylor had nothing to do with the price. He had nothing to do with budget. And didn't understand movies, but I think it still had to resent. Jealousy. Because he had the Red Rooster gimmick for years and the shitty stuff he wore. So the animosity and hating me from not being an insider didn't ever give me credit for any level of stuff. But he buried it in the bus or complained about the price. And it's like, I don't know how he knew the price.

Maybe he talked to someone in the office, all my invoices, but still it was standard price for a fake head. And as I'm doing rush turnaround. How much was it? At the time, like 7,800. And now. I paid more for head than that. Yeah, the fake heads nowadays are.

I mean, in a long run. In today's price, you're probably talking like $1,000 today's price. Sure. but we did work around so that his eyes aren't open and we put the glasses and the bandanas and shit on it. And that was in that one sequence. And it's one of the few things that was special effects that I pitched that actually is on air. And then there's obviously parody makeups and other stuff or characters I develop. But that one was cool because it's like you've got famous people that are coming to your studio.

And to me, like, he's the highest level in that business. I'm sure there's higher level guys now. But at the time, he was 44 years old. And he was cool. And he's like, you're a coworker. You know, he fist bump you in the hallway. It's like he wasn't, he was just the cool dude. It's the opposite of Terry Taylor.

Absolutely. I'm not busted on you, Terry. Terry and I are good friends now. We've all matured and changed. But, yeah, he was a little different. But also all those guys, like I talk about, they had no clue of my contracts. They never knew what I did. They didn't know me or what I was assigned to.

They just thought maybe I was Eric's guy. They didn't know the encompassing and what I'm there to try to do. If they would have probably said, this is my guy, Jacko, can you make him something cool? I would have done it. But they didn't do that. They just kind of rejected all the stuff because they thought it wasn't their idea or didn't come from them. And I think that also goes with being the older school wrestlers or maybe how they were treated when they were younger. And no one got this level of a push.

Yeah, I wouldn't try to figure it out. But that's, it's a psychological challenge. But, you know, they were all co-workers in a sense. And you, there was production people. There's older wrestlers. There's eventually there was writers and producers. But at that point, all I gave a shit was you're the guy that hired me and you're the guy that why I got my assignments from and you're the guy that could fire me.

And that's all that gave a shit about. Hey, man, remember when we were all kids and we used to write IOUs? Okay, was it just me? It was like everybody in my class discovered that at the same time. I remember this kid at the store actually tried it back when we could go by a bubble gun. by the individual piece. Do they even do that anymore? Well, it didn't work out for him. We needed to learn a little bit about money. These days, Cash App can help parents. I'm talking to you. If you've got a teenager at home, I already know you're having trouble

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podcast for full disclosures. And that's the way to approach it. That was a cool project. And I still, like I say when people send me that clip every now and then, it's so cracks me up. Because the head looked so real. I mean, Hogan's reaction to it was believable because it kind of looked like he was holding his own head. Let's talk about another one you're famous for, and that was the Four Horseman parody. You probably still have a little bit of scar tissue over that one.

That was so effective. It made such great TV, but it did cause some issues with talent. Also, you have to think, too, no one was doing parodies because the minute we started that parody, then the hunter and those guys up there started it, and then it's back and forth with Road Dog doing this thing and this guy doing this and the mockery going back and forth, I know in some way, whether I got a creditor on the show, I visually affected Nitro. Of course. But there isn't like a writing room coming up with that. Someone, like, NWO and some guys talk about doing a parody. And so, and it's like Kevin is creative. So, you know, he's Kevin Nash. Yeah, Kevin Nash.

And like he had worked on movies like Shreddered movie Ninja Turtles. And he had been to my studio and like he knew like prosthetics and stuff like that. So he, I want to say him and Scott and all of us are talking. And these are like creative powwows of stuff. And then I think at that time Buff was in the NW and Conan was. So we do buff as Kurt Henning, which is pretty easy. It's like I go buy hair and clip. put it on a ball cap that looks like Kurt Henning's hair.

Sure. And then with the baseball cap and then like a pink polo from like Sports Authority and whatever. And that's him. He's the character. And then Conan got a black wig and dark glasses and a black jacket so he looked like McMichael. And he can just do his shit in the background and whatever the thing he's doing. And then Benoit, I want to say Scott or Kevin, because Ben Wall wasn't talking a lot at the time.

they said to use a mannequin. And we dressed the mannequin up in Benoit's gear because he just sat out there, did nothing. And then for Xbox, we did, I just had a witch's nose or some prosthetic that looked like Flair. I found a blonde wig that's from Eddie's trick shop. And Xbox thought it would be funny or, I want to say it was him or someone else,

but if Rick Flair was crying during the interview, they were mocking. So I took a camelback type thing, rigged it up, and he had like the bladder to push where he's doing this and water's coming out of his hand. And I still have the camelback back there. That was like their comedy. And then Kevin, when I did Arne, we got him the neck brace because he had cervical surgery or whatever. He wanted to stuff his thing with like pillows from the hotel or whatever we put under him and got him the similar pipe clothing.

I did a ball cap on him and I have Crapewell, which is the old school for laying beards. I just had it in the kit and I shredded it out and glued it on to make it look like it's missing hair. and then he did like a character makeup and kind of shaded him and we gave him some like glasses with no prescription in him and then he wanted a cooler to walk out with so we got a cooler at like 7-Eleven to have the beers and then he wanted him a redder to get like rosacea. So he wanted that alcoholic flush.

That's what he told me right there on the thing and then we were laughing about it and we're just cutting up when we're doing it. There isn't like a board and test makeups and it's like we're just making a funny-ass thing from whatever I can pull together. for a parody. And then they walk out there and they do that.

And then the fucking heat they got was insane. For me, Rick Flair is professional. And he probably understood that was the business. Aren't never talk to me again. Like even walking down in the hallways, just never look at me, not even a knowledge I existed for many, many years. And he took it personally because it's a dig on his care of it.

But if you think on, if you can step outside the box like I do, That's like a Saturday Live parody of making fun of the president or some actor with buck teeth or whatever the fuck it is. They blow out all their shit out of proportion to get the reaction from the audience. That's essentially what we were doing. And then we did other parodies like Ernest Miller and Sonny Ono. We did, I did, like when there was heat matches between Kevin and like Sid Vicious. I did prosthetics on him.

But this is once again, we're not having to custom mold his face and sculpt everything. It's just like me going to make up show in LA, buying a bunch of fat and old pieces and having bags of shit and figuring out what works on Kevin and adding extra pieces to him to make him look sort of like a blown out steroid monster with a kind of just take whatever elements I could make in the deadline time and just make it on it. We did Vince McMahon, go to the store by a suit that had the patches on the elbows that looked like the shitty wore. Could you find the stuffed shoulders? Like, could you find suits with shoulder pads in them? Or we put stuff in them. We just tried to pick things. but you're also getting this on a Friday or Saturday when I get the Gord to do it,

and then I'm flying somewhere Monday doing it. So it's like, and it's got to be kind of hammed out campy because it's not going to last forever. This isn't a real movie shoot. Once they leave the curtain, if he gets punched in the face or some shit happens, I even did makeups on Rick Flair one time and made him fatter to look like dusty in a thing. And it was just pieces I had. I didn't mold his face. And at one time I did prosthetics on Rick Flair that I found Polaroids of,

it was a camera shot. We don't, you got to understand with wrestling. Most of the time, I say 99% of the time, it's all real of the contact. But in this one, he's being beat up by the NW. Way the fuck away in like Florida or someplace we were at. And they had helicopter shots. I think we're going to try to bury him or something. And they did it like Rodney King's style with helicopters above.

And it was way the fucking gone. And he gets his shirt beat up. And at the end of the show, he ends up making it back to the rain on coming to the ring. And I did a little prosthetic right here that was. was split and I did bruises all over his body that I had polarized up because I also went with him back to the hotel and cleaned him up, which I don't normally do that with wrestlers. And I remember, one thing I do remember was even walking down the hallway of the hotel and he had like some coach from North Carolina, his friend of his with him, he stole the fucking injuries

all the way until we got inside the hotel room. There was no one there except for me and the coach. Maybe there was a surveillance camera and he'd even pause and like take a beat and like, And then when he got in the room, he just beeline to the corner, got his beer, got the other guy, and then I took his shit off and I laughed. But he sold it. And I was, he was a method actor, essentially. Yeah. Okay, so we've talked a lot about mortis and glacier and wrath.

We talked about the parody with Arne and Kevin Nash and all the drama that that created. But you also have to work with one of the more, I think the most iconic figure in WCW really is staying. And talk about the transition for. from as a character, from your perspective, as an artist, from the flat top, platinum blonde, sparkly sting, to scary sting, as Scott Hall referred to him as. So at that time also, when he was here first, he had the flat top and all the shiny stuff and the boots and everything when I met him.

And I knew him through main event as well and on the show. But a couple of things, I think because of the push of the karate of Blood Runs, Cole characters, and this is no knock to Brian and Ernest and Ray, they were not main event level guys at the time when they came into the company. Sure. And the whole company is sort of based around Sting, who's kind of like the star quarterback, so much.

He was the face of the company, Ian Riffler. And I think he probably, in a, his own mind was probably thinking like, why are they getting these massive things when I'm the guy? And he approached. Did he ever say that to you? Did you have any conversation that led you to think that that's what he was? I just think I could tell that because I think he came to me privately and asked me if I would develop a character for and he was willing to pay. That's really a compliment, by the way, especially given the fact that at that time, culturally, politically,

you had such a large group of people that had influence that resented you. And now you've got Sting, who's really, by all accounts, you know, is Hogan, obviously, and Flair arguably. But Sting really was the kind of undeclared face of the company. So I think he was willing to maybe put his own money there. And I think ultimately you paid for it because it made perfect sense. I probably should have worked with him from the beginning, but we didn't know that at the time. And in the beginning, my contracts were only for those four guys.

Once my contracts changed to the talent contracts, then technically I'm free to help anybody I'm assigned to. How long were you with us on a contract basis until you became staff? Well, I was under my first contract was, I met you in the early part of 96. And then I went in, my actual contracts were signed in May, and that was for Glacier, Morgas, Wrath, and the development of Ernest Miller as his character. And then it changed. And then the, I had the, I sold the television rights. And I had a negotiation with Nick Lambros, which was interesting. Tell me about it.

This is going to sound so strange. I read a book called Practical Guidelines and Pricing for a graphic artist. and the book just said in there that people who make 3D models should have higher expenses because they're not a guy just drawing pictures. And then I did a poor man's copyright where I took my glacier photos and I sent them back to myself. I've done that. I didn't have lawyers at the time. No, but if you send it express mail and it's sealed, as long as it's sealed, seal is it broken, it's valid.

And you can open up in a court of law. Yeah. I did that with all my shit. And then... Judges look kindly on people like that. They have sympathy for that. So do juries. It's far more effective than people think

as far as protecting your intellectual property. So you guys had paid me, and at the time was like $87,000 to develop all the characters. That's bodycasting, armor, multiple suits, make all the gear. When we finish all that, we're about to broadcast on TV, and I realized that we haven't negotiated after reading these books, the actual intellectual property and the rights of this.

So I'm thinking like, oh, fuck, I better at least talk to them. And I explain that to you or somebody, and then you put me in a phone meeting with Nick Lambros. And it's just me and Nick, but I also had a lawyer friend of mine on the phone holding the thing kind of here and giving me like the thumbs up or whatever. and Nick offered me a buyout against the merchandising rights of the video games

and the toys or whatever they were going to make and he said about $5,000 a character and I was blown away because I'm thinking I'm going to make $20,000 on my idea. My friend's on the phone

and I said, but, and I wanted him to repeat it for my friend because he was fucking around with a notepad and when I said what Nick got super pissed on the phone. And he said, fuck you. And he goes, 97,000 is my final offer. And I said, okay,

and that was it. Paid me 90, because he was perceiving me as a smart ass and probably challenging him. That wasn't the case. I just wanted to repeat the numbers so my friend could hear it. The other lawyer that was listening on the phone call. So what was the outcome? How did it end up. 97,000 for my idea. And I started AFX Studios Inc. So it was a total buyout? Well, there was other things in the contract that say I'll get more money if there's

an, like, but they never gave me any more money. So did you go on staff so that you could? No, that was that was the, that Blood Runs Coal contract. Okay. That was it at that point. Then I approached you because I was getting more phone calls for movie and TV work over that year and a half. And I kept telling you, I'm using so much time going to these tapings and all over the place.

and you made the proposal to put me under a talent contract. And I believe that because you probably negotiated the contracts with the wrestlers, you gave me the third contract that they get. Because at the time there was a 52,000, which is 1,000 a week for training. There was a 75 or 78, and there was a 120. And in your office, you brought me in and said, how about I explained all that stuff? and you just said, how about $10,000 a month? And I was like, yeah, because I was in my brain,

I was doing 10 times 12, 120. But in today's market, that's worth $250 in our today's prices, what the value of $120 was for a 25-year-old guy. That's not bad money. No. And my, and I think, especially when you just got a $97,000 payout to open your studio with, right? And the funny thing is with the 90,

and I already had my studio for six years, but I had to incorporate because my accountant said now. So I actually took the $97,000. check. I gave it back to the accounting guy Bill, the head of accounting, and they rewrote the check to AFX Studios Inc from AFX Studios Associates because they had to change the bank accounts. But years and years later, when I tried to question about getting more money for the video games, Diane and all the loyal teams accused me of getting two paychecks and never reported. I didn't do that. I gave them the other one back and they reissued it. I physically gave

it to the head of the accounting guy, the tall guy Bill. Bill Bush. I gave him that personally drove it in there and handed him the check. And they accused me of that. I'm thinking, fuck you. I gave the money back to the head of accounting. There's nothing showing the deposits of my accounts. I only got one check for that about. How did that resolve?

But years and later, they just try to threaten me, like I double-billed the company when I never did. And that was near the end of the company. Because I was trying to get accounting to show if I made any money from the toys because all the guys were getting shit funds and money from EA games and the slot car racing and whatever their fucking royalties. And I wasn't getting anything. So they figured that that pacification was that from that contract.

But that other contracts I started was right after that, which would have been, I don't like, 97 or something. And then I went under that contract until 2001. And then I got your contract first. Because I remember I signed a contract with you. And then I ran into coming out of a nightclub. And then you turn around and said, oh, you fuck, you just signed your contract. And he went back in and Sonny was with you and we all had drinks and shit. I was like celebrate it.

But then after that... It sounds like something I would do. Because I was, I was pulling up at the ballet and you were walking out. What club was this? Taj. Taj again. Yeah, and because it was here. It was close.

We had a lot of meetings there, too. My car knew his way home from Natasha. So we went back in. That's where I met Sonny. But with those contracts, it's non-refundable guarantees. So people like Bagwell and Lugar and everyone that heard of what I was being paid through probably Janie or some leak in the office, they did not realize it's $10,000 a month.

And then on top of that, any expenses I make or budgets I come up with, if I got to buy the suits for Kevin Nash or prosthetics, I just keep invoicing and billing for all that or we make stuff. And I turn an estimated budgets. But people that were kind of smaller in their thinking or Terry or anybody at the time, and I don't, they would just think Andre got paid $10,000 to go to Nitro. It's like they had no fucking clue because they probably got track of some invoice they sent. No fucking clue is a good way to say.

Yeah, and that's what it was. They didn't understand. I'm under retainer and I'm doing all kind of other shit. And you only call me for one nitro that month, but I might have been making mountains of shit in the studio or doing drawings and concept stuff. So it was a non-refundable. But you didn't take any bumps.

No. That's what they were angry. Yeah. You were making money and you didn't take any bumps. And they just saw it as like this dude's hustling and working angles, but I'm already from the movie industry. So this is good money. And it's just giving me consistent money so that anytime you guys have a beck and

call or need me in fucking Germany. or whatever the fuck it is, I'm on a plane and I go. You issued me pagers at the time. And it's like it was a great experience. But once you navigate through the stupid stuff, it's like later in the show I became insurance policies for Craig and Annette because the shit would come up at the last minute. And they're like scrambling to figure it.

Well, and I want to get back to Sting here in a minute, but one of the other things started happening, I remember is the more people started seeing your work, the more people wanted your work, the busier you got. So let's shift over to Sting. Tell me, you started talking about the fact that he was willing to spend his own money. He came here. He came here.

So obviously it was under his initiative. And you're right. Had we started with Sting and we would have had the success with Sting as opposed to Chris Canyon or Glacier or, you know, some new guys coming in, politically things might have been different. But what was it like working with Sting? So what I do with a lot of my designs is I try to look at the time of everything that guy has. And also you got to understand in that time period, I'm going to S&M clubs and like the chamber and I'm gothic, vampireed out and all that. That's my own personal life. So it's like I'm in a gimmick technically.

Even though I'm like the wrestlers go on stage and become someone, but in their normal in life, I would go out and become someone else because it's like I had contact lens companies and stupid shit and look like a vampire. I remember. And that was alarming. But to those wrestler guys and Eric, it was not. unusual for them, which seemed strange that I'd be hanging out with them in a strip club as a vampire, but to them it seemed perfectly normal. And they acted like it was normal. And for me, I'm promoting my contact company. But then eventually I started realizing that I loved interview with a vampire and I go to Gothic clubs. I shouldn't look like someone out of the fucking 1800s. I need to

look like the vampires on a blade that are so fucking powerful that they have wealth and they, and I started designing way more advanced shit and clothing. And I'm with wrestler guys all the time. So I have to match their money and their look so that I just blend with them instead of like sticking out like a vaudeville character or something but to them that was normal so it's like I'm having meetings and meeting Dennis Rodman and clubs and shit with Eric I'm in a vampire get up

but and then and Dennis is looking at you like hey bro what's up because he's in drag makeup and like Raven and all them it was just part of like that entourage but they didn't see it as anything strange it's like I put on a persona probably because of insecurities it could go out And these guys just were like, fuck it, he's just part of this group. So you're like, and then I just became like a fixture like that. It's amazing that they didn't try to talk you into the ring.

Because, I mean, you're a big guy. You were even bigger back then. Yeah, they wanted me to run the ropes and all the stuff. And I would train with them. So the boys treated me like the boys. I wasn't with the crew. So I would be in the locker rooms with them and traveling and so the politics part of it kind of took care of itself over time. Is that fair?

Well, for the people that you get along with. And then like you befriend guys like Kevin Nash. I met him on a flight back from L.A. And he kicked the lady out of the first class seat. And I was in first class. So he said, and I sat and talked with him. And then he's like, hey, you got a car. And when he came into Atlanta, he had just bought a loft.

And he's like, hey, dude, if you take me by my loft, can we, you want to go out and party. I'll pay for everything. Just drive and don't get fucked up. I mean, too bad that, you know, I wrecked the car. So I went with, I went to Kevin's loft. And then he came to my house. I changed clothing. We watched the movie.

We waited. And then we went out in eight and I went to strip clubs. and eventually I became friends with him because we were always talking about movies and like special effects and he always liked that stuff. It was still friendly with him. And all the people also were moving here because they're all trying to center around the company because they figure if they can work angles and be at the gym and get their push or every bouncer in fucking Atlanta that wanted to be a wrestler.

This was a hotbed of fucking activity in that time period once everyone knew that was here. 96, 97, 98 was pretty crazy. And you look at everybody moving here. So you have a greater chance of running into Eric at who to, or jocks and jills or at a fucking local restaurant if you're here on the ground, then being somewhere else and flying in for the show. So the politics, and then when the company's moved up here,

it was way closer. So guys coming to my studio all the time. So with Sting, I looked at his whole character, and I decided everything was neon pink and green and all the shitty showed me the special boots he had made in California and all the stuff. And since I was in the Gotham, scene and nightclub stuff, I decided, I showed him a picture when he was here of Rolling Stone

magazine, and I showed these guys the other day, the cover had Marilyn Manson on it, and he had this white and black face paint with different colored lenses, and I showed him a Fangoria magazine that had a picture of the crow crouching up on a rooftop. And then I had this- That would be the crow character in a Bruce Lee. Yeah, the Brandon Lee movie. And it was promoting in the back of my horror magazine. And I showed him that, and then I showed him all the drawings I did, but I also did all my drawings running the spectrum of scorpion suits. I used Dune. I used S&M.

I did different versions, Phantom of the Opera with scorpion shit. I did all kinds of stuff, and I did all these pictures. Then I also did a whole shit ton of pictures of him. I drew that where he was in white. And I also did some color versions. So I theorized all the way out what his character could do, like in my concept. And I showed him all the stuff. And then he gravitated to the Marilyn Manson picture, that one, and the specific sting suits that I did for him.

So I made his first costumes. But when he first came out, he's wearing AFX shirt because he didn't have black and white. And he has that. And he has short hair. And he has a similar visage to a combination between the Crow and the Maryland Manson makeup. And the curves in the makeup are from Marilyn Manson's design. it's his interpretation because he can paint his own face and he just puts the shit out and the sink and paints and he's done it so many times. He got rid of that and he did the whole thing.

And eventually when I did the fake stings, originally after my first K-Fabe project beyond this type of shit, Eric wanted, he called me in the office and he wanted me to convincingly make a fake sting and he showed me pictures of Jeff Farmer and asked me if I could make him into, because he had the same body style. So I think even, it was like a thing I remember, I had to go fucking on the same flight as Jeff Farmer meet him somewhere. I have a K-Fabe meeting and explains some shit to him. Because we really worked hard in keeping this stuff quiet.

So the clandestine services in K-Fabe, that's kind of what I did because, but I'm really doing all non-disclosure shit and I'm reporting directly to Eric, not the writers and all these other people. And the only people, it's almost like you want to contain the amount of leaks because everyone's going to report it to the sheets or everybody gossiped like fuck. Well, and this kind of goes to the resentment and the jealousy and just the culture at the time. It's not so much that I was worried about leaks, although that too. But you start having people internally passing judgment on a project before the project

even starts. They're already trapping on it. Yep. And making it more difficult for anybody to accept. And that was one of the reasons why I kept things internal. because I didn't want internally people to start passing judgment and resisting it before it even get started. Well, also, you, like, you're talking about that. Like, if you would have not included them in the Blood Runs Cold Gimick and would have booked it differently and had different characters,

and they would have poopooted out of the fucking, like they did. But, like, some of the things, Sting was like such a, that whole thing, because the whole design, the main reason, why I was getting ready for the sting, the fake sting, was so that he was going to do with Fashion Beach. And I was there when the trash rained down backstage because I was supposed to do his makeup. We had done test makeups,

and I have pictures of me putting in prosthetics and hotel rooms and all the other shit. But then when you got Hogan, it was like at that point I was just a spectator and my thing got pushed to the back burner. They still used it later on in a limo attack. So help me out here, because there's parts of this

that I'm forgetting or hearing for the first time again. So if I understood you correctly, you were prepared at Bash of the Beach when I thought I may need Sting as the third man. So in addition to keeping Sting on ice, you were on ice and ready to make him the third man if Hogan wouldn't have showed up. Also, Sting wasn't in the black and white gimmick yet because all my designs and my photographs show him with the face paint and the tights and the jackets that we borrowed from Sting

of the gold and the other shit and with the epaulettes and this fancy shit. We had that. And we put contact lenses in Jeff Armour. I have test makeup photos and 35 millimeter of one eye with the makeup, with the contact with him in the hotel rooms of the prosthetics. And what we were trying to do was get it to be able to pass enough, almost like a stuntman where he's fighting. It's never going to be sting,

but we had to change his eye color. We did prosthetics. I molded Sting's head to make. the thing, the prosthetics, and I did a brow piece, a chin, and some structural pieces on him. I painted him flesh color, and then I painted that into the contact lenses. And we left Jeff Farmer's hair, but we probably should have put a special wig on him at the time. And then over time, Sting's hair grew out.

And then later on, when we did multiple stings, the reason I invented the Sting mask was because I couldn't do prosthetics on all these guys. And some dudes would have goatees. So I decided to make a vacuum form of Sting's face and paint it just like his makeup job so that when it went on, it terminated at his makeup line. So if he did Scottie Riggs, he just trim his hair, put him in a wig and a duster, and then put him up in the rafters, and he's close enough to be a appearance as a stay. From a wide shot. Yeah, wide shot angles. And then there's 10 of them coming down. But ultimately, at one point, the marketing people

ripped me off my design and then produced it. Then I had to have another negotiation to blast them and get money to have them buy me out for my sting design, because they completely stole it. They asked me for samples, and then they went and had a mass produced in China, and they put them on the racks. And then the way they negotiated that, it was Nick Lambros, and they put me in the room with the person that ripped me off. And they asked us both our stories on how it came about. And I brought visual aids, and the person lied and said they were in Vegas, and they saw the pictures of staying, which are pictures of my fucking suits and his whole makeup. But beyond that, that same person asked for samples, and I had Sting's face. I had the vacuum form that clips on it that I made for the first thing mask,

and their copy clipped on top of that, and they put my painting mistake in it. And then they said, enough, and they said, what do you want? And then they gave me my two-year contract plus that money. You did better than I did, brother. But that lady or that person was so pissed at me. Who was she? Kelly came in.

The head of marketing. But it's the same thing with T-shirt designs and all the shit. The reason everyone was coming to me, I'm in the 18 to 35 year old demographic making cool shit. You got an older 40-year-old lady probably using her brother-in-law's company to produce shirts and maybe getting a kickback, whatever the fuck happened. Oh, you're saying? But they're making pink shirts with sting on it.

18 to 35-year-old male's not buying it. And before that point, the guys are not wearing the same clothing. So if I put you in an Eric Bischoff shirt with a cross on and everyone wants to be like you, you better have that shirt on the fucking stands for them to buy, not the pink thing that the guy won't even wear. That made no sense. So I made all these crazy shit for Hogan and DDP and macho because they were, I'm in the demographic.

I'm a designer that's really creating something that I would fucking wear. And they weren't thinking that way. Eventually they got a long board with that. Eventually. Yeah, and then they made the Sting mask that mass produced. And eventually it probably made more money in WWE and everybody from probably all my contracts combined. You know, when you think about it over the expanse of what it actually,

what it costs to produce and what it made. But with Sting, you know, doing, at one point we did a Sting dummy. We did disguise makeups. We had things where he had his own mask on it. I remember this thing dummy because we took a real articulating, you know, dummy like they used for. I made it. Oh, you made that metal thing and all that. I mean, it was heavy. Yeah, it was about the same. And we dropped that, I'll never forget, we dropped that thing from the ceiling and when it, now this is obviously before Owen. Yeah. But that thing hit the floor. I was on the floor when it hit in it. I mean, the thud did it. I mean, I for a second went, I hope we got the right one. We didn't think about

at the time, but then when obviously Owen's incident happened out of respect, we quit doing those stunts and everything. But I was a lot of times involved in that. Or sometimes he'd be up in the rafters with a peek up and stay there the whole fucking move to the whole show. And then he'd come down. You know, like he'd be there sometimes up there for a lot. I mean, when you think about that, Steve was not a big risk taker. I mean, in life. He's a very, typically pretty conservative guy. And for him to get up there in those rafters and drop down the way he did, it took a lot of guts.

So this is just a copy of the first T-shirt I came up with, and this is just clip art of a scorpion. And this, I thought, when he's in the first shots, you see him, he's wearing my FX shirt because he probably didn't have black and white clothing, and he bore it. And I was my gothic influence over everything. And I know a lot of people say Scott Hall came up with it,

but he might have seen something and said that, but he was here and I showed him those specific pictures. And years later, Sting asked if he could put my drawings and stuff on his website. And I ran into him like, yeah, that's so good, man, you can have anything you want. Because I theorized his character all the way out there even if he came back. And then we did his scorpion suits that had the airbrushing on him because I ended up calling Hulk Hogan's guy to figure out what he painted his boots and clothing with. So I bought the special automotive paint.

and I made specific airbrush paint. Then we did ones when they were red. And then we did his first suits, which was called Tripuntor where I puffed the scorpion. And I did like padding on him. And I did one or two jackets for him in the beginning. And eventually he had more shit made. But I kept thinking of this design so that if it's on your body,

and instead of the AFX shirt, I just kept seeing like Superman symbol. I want his lapels like here and here. And now you see the design in the center. So like when I'd go out to a nightclub, if I have AFX running this way or a flame, you don't get to understand what's there. So then now if you had a break by the clothing,

you can see the design. It was so simple. But then when we printed them up, they started selling. And then everyone kept saying, well, why don't you make my designs for me, like Dallas or whatever,

because their shit wasn't selling. But it was a pretty basic concept. If you put this on the guy and he walks out there, you're all wanting to be like him, so you're going to buy a shit. But they didn't, they weren't thinking that way. It's one of the things that I learned, and I learned it through the NWO logo,

and I learned real quick that if you're going to produce T-shirts that you want guys to wear outside of a wrestling event, because you're going to go to a wrestling event, everybody's going to wear your wrestling shirt because you're at a wrestling event, right? But you're not going to wear that shirt if you're going out to club to get lucky. You're not going to wear that shirt if you're out hanging with your guys, a fluorescent, you know, wrestling t-shirt. And it was a smart move. move on your part. When you come up with stuff that you can wear out to a club, you're probably

going to sell it. Yeah. And that, it was strange because I'm not a marketing person, but then when I start realizing if you do certain things and they end up on TV, then they can affect it. I eventually like the sting mask and other things. So when I was creating the first characters, I'm just literally thinking about these are going to be toys and video games. These guys are going to make the coolest mask. I didn't realize all the politics is going to take foot or the casting choices, so to speak of parts being played or the performers. But if you're actually in sync with that, like developing a complete character and you're thinking all the way through

and if you express that to all the people, the reason I'm putting it in a sentence so that guy buys the shirt. I didn't explain that to anybody because I didn't think it needed to be explained, but apparently there's underhanded foot and shit going on. I learned a shit done about politics working with wrestling, that I never, my eyes were open like after the first year there. And then I was there like a contract all the way to the end of the business until Vince bought the company. And you could see the writing on the wall where my contract started off at my bigger contracts than a year contract, then a two year contract, then a year, then it's like six months.

And then there's one more six months. So you're sort of being like prepped for it. Sure. And then I thought I might work for WWE after, but it didn't happen that way because they really had all those services built into their company. and my company was sort of like a pilot fish on sharks to be with them the whole time. And I learned, I learned, there was a good period of my life, but it's also a chapter of my life. And I don't always talk about wrestling or things that I've done so much stuff more. You're talking, I've owned the company 35 years.

Wrestling, my company was around six years before I started wrestling. And then, you know, that was a five year, six year period of time. And then I've done all kinds of stuff since that point. And I'm still in business. New episodes every Thursday night at 7 p.m. on YouTube. For over 25 years, J.C.W. has delivered the very best in pro wrestling entertainment, bringing fans deep storytelling drama, gut-busting comedy, and unbelievable in-ring action. From wild characters to unforgettable rivalries, don't miss a single moment.

Tune in every Thursday night at 7 p.m. on YouTube. J.C.W. Lunacy. I mean, when you're designing these characters, you must be stimulated and excited about them and motivated. And then you present them and nothing happens. It's just like on movies when you do a badass special effect and it makes the edit or they replace it with VFX or something happens. I used to take it personally, but I understand it's the business. So it doesn't affect me. I just like keep cranking.

Stay motivated. Yeah. And you're happy they gave you the opportunity and they paid you. And most of the times you get the credit on the show. And a lot of shows like wrestling. I don't even have those on my IMDP because a lot of people do it as by the episodes. I've probably hundreds of shows that I provided stuff for, but we never had a rolling credit for what I did.

So then for me, I would just put AFX stuff all over and as something that's my own signature, never sold at all, like the products. But it was, it's like a moment in time that I was a part of. And I didn't think it would ever lead to that. I thought it was the karate characters. And then he literally got on a rocket trip ride with the NWO

all the way to the end of the company. And life changing. And then you enter the world after being on tour for five years. And you're like, what the fuck just happened? Where are you being? You went all over the world. All these designs. Do you own these?

Do you own the IP on these designs? Well, on the ones that were never done, that revert back to us. But it's like, or like, sometimes stuff would come up with Vampiro. He's just going to go take it to his people and have it made. And like Sting, that stuff I did under contract, but there was no specifics in the contract to say, like a lot of movies, if some of the designs revert back to you, or we do prototyping, some stuff has work for hire.

And then, like, the forgetting, like the karate projects, you guys bought out those designs. But I was always under the impression in the beginnings when you made the stuff from the way the contract reads, most of it was work for hire. But, like, a lot of times if stuff never made it or guys hire you privately, that's just between you. Because I was, again, I mean, just wrestling fans love history,

they love collectibles. And you've got so much stuff here, Some of it, which obviously didn't see the light of day, but I think if it were in the right format, it's a collectible. And people I think would be interested in seeing that. Well, I thought about possibly doing a book, like talking about that period of time, like, the gimmicks I was involved with. Like, almost like where you show more visual stuff and the stuff that never, because there wasn't a lot of like people weren't photographing and keeping track of all that. There's certain photo shoots. Or like the Hulk Hogan had was maybe to make a smaller.

version for sale for like a collectible or to maybe laser scan it and produce the bus smaller but or maybe put like the stuff like the Hogan head or the belts with like golden auctions. I don't know where that slands because that was so long ago in my life and maybe I'm sort of like a hoarder. I had to dig all the stuff out of old file cabinets that were pushed back between a lot of movie design because that was like a time capsule. You just kept adding more shit and pushing it back further and you don't think about it at the time. And then it just become sort of irrelevant in your life because you're now working with Margo Rabi or Avengers, and that's your bubble that you're in. But this is all, you know, examples of it. It's almost like

a time capsule that you're looking at from 90 to 95. You know, I mean, I had done like his sting suit airbrushing. I had done concept art for potential looks for everything. Everything's black and white. And then, you know, I made this suit here. But I had other looks for him. And I have to put stuff in design that people reject. So here he is, sort of like a S&M guy and a Phantom of the opera holding a mask. And I did his first... Did you do all those by hand? Yeah, his first coat designs where I did. I ended up doing this coat in gray ultra suede. And I didn't know what these fabrics were. I would just go to the store and go, this looks cool and then figure it out, because I'm not a costume designer. I was doing character development, but I had to get in the

clothing making because the people that made the clothing were not, they weren't as, you know, skilled. So like this design eventually becomes this and we made the suits. And then like I had theorized what he looked like and I would do a lot of, I mean, I did rifts on his designs so that I was doing stuff like here he is when he goes back to green, like a green lantern look. But he never went to these colors. He went to red. I designed a suit like a dune suit that almost looked like the plates of the scorpion armor. And it was interpretational instead of a physical scorpion. I would rift on ideas so that when he's looking at him, he can get feedback or like, well, that one looks too gay.

This one, I need, I need, I need, I need rejection and I need positive. I only gave him one design. I might get picked apart. Right. So I'm concepting him even if he went back and then he still kept his blonde hair one day or, you know, like, I'm, where he goes all white and it's like I'm thinking black, white in the design, and then ripping and get a wear of color. So that's kind of like my thought process is to overwhelm with this mountain of fucking

design shit and then get feedback from the client or whoever you're working with so that they can pick it apart and then it becomes collaborative. Oh, I don't like this. This looks phony. I would never do that. And then he's also putting his own shit into it because it's his character. And then he's expanding the pain. He's changing things. He probably sat at home and did that or tested it out differently. So if you look at his early matches and then he got the one that he really liked or he got his hands down and making it. A lot of the guys couldn't paint their own faces like Brian Adams for Kiss. I tried to make templates for them. Raven, Ray, I had to make vacuum forms. But Sting had painted his face so many times, kind of like Gene Simmons. They just fucking make the thing.

Let's talk about Gene Simmons, because you also got to work on the Kiss Demon characters, which was a really cool project. And I'm going to set that up for people that may have not heard. I've talked about this many times. But the idea behind, my idea, originally behind getting into business with Gene Simmons and Kiss is, Kiss was a big, Gene Simmons was a big wrestling fan. He understood the power of wrestling. He certainly saw the merchandise. opportunities that existed in wrestling, probably because of his familiarity with WWE, which was making a fortune in licensing and merchandising. But the idea was that we would enter into a partnership with Gene Simmons where we were

collaborating on these Kiss Demon characters, and then we were going to share in the revenue from the merchandise that came from it. So tell me about the creative process, because we're working with Gene Simmons. He was involved in the creative on this stuff. Tell me about your... In fact, you told me the other day that you and I had our first meeting with Gene Simmons at his house in Hollywood, I believe. Yep. And just a side note, when I'm in the hotel before I get there, I'm literally dry heaving in the bathroom because I'm so nervous because I'm like going to see Gene Simmons and you're picking me up in a limo or whatever, talc car.

I call my brother and I just, I, my brother's like, why are you so nervous? You're basically going to, you're just these guys are paying you to do what you do. and then he kind of calmed me down and then I went downstairs and brushed my teeth and went down and got in the car with you and we drive up to Hollywood Hills I think this is shit I remember

because it's not you're talking about a special effects guy from Marietta and I'm doing all this special this is another high level fucking person like he's like Hogan this guy's legitimate

it's Gene Simmons yeah he's multi-millionaire everything else and I was a I listened to Kiss music I was more of a Metallica guy but I like you know I like the songs and shit

but it was just surreal. So I'm in the car. We get up there, meet him, he comes out of his house, you know, meet his wife and whatever else. And then we go into a room. He starts showing me stuff like the real props from Runaway, which is like the Tom Selleck movie movie. He had the real animatronic metal bugs and shit on tables and all his movie stuff. He starts showing us all kinds of shit like tennis shoes he's developing. You can tell he's a marketing dude because his shit's everywhere. And then at one point he hands me a kiss condom. And I make a comment as a a joke, funny. I said, does it go in the dark. And the dude whips out a little pad, flips it open, and writes down basically my idea, just like that. And then he puts it away. And then we continue talking and we eventually move into a... So did we know of whether ever kiss glow in the dark condoms? Did they ever make the market? Well, I also think, too, that his original kiss coffins that he eventually made was probably a rift on the thing I've made here later on, but you can't, you don't know where those ideas come through.

Because it's just like having a conversation going, that's look good in blue or red, and then you go eventually one day and you make a red one. So you can't take credit for those ideas. It's like you're creatively brainstorming, and you've got to accept that. He can't say, I came up with that. Right.

We just, he might have simulated thought, just like Sting, I show him shit, and then he's rifting off his face makeup. I might have not done his exact makeup, but I provided creative elements to simulate the thought. So let's go back to Gene Simmons. What was your impression of him after he walked out of that meeting.

I thought he was really, like, good at marketing. But there's things that happened to meeting that were nuanced that you may not pick up on. We're in the meeting. We see all the crap in that room and all of his kiss shit. We go and sit down. We start having this conversation about the kiss thing, or you do, and you're across from him.

I'm sitting next to him. You get up to take phone. calls and you say you have this to me. And I'm now like, oh, I'm fucked because Eric literally just walking off to take phone calls and I'm sitting there with him and I'm like, I better make sure I got my big boy pants on for this. And I start showing him pictures of wrestlers and we eventually talk about all the sizes of guys and what he wants to see. And previous to getting there, you had paid me to hire a trainer for that Apache Dave American Indian guy to train him to make him buff looking and I paid the Mark Wallace guy to get that guy in shape. We did test makeups which I have pictures of on Dale Torborg, Chris Canyon, and Apache Dave.

And that's what we were going to show him those at least polaroids and pictures and what I have pictures of that for a potential demon character. Also, prior to that, I had this idea in my head, and I was watching a movie called The Shadow with Alec Baldwin, and there's a scene in the movie where the Kubolai Khan guy is in a museum, and his Tonak Amin, Silver-based Dragon Tomb opens. And at the time, you have Blockbuster Video and Hollywood Video go by my house. I had got the Hollywood video, I slowed it down of the thing, and I put the thing in my bag, and I took it with me to Gene Simmons' house. So it's queued up. VHS tape.

And when I'm describing all this shit and showing in pictures, with this not all my concept art for demons, it's in the very beginning. I got a little panicky when Eric left because now I'm fucking in the hot seat. So I tell him about this idea and he's like, I don't know, I really not understanding what you're talking about, Andre. I'm like, dude, I got this video.

Can I show you this thing? Because I'm thinking now I don't have mood boards. I only got my portfolios. So we walk in another room. There's an arm wall. We put the fucking thing in. he gets what I'm trying to do with that scene that seeking of the silver coffins and all the shit. And then we, he starts to buy into the idea.

And then I pitch him on all that stuff. And then when it's time to leave, he wants us to go to the E3 convention and walk around. But Eric's got a lot of shit going on. He wants to eat sushi or something. And we kind of like, he wants to blow off and get out of there. Which Eric doesn't see him probably as a rock store in the way I was perceiving it. It's more like this guy's a little cooom. So like put another kooky artist guy with him and fucking go deal with your shit and work it out.

That's that's kind of what it went down to. There's things that happened with Gene Simmons. Like I remember everything when he dropped a piece of food on the floor and he picked it up and he see crayon drawings on his refrigerator, just like a normal human. What's this Shannon? Shannon Tweed. Shannon Tweed. We're in there because it was breakfast time when we got there from what I remember.

And she comes in and she's cooking breakfast. She's got a long, like buttoned down shirt on, maybe jeans. Her hair was in curler. Her was, yeah, she looked like she just walked in a bed. She's not wearing any pants. She's down there in her underwear, and she's hot. I mean, even with her hair and curlers, it's kind of like this is awkward. I'm sitting here with, like a robe or something.

Yeah, it was an awkward meeting. But he gave, but also Paul Stanley's wife came by during the meeting to try to give him a bunch of shit to autograph. There was kids jumping on a fucking trampoline. There's like other shit going on beyond. It's not what you would think for a rock star's house. When you start seeing him, like, dropping food and other things in crayon, you start, like, realize this is just a fucking dude with kids. And, like, you kind of start seeing through the curtain a little bit. But also when we left, he did something that you don't realize, but he gave me a kiss tree book.

He gave Eric a pillow, like that said kiss on it that was like, like, a fucking thing you put on your couch or get it Spencer. And eventually he sent me a bass bass bass guitar with the use for molding for this or used for stuff. And he gave Eric big plush figures. he showed me in the office. It's like, he didn't know what to do with them. It's like, got these big toys. But when we left, Gene stopped me and he pulled out another book, which is his phone book, and he turned it,

and he pointed to two names in it. And you don't know who they are, but he pointed to Rick Baker and Rob Boutin, which are the highest level of special effects people that did the Howling and American World Wolf, and that was like his personal phone book and written and pencil. And he just pointed and did that to me. And to me, what he was doing was kind of like,

saying you better not fuck up, like in the nicest way possible when he showed me that. And I was just like, well, that wasn't unnecessary, but I don't remember Rick Baker being a clothing and set design in, but he still knew I was an effects guy. And somehow he showed me those names because I told my idea it was in makeup effects or whatever. And what that's basically saying is you're not shit and I can replace you in five seconds. And I was like, wow. And then we went out and then that was it for the meetings. And the rest of my meetings were on the telephone with him via fax machine where I'd send him stuff. And at one point, I had saved a message from him where it's like he's calling my fax answering machine saying, Andre, this is Gene Simmons.

And what he's talking about is in one of my drawings. He wanted more holes in the side of the pants to see more skin because he's like, I want to see skin. So I made the change, sent the drawings back, and then we got off building it. And then Brian Adams comes here. We do the full body mold. We choose Brian Adams because he was very adamant that he didn't want. Dale and those other guys because he felt they were all small. He wanted a big presence walking down the hallway, kind of like the spawn cartoon books that were put out where the demon character is monolithic,

like, bigger than life human being is what he wanted. To represent his character. And ultimately, we had talked about eventually doing a second character for tag team and two women that were going to be in the women's tag team so you'd have the four members of Kiss. It never metastasized into that, but it just was the one guy.

And eventually, just like the demon character, and it premiered backstage of 99 in Vegas, and they played God of Thunder Live, and then the hydraulics and shit went off, and the stage set by design with the production team and the coffins and opened up. And this isn't the real one. This is one copy out of the molds

that are long gone of just the front doors that uncut on the, there's no mechanics or anything in it. It's the same metal finish. and I use that metal finishing technique on all the, to tell you how cool Eric was back then, I told him, Gene Simmons wanted nickel silver color, and I found this company called Luminar Composite Metals, and I convinced Eric that I needed to go to L.A. to get the training for Luminor so I could use it on this job, and I literally flew to L.A. They put me up for a rough few days.

I took the technical training in Temecula, California, and I learned on how to metal code. and I came back here and I started using it on all my shit. I sculpted the coffins and clay here. We made the mold. I bodycast Brian Adams. And the reason I bodycast a lot of these guys is to basically make a custom dressmaking form. Then in movies, we bodycasted headcast people to have a version of them there when they're not so you can make all the stuff like prosthetics.

But I started, we had the budget, so we made body molds on them. So Brian didn't need to be here for the fittings. I could just make it all on his suits. And eventually he didn't want to play them. part and I think it's the same thing where he fit the part physically I put his contacts in backstage I painted his face for him I was there backstage I had pictures with the band it was very cool moment for me because it was like this is fucking insane because I'm watching God of Thunder I'm watching my shit all happen on the end of Nitro and you had breakfast with

Gene Simmons and his life yeah at the house and Eric was there for like all that stuff but that's not normal stuff you talk about because it's like you're not reporting it because once again, this is NDA shit. You're dealing with the creating the version of his look. I created the coffin designs. And then when I tried to tell him, I pitched his Iron Maiden, because that's what I was designing around. He didn't like that because that was the

name of the competitor band of his error. So I came up with the name Resurrection Chamber, and he was fine with that. And said, don't call it that. I changed all my artwork to say Resurrection Chamber. Because I was thinking this would become a toy and just like all the spawn toys. And then I

but with Brian Adams, once again, he's known as who he is. I don't think he liked the character gimmick, even though he liked Kiss in the band. That's why when Dale Porborg took over the character, he was better suited because he was a Kiss fan. He still plays him today. He has toys made and everything.

Well, he and Gene are still friends. Yeah, they're still, like, I see Dale, and I've given him armor pieces and given him, and I have parts of the belt right there and the arm greaves from that job. And Dale's come by here, and I've given him free stuff, like to make his character better, like the shoulder, ads. But at the end of wrestling, when WCW closed, the hydraulic coffin, it's deeper, it has insane asylum padding and the hydraulic rigs, and the main costumes went missing.

So they've gone, someone has them somewhere. And I think that stuff was all supposed to go to California moving in storage for Gene Simmons or at the end. It never made it. And it's basically someone out there has it, which is the mystery of where that is. it's a full version of this hydraulics of two feet deep hydraulic platforms that would be worth finding to trust me I've heard people that might have had it and I'd detective hunted that motherfucker and cannot find it

and two copies of the suit and it wasn't the full suit it was the two versions of the cape I did that used to leap inside his coffin armored suit I mean I speculated maybe the stunt guy that built a hydraulic thing might he hid it in some barn but that's a really that's one of a kind piece well because a lot of stuff kind of got falling through the cracks from the end of wcd oh yes and it's like

but that was um but seeing that was um but seeing that and seeing it on tv and watching it all the time and some it wasn't as practical sometimes where they couldn't take it places but i tried to make show stopping shit as what i was trying to by now you know that the bischoff family and the thompson family man we are dog crazy i've been telling you about my new dog i didn't know i was getting a new dog, but I sure am glad I did. My wife brought home a dog that fits in the palm of my hand, and she named him a little daddy. And I thought, man, I don't know if I like this idea.

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For up to 40% off your order, Betterwild.com slash fish off. Jacob Simmel, I'm from Bulls Gap, Tennessee. I was looking for a house, and Jason, when I talked to him, it seemed like he knew a lot about what he was talking about, and he was a big help with anything I ever needed. It's my first time buying a house, so I didn't know what I was getting into. It was a good experience. I closed actually a week earlier than planned. Anytime I needed help with anything or had any questions, he'd answer right away and

help me learn a lot, too. I'd gladly recommend anybody. Y'all are a big help, and if I ever go to buy a house again, I'd go with y'all again. My name is Jacob Simmel, and I got into my first time with the team at Save at Conrad.com. In the last number 212, non-equal housing lender. Savewithconrad.com. If that idea would have probably evolved maybe two years sooner, I think it probably would have taken off. Unfortunately, 99 was a bad time for anything to get off the ground. But you not only worked with characters and special effects, you also worked on the belt, the WCW,

belt and Goldberg's belt. Tell me about that process. The World Pidal, which is, everyone knows is the big gold belt or the Krumner belt. At one point, they made a decision, and I'm thanking Craig and Annette are producers, that because they have double ring truck. Craig Leathers was our director, and Annette was his assistant. He did producing, but he's running like the cameras and the shot stuff, and sometimes the creative stuff gets disseminated down. So I think this is more like a production decision where we have two ring trucks. We only have one belt.

The one belt has a bend in the top of it. We probably need to make more belts so that they go as a prop on each truck, which makes technical sense because then you don't get things like Ray Mysterio with WWB putting it in his luggage and then he someone in England steals it. Then they have to get all the Bobby's out and hunt it and then they find it. And like weird shit. It's like you take that as like treated like the Stanley Cup. and it's got to go with the plane with you or whatever,

but there's only one of them, which Rick Flair made a long time ago, and I didn't realize it was pure silver. So I proposed this idea that I take the belt over a weekend. I take it off the strap, and I re-leather the strap to fix it, and then we make molds off the belt, and then I go and cast,

I have the local foundry that does my bronze work called Ward's Sculptial Art. I don't know if they're still around, but they used to do all my bronze casting back then. they, I have them make me three copies of the belt at the time. And the reason I did three, I was thinking that if this happens again, I need to have one here so that it goes in and out of circulation. So if shit comes in for repair, you're not fucking up with the assemble of order. And what the belts are, they're cast bronze,

they're 24-carat plate. And I had a company called S.D. Simmons blading that did religious stuff, like a Russian-Ukrainian guy, he did my plating for me back then. And he's not in business any longer. And then I had my neighbors here in the building that were jewelry gem-setters. They settled the stone. And they're cubic zirconian CZ. This here is my number five copy of the bronze past piece. And then there's the original belt. So that's the original big gold belt? Yeah. Wow. And that's the one I've repaired. and pulled molds off of.

So you've got it? No, that's not mine. Oh, okay. This is mine. Okay. And then that's the leather they got back from me. When I re-leathered it, I happened to have it up in storage. Wow.

And it was hidden away, and there was a phone call, and I just walked up in the storage thing, and it was tucked in a box, and they're like, can we have that? I'm like, sure. And I use that as all the patterns and stuff I made off of it. And so it's the real strap on it, too. And then that's the real plate. it was all fully restored. Really impressive.

The original belt was actually, this is gold and this is 24-carat. It's silver. And it was gold-plated and I think they do a process where they strip it away so you have gold and silver. Where when we did it, we always saw it as gold.

And when we got it and molded it, we just made bronze copies. And what this mitigation on the surface is, that's a patina, probably coming from a particle cracks in the bronze in the casting, and eventually it's aging. So in order to fix this plate, you just scrub it, take it off the leather, and replay it.

All the belts have AFX studios engraved on the back of them, and I have my old email address and on each of all the plates. So if anyone says they have the real belt, no fucking way. Take the plates off and look at the back with what I engraved on all pieces. Kevin Nash and DDP later I made belts for them because I went around thinking I could monetize this and I had the mold. So I approached anyone that held the title and offered them that. Later on for WWE, I made ECW belts. I did the King of the Ring crown for Booker.

And then they had be bid on other stuff. And I did power lifting belts that looked like wrestling belts. And I did the hardcore belt for wrestling early on, my first belt. but I'm not a belt maker. It was, Andre's a basically a fixer, worker problem solver guy, and they don't know how to use me.

And I've done bronze statues, so they just said, we're fucked and we need this in like a week or two. And then I just facilitated the problem. I don't go around trying to sell UFC belts and boxing championships.

I just became what they needed me to become because I had to done statues and stuff. So it's a, I don't think a lot of artists have multi-dimensional, abilities. I think you've got costume makers and makeup artists and special effects and you've got designers. I became more like a creative entity so that any response I could answer. And then I had all these skills, whether I'm applying Kevin's makeup or I'm drawing a picture. So in a sense,

I became a costume designer, an art director, a creative producer, a fixer, a fucking maker of things. A belt maker. Anything that the request came. So like I'm a short cook and the ticket comes in this is Jesus statue with a dead kid and fucking fat old man. Then you're like, and you make it. And that's my whole life. And it made me a way better artist, way more well-rounded. Because I've now worked in so many different materials. And then he's like asking me to make something for his Harley.

And I'm like, oh, fuck, I'll mold his tank and sculpt some shit. I don't like to say no, but that made me a way better, a different type of artist. So I'm not, I'm multi-dimensional or more like a creative entity where I can think of shit, or I can put myself now in the shoes of the producer or the directors. I bring a lot to a project because I can analyze stuff or I have a very creative mind that thinks around things. My problem solving. What are you doing now?

I look around in the studio and there's stuff from movies, TV studios. What are the big projects you're working on now? Nothing now because the movie industry has collapsed. for the past 15 years, I've run a really big makeup effects company where we would do like Captain America 4 and Marvel and do Paul Bittney's vision makeups. And sometimes we're collaborating with very famous special effects companies. Like when we work on Walking Dead, we're not making all the zombie stuff. We're working for a very famous company to do the zombie makeups. We're part of the hit, like the shooting teams that go in.

And then some jobs we partner with other people, other jobs my company, like, them for Amazon and Sony. We're the designers. We work with Little Marvin, their showrunner, he's executive producer, writing, directing, and the famous directors that come in, we would break down the scripts, create all the stuff, and make whatever's in his head, transmutate the words on paper to the celluloid and the physical stuff. Some jobs, you might do one thing, like a tattoo for Matthew McConaughey's arm in some movie, and you never see him, you just send it to them. So we can act as a support service for movies. We can act as the main design and builder and we can offer stuff for the prop. Sometimes we do rentals. So there's

not a set in stone approach. It's more like you're moving fluidly for creative stuff. I'm developing medical models. I did a lot during the pandemic for chiropractic schools with 3D printed parts. So it's not like any mass. I have meetings with producers later this week that might have three horror movies they want to talk about or they're designing stuff in verticals. I work on jobs where I do art direction and production design for Chick-fil-A and Delta, but I'm not doing this. I'm telling someone like, I'm looking at a room going, we want to film in here. I think maybe might read some red in the background because your logo is red, white, and blue, or whatever it is, or Chick-fil-A, and I morph into what they want. I don't tell them about Walking Dead and Wrestling

and Goldberg and Hogan and Sting because they don't care. They think it's neat, but all they want to hear about is their... Chicken logo. Yeah, or getting Mark Kathy dressed in a Santa suit for a funny thing and making sure the hair doesn't mess of his face or something. They're not there. So I'm adjusting my skill level and my technique to whatever the request is. So the short-over-cooked bill, but whoever hires me. Millionaire people want their kids sculpted. Some guy wants the disguised makeup for a funny YouTube video. I'm still doing creative stuff. And I love working on movies because of the money and stuff. But the business is changing and it's all moving to overseas and the bottom lines.

So you have to figure out your newer place. So the place I'm in now is sort of like when wrestling ended. The movie industry sort of ended. And it's still coming back slowly and there's stuff popping up, but it's not what it's been for 15 years. And all the lessons I learned when I left wrestling and the mistakes I made financially, I learned so much that I told myself I would never do that again. So I went into low power mode.

I refined my studio. I'm reinventing the way my shop is. I'm kind of preparing for the next eight or 10 or 12 years in my life. And I remodeled the whole shop. I figured to make displays, maybe give out of museum tours of my shop, the show process, and still open to anything creative. It doesn't have to be the next kiss job or the development of stuff because the money isn't there in certain markets.

So I thought maybe I'd go on to work for more wrestling companies, but when you started dealing with other wrestling companies, no one wanted to spend the money. or you're dealing with independent wrestlers that don't have the money to pay. Sure. So once certain levels of the financial goes, you have to find different ones. So maybe my new money is from research and development for a medical company model, making a robot or something, you know, like whatever it is. It's like I'm going to put my home.

Andre, it's been really fascinating. I've probably talked to you more now in the net last two hours and we have in the last 20 years. So it's been great. I've learned a lot. And you've cleared up a lot of things. things that I didn't quite remember. I'd like to thank you for the opportunity you gave me. It really changed my life.

Changed both our lives, brother. Thanks. Thank you.