The Bill Simmons Podcast - Sixers Mania, the Masters, 'WrestleMania 34,' and Making 'Andre the Giant' | The Bill Simmons Podcast (Ep. 350)

Episode Date: April 9, 2018

HBO and The Ringer's Bill Simmons is joined by Cousin Sal to mull over the surprising success of the Philadelphia 76ers (03:30), Patrick Reed's win in Augusta (15:00), and 'WrestleMania 34' (21:00). Then, Bill and Sean Fennessey sit down with 'Andre the Giant' director Jason Hehir to discuss meeting with Vince McMahon (41:15), how important editing is to a documentary (01:07:45), Andre's sex life (01:15:00), interviewing Robin Wright (01:35:00), the use of narrators in documentaries (01:40:00), and more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Don't forget to listen to the Shack House podcast presented by Callaway. This week, they broke down Patrick Reed winning the Masters yesterday. Jeff Shackelford stayed there. He was there on Sunday. House watched it and lost money on it, which we're going to discuss in a little bit with Cousin Sal. They broke down everything that happened.

I thought it was a great Masters. Really did. I really enjoyed it. Ringer NBA show this week. We are heating it up. We're ramping it up. Wednesday night, be ready because after everything shakes out on Wednesday night and we know all the playoff matchups, we are doing an emergency Wednesday night Ringer NBA show podcast. I will be hosting this one with a bunch of Ringer staffers. We will start taping at about 10, 15 PM, Wednesday night, West coast time. It will be available for all the night owls, as well as the Thursday AM audience.

Excited for this. I think this will be a really fun Wednesday night. I can't remember more things up in the air heading into the last three days of the season. Put some Tankapalooza stuff as well. So check that out. And then finally, Andre the Giant. Tomorrow night, HBO. 10 p.m.

Just got a framed poster we're putting in the office. So couldn't be more excited. They did a nice plug for it yesterday at WrestleMania. I know you're going to enjoy it. There's no way you won't enjoy it. It's really good. Coming up later, we're going to enjoy it. There's no way you won't enjoy it. It's really good.

Coming up later, we're going to have the director of the Andre the Giant documentary, Jason Hare, my own friend, along with Sean Fantasy, editor-in-chief of The Ringer. And we're going to talk about how we made Andre, kind of what it's like to make a documentary. It's pretty inside baseball, but hopefully you guys will find it interesting. Making a documentary is a lot harder and more complicated than I think people realize. And we're going to go into a bunch of that, a bunch of the decisions we made with the film.

There's not going to be a lot of spoiler alerts, but if you want to save it until after you see the doc, that's fine too. But we are going to have that coming up first. A rare appearance, a rare non-football season appearance from the cuz, Cousin Sal. We're going to talk about all the money we've lost the last couple of months. But first, our's on the phone. He's driving into work.

A lot of stuff is going on. We usually don't activate the Cuzz's emergency bat signal during the off football season, especially during this time of year, but we had to. We've lost an incredible amount of money. We just had an amazing Masters. We just had WrestleMania. We have the NBA playoffs coming up, but more importantly,

we've lost an incredible amount of money and we have a dramatic gambling announcement. I would dare say this is the most dramatic gambling announcement we've ever made. Don't you think so? This is pretty good. And it's going to affect a lot of people who I think already hate us and some that don't hate us but soon will, I think. Yeah.

So before the NBA season, we went big on the under for wins with the Philadelphia 76ers, which I think was 42 and a half. And the thinking was there was a couple of things going in. One, we thought the number was too high. Two, Joel Embiid had played 31 games total in three years. And we did not see any roadmap for him to play more than 50. It just did not seem realistic at all. They were playing Ben Simmons at point guard,

which seemed ridiculous because he can't shoot. They had no bench whatsoever to speak of. And we thought the East was going to be pretty good. And we thought this was a laugh. The more you talk about it, let's do it again. I like it. I like the reasoning. It was great.

They were a young, injury-prone team. Oh, Fultz was already out, so they had already lost the Fultz trade heading into the season. It just seemed like the Stars had a line for us, and then the season starts, and Bede's not playing back-to-back, so we're feeling pretty good. He hasn't had his injury yet. It's going. It's going.

All of a sudden, they're like 37-30. We start feeling bad and now they can't lose and now the skies have parted and now they are like, they're not even a sleeper anymore for the Eastern Conference. Their odds are 7-1

to 5-1 to win the East, depending on where you find them. We liked it so much. Sal, why don't you tell the announcement? Well, I'm sorry, Sal, why don't you tell the announcement? Well, I'm sorry, Philadelphia fans, because as you know, like Bill's Patriots lost to the Eagles in the Super Bowl, and I bet against Nick Foles all the way through the playoffs, and as Bill points out, we took the under of the Sixers.

But yes, we are in fact jumping on the Philadelphia 76ers at 7-1 to win the Eastern Conference in the NBA. What a dramatic turn. We went from thinking they were going to win 42 games or less to now backing them to make the NBA Finals. And here's the case for it. The C's have parted for them from a seeding standpoint. It looks like they're going to be the number three seed, which means in round one,

they're probably going to play Miami or Milwaukee. They'll be favored in either series. And I think they have a, I think they would beat Milwaukee. I don't even think that's a contest. Miami is a little more, you know, Miami is a weird team. They're really well coached.

They can play a lot of different lineups. They have some experience. I think that would be a harder series, but I still think Philly would win. Philly's got a great home court advantage. Then round two, they would play the winner of Boston versus either Miami or Milwaukee. Boston has been just decimated. I am the biggest homer there is, and I just do not see a roadmap to make the Eastern finals without your two best players. It certainly never happened before. But more importantly for them, Toronto and Cleveland have to play in round two.

So now we're in a situation where Philly in round three is either going to be hosting Cleveland. So they'll either be favored or it'll be a pretty close line. They'll be close to even, something like that. We could go against our bet. Or they'll be a pretty close line. They'll be close to even, something like that. We could go against our bet. Or they'll be playing Toronto. Toronto would have home court advantage. And Philly will be the underdog in that series, but not by a ton.

Against Cleveland, they'd have home court. And beyond all of this, Philly's playing great and Ben Simmons has gone to another level. And when they have Embiid back, they're going to have two of the best 15 players in the league. They have a bench now. They made the Bellinelli-Iliasova trades that really deepened their bench.

Sarge is playing great. JJ Redick has been unleashed. And they, honestly, if I had to bet my life on it, I can't believe I'm saying this, but I think they might be the safest pick. What do you think? I agree with everything you said, except for if and when they play Cleveland in the conference finals.

I think Cleveland will still be favored. I think if Cleveland were to get that far, which they really should, I think they'd be a two-to-one favorite over Philly. But that's okay. I would still like Carpet. You think they'd be a two-to-one favorite with no home court advantage? Yeah, because I think they'll have turned it on. LeBron put up two 45-point games against Toronto.

I just think a lot of people have been betting. They'll bet Cleveland up to a 2-1 favorite. Maybe it won't open that high, but I think it'll go to that. But the point is, folks, we are now, Bill and I and Joe House, I'm throwing them in the mix. Yeah, he's in there too. We need to share the hate. We are now the Joe Carter.

We're now the Scott Stevens to your Philadelphia franchises. I'm sorry, but we've gone the other way. You had a good thing going with us. Yeah. They felt great. They've won 16 straight. And the worst thing that's happened to the to the city of Philadelphia in 2018 is that me you and House have jumped

on the bandwagon it's just a terrible turn of events for Philadelphia Fultz is back Embiid is coming back Simmons is going to be the rookie of the year everything is coming up roses but unfortunately for you guys you have three people on your bandwagon that you just don't want

we have had this has been the worst betting stretch of my entire life, starting with the Super Bowl when, actually starting, yeah, starting with the Super Bowl. When I tried to middle the Eagles covering four and a half with the Pats just winning and the Pats were up by one with 10 minutes left and somehow gave up a eight minute drive and blew the game. And then from there, we have lost.

We're on pace to lose every NBA future bet that we made in October, which is amazing because one of them was the Pelicans, Mavericks, and Lakers, all three will not make the playoffs. Boogie Cousins gets hurt in January. And that's like a cross-off. Oh, we won that one. Done. And then Davis starts playing like the number two MVP candidate, which he is. Raejean Rondo, out of nowhere, starts feeling it.

Emeka Okafor, all these weird people are playing well for them. And now the Pelicans, if they beat the Clippers tonight, are going to make the playoffs. And I don't know how we lost that bet, Sal. I think, Rondo, that was personal against you. But, yeah, you're right. And frigging hell, they beat Golden State. Not that Golden State needs to win all these games,

but just to beat them over the weekend. And now really we have no chance to hedge that Pelicans bet because they're favored by seven over the Clippers in LA. Clippers couldn't stay alive one more game for it to matter. And then Wednesday, I think they finish off against San Antonio at home. The Pelicans do. I don't know at that point who the Spurs

are going to be starting. We need that goofy Clippers team that's already been eliminated from the playoffs to somehow beat the Pelicans tonight. And I'm not confident. Here's some of the other losers that we had. And I don't know if you had all of these, but I know I did.

I parlayed. I parlayed. I loved Utah to make the playoffs. And I was right. Utah is going to be the four seed. Unfortunately, I parlayed that with Portland will not make the playoffs. So cross that one off.

That was a loss. I love the Rockets to win the playoffs. So cross that one off. That was a loss. Right. I love the Rockets to win the Southwest. The odds were minus 115. Seemed like a lock. You know what else seemed like a lock? The Celtics winning the Atlantic at minus 400. I didn't realize that we were going to get 60 combined games out of Hayward and Kyrie.

Cross that one off. I had Miami winning the Southeast at plus four. That's going to win. I don't want to jinx that, but yeah, plus 425, right? Yeah, so that one's going to win? Yeah, I think so. They're a game up on Washington, and Miami plays okay. I mentioned it, so now it's not going to win.

A rare possible win. I didn't know I was alive with anything. We had Dallas, the Lakers, and the Pelicans was plus 115 that they won't make the playoffs. I think if we could have tripled down on this bet in January when Cousins went down, we would have, right? We would have quintupled it. We would have sextupled it.

So that one lost. Yeah. Unless the Clippers miraculously win. Philly under was 41 and a half, not 42. We have... Yeah, so we had the over for OKC, which is

52 and a half wins. They get Carmelo. We have no idea that Carmelo is somehow going to make their team worse. And they blow, I would say, somewhere between 12 and 15 games in the last three minutes. I have no idea how they didn't win 53 games, but we have that. We did a flyer on Kyrie to win the scoring title, which lost. And then we jumped on Jeff Hornacek as the next coach fired, like six games into the season. Because I called you and I was like, I think Jeff Hornacek is going to get fired. And then the Knicks immediately went on a winning streak.

Porzingis got hot and like three other coaches got fired. So we lost that one. My point is. Oh, and then finally we have the big bet we made, which was worth more than all these other bets combined was Cavs warriors to play in the finals was plus one 20. And now that's like three to one. Yeah. That's like three to one.

So the price that we bought it in October is somehow worse than it is now. I've learned a lot of lessons. Sal lesson. Number one, don't gamble. Lesson. Number two, don of lessons, Sal. Lesson number one, don't gamble. Lesson number two, don't do NBA futures. Lesson number three, just bet the thing straight up versus throwing them into these weird parlays. Because a lot of the stuff I liked, you know, like Utah making the playoffs and like Mavs, Lakers not making the playoffs. We should have just done that. I have a lot of regrets, cuz.

I really do have a lot of regrets. Yeah, but like the Lakers not make playoffs. Was it like minus 400? Like that's why we parlay those things to get it down to a reasonable price. And, you know, the same thing with Cavs Warriors. Like, all right, by this time, we probably thought that would be minus 280 at this point.

But no, what'd you say? Plus 280? Plus three to one. Yeah. The worst, the Warriors are having one of the weirdest post title seasons I can remember. They're just completely disinterested in the regular season and they think they could just turn it on in these games and they can't. And, uh, they're gonna, I remember with Joe Hass and I did the over under, wondering how the Warriors were not going to win 70 games with how loaded they were.

And they're not going to win 60. Now, Curry has missed 30 games. Durant missed, I think, 10 or 11. Still no excuse for them not to get to 60. I think that's an embarrassing performance by them this season. I'm disappointed in them. Do we have 1 a thousand player game injuries between our bets? The more you mentioned it, like all these bets we've made, like, oh, this one's at 30.

This one's at 40. This one's at. So I'm like, I'm adding these up and we're we're in we're you know, we're at least 600 player games. I know injury is a part of it, but yeah, we got we got hit hard. Right. Yeah. 600 player games. I know injury is a part of it, but yeah, we got, we got hit hard, right? Yeah. Well, the ones that we were the most wrong on were Portland,

Portland heading into the season seemed like a team that was going to blow things up after about six weeks. And it went the other way. Yeah. They're going to be a three seed. Dame Lillard, I think is a top five MVP candidate and, and they've comfortably made the playoffs.

And then the other one was just kind of betting against the Pelicans, which I still think is a good idea. I have no idea how they're going to make the playoffs. I watched their team and it's like they're playing Golden State the other night and they need to get a stop and Rondo pickpockets Durant to win the game, basically. It's like, Rondo, anybody could have had him. He was available for a million dollars. Right.

So anyway, enjoy our... We're the ones that should be available for a million dollars. They should, teams like the Pelicans and the Sixers, they should parade us at halftime. We should have our own banners. These teams are going nowhere until we bet against them. And I'm convinced now. I used to think it was just a coincidence or whatever.

Bad luck. No. All loss. Well, further in that case. So the masters yesterday. Oh yeah. We turned it to golf.

Yeah. You and, you and Joe house, I think are at the highest level of, of a degenerate golf gambling. You're watching every week. You have like real hardcore opinions on these guys. Patrick Reed heading into Sunday. It's minus 150. You can have everybody else but Patrick Reed.

So basically all we have to do is have Patrick Reed not win the Masters and we win our bet. So of course we go all in. We think Patrick Reed's going to self-destruct. He's going against Rory. That feels great. We figure somebody out of like the, the, the guys who are around minus 10, minus nine, we figured one of those guys make a jump and we were going to, this is easy money. Patrick Reed duffs his first drive.

I think it seemed like he was going to be like minus two after the first three holes. Rory starts missing putts. Now we start getting nervous. Spieth starts making just a magnificent run. And it really seems like Spieth's going to catch him. And then Reed makes this really long, crazy putt on 12. And all of a sudden there's six holes left.

It's like, wow, are we going to lose this? Patrick Reed's going to win the Masters. Nobody in Augusta is rooting for him. How is this going to happen? I feel like we single-handedly turned his luck on that one. What do you think? Yeah. And it was crazy luck too.

I mean, Patrick Reed, if you watched, he would hit it like right. You know, I heard the word tributary said in a foreign accent like 45 times this weekend. And he just missed word tributary said in a foreign accent like 45 times this weekend, and he just missed the tributary, and it's just like a foot away from the tributary and about to bounce down and roll down, and it doesn't. And then his next shot, he, like, pops it in from, like, 25 yards, you know. And it was that all weekend long, and, like, I'm making jokes. I think I said to you, like, the Braves have been nice enough to offer their tarp in case Patrick Reed needs to get fitted for the green jacket.

Yeah, that's true. Meanwhile, I'm like 15 pounds fatter than him, and, you know, we have money against Patrick Reed. It's like, it's the worst thing you could do, but whatever. Yeah, I mean, then Fowler ran out of holes, and that was it, and we lost that. And even in the stupid one, just a throwaway bet that I convinced you guys to go. I said the final shot by the winner would be under three and a half feet. And how far was it? How far was that shot?

It was four feet. Yeah, we don't know is the answer, but it wasn't three and a half. It was probably 3.7 or 3.6, but they marked it as four, and we're losers yet again. I was laughing because he's putting his third shot on the 18 is this long winding downhill putt that could go wrong for 40 different reasons. And so my number one priority is please miss this badly. And then in the, in the back of my head, I'm like, you know,

it would suck as if he leaves this four feet away And then in the, in the back of my head, I'm like, you know, it would suck as if he leaves this four feet away and then has the four footer to make, to make it. And then everything loses. And it's exactly what happened. It's, it's like, he picked up the ball and walked it over to the four foot mark just to, just to screw us the most. I, and the funniest thing was I've never, there's been a couple other times when the gallery was pretty lukewarm. Like I remember when Vijay Singh won that year, they're pretty lukewarm on him. I remember Mike Weir, when he won that year, the gallery was just confused and tepid applause. You could tell when the gallery is not really behind somebody. I've never ever, just through

the TV, I've never felt the gallery more apathetic and rooting kind of secretly against somebody for an entire round more than Patrick Reed they were going bonkers for Spieth they're going absolutely apeshit for Ricky Fowler they're going apeshit for Rory

it's like please, John Rahm anybody, please, please no, please, Patrick Reedm, anybody, please, please start. No, please, Patrick Green can't win. He should kind of own it, right? Like, he should grow the Kenny Powers goatee and just start doing... He should start doing the Shooter McGavin

shooting thing after he makes it. Like, just be the villain. Just own it. Flip everyone the finger walking to the next hole. Just do it. Whatever, dude. Just walk with your pants down. Who cares, right? Why did we hate him so much?

He's a nice American kid. He's young. He's dedicated to the game. He's been screwed so many times before. I know this because Harry of the Degenerate Trifecta bets in every tournament and every tournament he blows it on Sunday.

Right. He stayed away from him this week so he had a chance. And yeah, I don't know why we hated Patrick Reed so much. 55 to 1 odds, he comes in. 55. And House had Spieth was his big one, right, to win the Masters? Right.

Yeah, he had Spieth. That was the big one. The funny thing with the Masters, and especially after going there, it makes more sense, is you're feeling so good when whoever you're rooting for gets through, like, to 16, that par three, and you're like, oh, this is great. Oh, one more birdie. And 17 and 18 are just impossible. 17 is easier than 18.

But 18, I tweeted this yesterday when House and I, we walked the course on Thursday. We got it. My dad was just parked on the 16th hole all day. House and I walked the course on Thursday. We got it. My dad was just parked on the 16th hole all day. House and I walked the course. We walked down 10 with Spieth, which I thought was good karma for yesterday. Obviously not. But then when we were at 18, it's just impossible. Like you could see it when they had the shot of Spieth from behind before he drove.

You have such a small window to go straight. You really have to just hit it straight. And then on top of it you can't go in the trap on the left you can't go too far to the right because then you have to basically hit it over the trap and it's almost like pinball

and it just to just be oh he'll he could birdie 18 now it never works out that way and even with Reed i was like our one chances for reed to bogey this this hole's impossible and meanwhile he yeah yeah he makes it i wish you were right bill i wish i wish it were like pinball because i only the most i ever lost playing pinball was like three dollars and 25 cents and uh this is just getting just getting

ridiculous and uh you know i don't know if you want to talk about WrestleMania, but... I do. There's a sportsbook that... An online sportsbook said they took $100,000 in WrestleMania bets, all small. And Brock Lesnar was 5-1 to beat Roman Reigns. Like, how are we not on the easy stuff? Crazy. how are we not on the easy stuff so everybody and their brother thought that

Brock Lesnar was gonna lose and go to the UFC and it was like this Roman Reigns this three year push that was gonna culminate with him winning this Wrestlemania and then Brock Lesnar was gonna leave I am rarely shocked by wrestling

now granted I was groggy Because we were at like the five hour mark By the time this ended I mean it was the longest Wrestlemania It was the equivalent of a 20 inning baseball game Where you're just The announcers are getting punchy But I gotta say I was flabbergasted

When Lesnar won I did not see that coming My son was flabbergasted Everyone was flabbergasted Crazy Everyone was flabbergasted. Crazy. Do you think they changed it? I mean, I guess it wouldn't matter because at some point in the match, rain started bleeding.

I mean, it was to the point where like, well, if this is fake, it's too much. It's stupid. It looks dumb. If this is real blood, what the hell is the matter with these people? We got to stop this thing there was so much blood

going and Lesnar pinned him shortly thereafter oh you think maybe he did that cause of the blood cause it seemed like I don't know

I think it had to end soon either way he did the same thing with Randy Orton where he was doling out elbows that seemed

intentional to get the guy to bleed. And they caught him wrestling to get him to bleed hard way. And it seemed like that's what happened. And either that or the other way maybe they do it is Reigns already has bladed earlier and it's coagulated. So then when Lesnar hits it, it just opens up. But whatever they did didn't work

because he was bleeding to the point that my son, who watches horror movies all the time and isn't fazed by anything, was like, oh my God, he's going to bleed to death. He was actually scared. It seemed like he might bleed to death for 20 seconds. When the referee puts the gloves on and then puts a parka on and covers his face, they really did a lot to protect that there. But yeah, 5-1 odds.

The center of disease control came out. Yeah, I have no idea why they do five hours for these WrestleManias. It's inexplicable. There's just no way for the crowd. You and I have both been at WrestleManias, and it's really hard for the crowd to keep the energy past the four-hour mark. This one went as long as it ever has. There were some good matches.

Ronda Rousey was surprisingly good. I was stunned by that. The Styles match was good with a nice little turn at the end. That was fun. I loved Braun Strowman pulling the 10-year-old out of the stands, although my son was devastated. It would have been his dream.

I was thinking this might be our parent corner, but yeah, I had the same thing on our end because we, a lot of times, we went to, we didn't go last year, but we went to WrestleMania before that. We try to go whenever we can try to match it around our kids spring break schedule if it works but uh yeah i got the same thing from my

kids like that could have been me i was like that wasn't going to be you don't worry you weren't going to be pulled in and now this 10 year old with uh with with hair that matches tommy fleetwood is a tag team champion right Braun Strowman, right? My son really, my son not only was disappointed that he wasn't picked, even though he was 3,000 miles away, but was talking about how he would have come in and tried to cheap shot Cesaro. He would

have walked over to Cesaro all scared and then punched him in the nuts as hard as he could and then ran back and tagged Braun Strowman. So he had a whole game plan. If Braun Strowman's ever looking for more 10-year-olds, I just want to say don't look further than my son because he's ready. He has all the strategy. And they really, like, the smaller kids really do have an advantage

with punching somebody in the balls. It's right there. It's a straight shot. They can get all their leverage behind it, and there's no way to defend it. So Cesaro, I think, lucked out. That Braun Strowman thing was a great idea though because it could have gone a bunch of different ways.

I personally thought it would have been funnier to pull an adult out of the stands who was definitely one of those guys. It's real to me, damn it. One of those kind of those guys. It's real to me, damn it, one of those kind of wrestling guys. And that guy actually could have become somebody for them. I don't know how they have a 10-year-old travel with Braun Strowman,

but a 30-year-old kind of lifelong living in his mom's basement kind of guy could have worked. I wanted Cesaro's big thing. Cesaro's big thing is to swing. Or at least he used to be. He doesn't do it as much anymore. He used to swing his opponent. And the crowd, even though he's a heel, they would count how many rotations

he'd be swinging the opponent. And it would get up to like 10 or 12. And the guy, everybody would be dizzy just watching. I was like, oh, he's going to swing this 10-year-old. He's going to launch him out into the third row. This is going to be the greatest thing ever. But they didn't think that far. But yeah, you're right.

WrestleMania has been around 34 years. Wrestling has been around 100 years. And to not make a kid a champion until now is surprising to me. It reminded me, this is going way back, but there was this famous Hulk Hogan match when he was in Minnesota with Mean Gene Okerlund. And he was going against some tag team that was really good. And I guess either his tag team partner called in sick or something happened.

And Mean Gene Okerlund was his partner. And it was in Minnesota. And Hulk had a lot of Minnesota ties because he had wrestled there in the territory. And I think Mean Gene did too. And Hulk took on both guys, but then at the end brought Mean Gene in and like threw, did like a Mean Gene splash and Mean Gene pinned the guy and the crowd went like ape shit. And I thought that, I thought that was in play with the 10 year old, but I have no idea. Do you think that was prearranged or he really just picked the kid out?

No, it had to be. He had all the facial expressions down and everything. That kid, he knew what he was doing. He was tagged and he took three steps forward and then tagged back. Are you kidding me? Of course, they had to. It took a while to find him. Which son do you think would have done the best job

in that scenario out of your three sons? Well, I think Jack, but only because my 10-year-old, because only he would have been able to reason with his opponent. Nothing physical at all. He's a 55-pound weakling, but he knows how to inject logic into a discussion. So I think that would have been our best job. But I was thinking about Ben. Your boy would have

he would have kept this going for years. I don't know how long that Stroman what's the kid's name? Nicholas? No. I forget the kid's name. Nicholas, yeah. There's three things my son would have done. One is he would have taken off his shirt. That's a mortal lock. He absolutely 100% would

have taken off his shirt. He would have climbed to the top rope at some point and when he came in he would have taken off his shirt. That's a mortal lock. He absolutely 100% would have taken off his shirt. He would have climbed to the top rope at some point. And when he came in, he would have punched Cesaro on the balls. I promise you those three things would have happened, whether they were prearranged or not. He would have done all three of those things. That's great. Let's do a quick parent corner.

I'm going to start, Sal. Go ahead. My son has been playing baseball, much to my chagrin, uh, and happens to be good at it, which is just completely unexpected. He is been pitching. And what I can't figure out he's, he's pitched six innings.

Hasn't given up an earned run yet. And he's only given up one hit. Wow. What I couldn't figure out was how he knew how to change speeds and do all these things that like a pitcher can do because he really doesn't watch baseball. He's not a student of it. I just didn't understand it.

And so I asked him, I was like, why are you throwing change ups? Like, how do you know how to do that? And he explained that he he's, he's learned everything he knows in baseball from MLB, the show, the video game, including how to change speeds. So he's in these games.

He's going, getting a first strike on these kids, throwing the second one in the dirt and they swing at it. And then his third pitch is a change up that they swing two seconds too early. And if the change up's too high two, two seconds too early. And, and if, if the change up is too high and they don't swing in it, then he goes gas the next one. And it's all from the stupid video game that he plays. Um,

but that's not my parent corner. Um, you're supposed to, let me just first say, let me just say, how good would we have been if we had something other than that dumb Mattel game? Oh, in television,

three, three, not even in television, the thing you held in your hand, it had three red lights. Oh, yeah. And you hit it, and then you put the button, it would swing it. That's what we had to become professional. But go ahead, go along. Yeah, the stupid Mattel game. Yeah, we did not learn how to change speeds from our video games

in the early 80s. So anyway, you're supposed to wear a cup when you play, when you play baseball, you know, you might get hit a grounder. My son's playing. He's, he can play all over the place,

but he'll play catcher for two innings. He'll play third base, like all positions where you're going to hit the balls. And we thought he was playing, he was wearing a cup. And then we, we come to find out after one of these games, as he's getting undressed

after the game in our house that he wasn't wearing a cup he grabbed the tooth fairy pad from when he was a little small child when you lose a tooth and you put the tooth on the tooth fairy pad hoping the tooth fairy would get it that little pillow cushion

it says tooth fairy on it he was using that as his cup my son was pitching, catching and playing third base with a Tooth Fairy pillow covering his balls. My son. Thank you. Wow.

Yeah. Thank you. And that worked. I mean, he hasn't given up an earned run yet, right? Apparently it worked. You should market these. Shout out to the Tooth Fairy. Who needs protective cups?

Who needs plastic? Who needs 100 years of technology when Shout out to the Tooth Fairy. Who needs protective cups? Who needs plastic? Who needs 100 years of technology when you can have the Tooth Fairy pillow? So, we're keeping it going. We're not buying a cup. He likes the Tooth Fairy pillow, and that's what it is. Hopefully, he won't get hit in the nuts. That's great luck. Mine is baseball-related, too.

Not as good, but my four-year-old started. He had his first game the other day. And, you know, they set up these games, and my wife's out of town. The game is at 745 in the morning. So that means I have to get these kids out of the house faster than, way faster than I would on a school day. So, I mean, we're talking now Saturday I have to wake up at 6.40 and get them fed

and get them out of the house. I'm coaching too. At 7.15 I have to get them out and no one's moving. I dress my four-year-old in his outfit the night before. He sleeps in it. He's got the belt on.

Even the cleats. I was like, you don't have to wear the cleats. He's like, no, I want to even the cleats like i like i'll think you don't have to wear the cleats like no i want to wear the cleats i was like all right you're gonna tear up your sheets but whatever i don't care wear the cleats so he's wearing the cleats i wake up i miraculously get everyone out of the house in time and then they ask me uh the other coach asked me to line the field now have you ever lined the field before no No, it's a nightmare. Yeah, it's a nightmare. A lot harder than it looks, and even harder than it looks at 7.30 a.m. I'm not a drinker, but the way I line this field, if the cops had observed this, they would have said,

you're coming in with us for a little bit. We need to take your kid. You failed the sobriety test of lining the field. And I put it on Instagram at the Cousin Sal, but it's an absolute mess to the point where my four-year-old looks at it and says, Dad, is that really the best you could do? Oh, no. Unfortunately. Yeah, yeah.

And he doesn't say things like that, but he looked at me in disgust and shook his head, and little kids were running like drunks for two hours trying to get down first. They were wobbling back and forth. But the bigger point is, like, we're grown-ups setting the schedules for these games, right? It's not these kids setting the schedules. We're grown-ups setting, and we're grown-ups who have to get our kids to the game. Why are we killing ourselves with the 7.45 start? I don't know.

Let's figure something out where the 9 a.m. is the earliest start on a we killing ourselves with the 7.45 start? Let's figure something out where the 9 a.m. is the earliest start on a Saturday, for God's sake. My son had an 8.30 game and you have to get there at 7.45 and it's just too early. Even 8.30,

I would say maybe when I become sports czar, I have a whole plan for how to become sports czar. I'm going to try to pretend I'm a Trump sympathizer, but it's really going to be a nefarious plan to, to take the sports are position, but then turn on Trump after I have it. Um, when I do this,

no, no youth sports will start before nine o'clock. That'll be one of my rules. We got to look, start looking out for the parents. Yeah. And I see the 9 a.m. So we're at the 745 game, the 9 a.m. game. There's three fields and only one of them is taken.

I'm like, we couldn't play at nine on field C. Right. Facing south, whatever you call it. Come on. Get it together, Aaron. Yeah, well, wait. I mean, we've had soccer games with my daughter where they've had eight o'clock games, like an hour and 15 minutes from us where we've gotten up at like five 30 in the morning.

I mean, it's, it's insane. None of our kids are going to be playing for, you know, the Olympic team or the world cup team. I don't know why we do this for ourselves. I. Maybe yours. Maybe yours. No.

With the, uh, tooth fairy pad. We could do it. That might be it. He'll be giving Sports Illustrated features 10 years from now. I remember when Ben started playing baseball and he put the Tooth Fairy pillow in his crotch. That's right. Things really took off. Cuz, against all odds, you're taping it this week.

What's on the docket? Yeah, we're going a day later. We're going to go Thursday because we want to have the lines for the NBA first round playoff matchups and we're going to have hockey picks and all kinds of stuff for me and the January trifecta on against

all odds. I mean, this is really this is Harry's time of year, right? Golf. We didn't get a break. Do you realize the national championship of basketball was only a week ago Villanova Michigan like we didn't usually get like a two week break it went right into it Masters

basketball hockey lots of money to be lost yeah I remember when we were conceiving the against all odds podcast and whether a gambling podcast was feasible for every week for the entire year. And we were like, ah, well maybe. And it is like, think about like the start of March madness all the way through to masters.

Now you have NBA, NHL, you have Kentucky Derby of the three horse races. You have all the tennis coming up. You have the hot dog contest. It really was conceivable. Who knew? It was conceivable. There are NFL draft props up and that's not for another two and a half weeks. Yeah, there's a lot to cover. We might have to do an exorcism with me, you, and House. I don't know how that works. I don't know if it's ever. Maybe we go see some old Italian priest and he throws some water at us or something, but we need, we need something good to happen.

I like it. Maybe Sister Jane will, will lend her services. I don't know what that would do. Maybe we can hire her for the rigor. That's a good idea. Yeah. Because listen to Against All Odds this week. I might even make a cameo.

Until then, thanks for coming on. All right. All right. Good job, Ayo. Good job, Ayo. See you, bud. Before we get to Jason Hare and Sean Fantasy, let's talk about me undies.

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20% off free shipping, 100% satisfaction guarantee, the best and softest underwear you will ever own. Just go to meandys.com slash BS, a limited time offer. Start wearing the best underwear of your life. It changed my life. It's time to let Meandys change yours. Meandys.com slash BS. Coming up right now, here's the conversation I had with Jason Hare, director of the Andre the Giant documentary, as well as editor-in-chief of The Ringer, Sean Fennessy. We taped this the day after the red carpet premiere, which was a week ago in LA. It was like nine days ago. So we're riding high from that because it went really well. And this is a very deep dive examination of what it's like to make not only this documentary, but any

documentary. The process is complicated and hard. I have been involved in these really since about 2008. So I have 10 years now of just being immersed in this stuff. And we talked about some tips, some lessons, and some things you shouldn't do, some things you learn not to do, some things you want to do, and also a lot of the choices we made in this documentary. So hopefully you'll enjoy it. I think you're going to love this documentary when it comes out.

I'm pretty confident. Here it is, Jason and Sean right now. All right, we're taping this on a Friday, the day after the premiere of Andre the Giant, the documentary we did. Sean Fennessy is here, editor-in- documentary we did. Sean Fentis is here, editor-in-chief of The Ringer. Jason Hare is here, director

of Andre. We've worked together before. We have. Fab Five. You were a young kid. You just escaped the bowels of HBO. I'm kidding. Cutting my teeth in the business. And then we did Fab Five, which I think is probably the most watched 30 for 30. We've argued about this. They show did Fab Five, which I think is probably the most watched 30 for 30.

We've argued about this. They show. Fab Five's on the most. What do you think, Sean? It's probably the one I've seen the most because they air it all the time. All the time. They show it a lot around tournament time. They show it a lot around NBA finals.

They show it a lot around Midnight Madness time in October. And it's one of those that's kind of rewatchable. It's fun B like rewatchable. It's fun B-roll to watch. It's not. Yeah, we stumbled into this successful formula for 30 for 30 is just tell the story of this and the audience can jump in at any time. It's like Bad Boys Pistons was like that. The U.

It's just like, here's this life cycle of this thing that you cared about. And we go deep and come in at any time. It like oh here comes the weber timeout section all right i'll stay for 20 minutes i think that's exactly what andre is going to be too i learned lessons for that a week can he edit this as we go yeah yeah because are we talking in past tense or like people have seen this or they have not seen it they haven't let's say they haven't seen it. They haven't seen it. Yeah. Okay. Keep that in though. I think the FUD confusion. We're going raw, shaky camera.

So some of the lessons that I learned to do this Andre doc derived from that Fab Five one. I saw Fab Five on the plane on the way home from interviewing five guys in Florida who included Bean Jean and Hogan and a few other guys. And at the outset of this thing, I was trying to think of like, all right, we're going to start in France and end in France. And then we'll weave France all the way in. And we'll tell this A story and a B story about where he was from and where he got to. And I was overthinking it. And then I just happened to see on like ESPN2 on a late night flight, Fab Five,

and realized that the visceral enjoyment that people get from a lot of these documentaries is just cool B-roll and fun characters giving great sound bites. It's not that difficult a formula. But then the challenge becomes, how do you tell an awesome story knowing that that's the way

to keep the people hooked the whole time? That's the next level of this stuff. Yeah, Well, you have to sprinkle in a good example is I remember at the outset of this thing when I had reservations about doing it because I knew you were a huge pro wrestling fanatic and I knew nothing about that world. And you were like, obviously there's going to be moments that we put in there. Like when Snooker jumps off Andre's shoulders and I had no idea what you were talking about but you were a wrestling fan you i was just another level i knew of it yeah and i watched wrestlemania one and my brothers and i i vividly remember my brothers it was i think it was channel 56 at 11 o'clock on saturday mornings yeah them calling me into the room and saying this guy

andre the giant is going to be on after the break you're going to see this i vividly remember us watching it that day so i knew of wrestling i was a kid but i was not the guy, Andre the Giant, is going to be on after the break. You're going to see this. I vividly remember us watching it that day. So I knew of wrestling. I was a kid, but I was not the guy who bought the action figures and bought the magazines and stuff like that. I was not. Although I told Vince that I was as we were pitching this thing. I co-opted all the stories from my friends who were huge wrestling fans. So we went to a Catholic school.

We grew up and went to a Catholic school outside of Boston. And my friend Anthony had a wrestling magazine that the guy had blood all over him. And one of the nuns sent him to the principal's office for reading that because it was like the devil's work. So that was like a big wrestling mag thing in the 70s, 80s. They put the blood on the cover. Yeah. Or bloody pictures. Those magazines and the heavy metal magazines were behind like the bar at the magazine stand, you know.

Exactly. So it was Ozzy Osbourne, buddy, and they had off a bat. it was like uh the hacksaw jim duggan's bloody face yeah i mean the wwe was awesome to work with but the thing that took the longest with this whole process was them settling on the right director they were so protective of this ip this was like one of the most important people that had ever passed through their whole universe. And they wanted to make sure it was the right director. Somebody that vibe with me. Tell me about when you had that. I sound like a side reporter. Jason, talk about that time you had the, but you went in, you had that one-on-one with Vince. It was great. Well, you had that

one-on-one with Vince and it was like like you had to leave that meeting with vince being like okay i'm gonna improve this guy yeah there was well there was like a gauntlet that i had to go through yeah it was like first uh peter nelson who runs hbo sports and you and i had known you guys and you guys called and said are you interested in this and was like all right let's do this let's figure out a way to do this and oh by the way you just have to meet with this guy at wwe and then you're gonna meet with this guy and this guy and this guy at WWE. And I was like, wait a second. I'm doing the dog and pony show here every time. In my mind,

I already got the job, but they were vetting me the entire time. I didn't realize this. Then two months after that, it was July 1st, 2016. It was the Friday before the 4th. It was go up to Stanford and go to Titan Tower and meet with Vince McMahon at 2.30

we prepped for it like it was like a prize fight really? don't look him in the eye no it was don't sneeze I was told do not sneeze if you sneeze in front of Vince he sees it as you can't control yourself and he just alphas you out of the room

if you sneeze I'm going to steal that that's incredible I took like six claritin on my way up there. Yeah. You were OD'd on Claritin. And you vibed Vince? So they keep you in a green room that you go in there and you sit in the green room like you would sit in at like the Jimmy Fallon show. And they have like snacks there for you and a big screen TV.

And can we get you anything? And he has two assistants. And then you walk into another room and there's an assistant. And then you get into Vince's office. It's very, it's surreal. It's like the get smart beginning. It's like door after door after door. And meanwhile, if you need to use the bathroom, you need someone to go with you so that they can like, like key card you into these big glass doors to go in the bathroom. And Triple H walks out of the bathroom as I was walking in. And the first thing I thought of was those old ESPN commercials were like the Syracuse Orangemen

is walking down the hall and Gray Hills playing the piano in the lobby. It was like, so Triple H just walks around here. That's what he does. Because I didn't know that, I didn't realize like what a title he had in that business. I was completely ignorant. Like I was a normal pop cultural fan,

but I didn't know the hierarchy of that place. It was like, isn't that Triple H like walking with a suit and tie, literally like with a manila folder going to a meeting, like, Hey, how's it going? What does it mean to be vetted by Vince? What is, what is he asking you? What does he want to, how is he investigating whether you're the right person? So we went in and I thought it would be, I thought he would be bouncing off the walls, telling Andre stories. I've dealt a ton with Dana White at the UFC. And from what I've heard,

like they have similar, uh, just traits about them and similar characteristics. Somehow both of them are insulted right now. I'm sure they'll both find a way to be insulted, but they should both be complimented because I have held them both in high esteem. But Dana is jeans and a t-shirt and he's bouncing off the walls and he's F-bomb this, F-bomb that. Like his his enthusiasm is it's it's palpable and contagious. And that's what I was expecting from Vince. We sit down. It's a table for four. And it was myself and Kevin Dunn and Vince in an empty seat at the other table.

And Vince is facing the empty seat and pretty much didn't keep his eyes off of that direction. So he's looking perpendicular for me. I'm looking directly at Kevin and Vince is just staring straight into the abyss. and pretty much didn't keep his eyes off of that direction. So he's looking perpendicular for me. Interesting. I'm looking directly at Kevin and Vince is just staring straight into the abyss, talking about Andre in a very low voice. Yeah, low key Vince. As you know, this is a very important story for us to tell.

It was way more solemn and way more, I knew it would be a serious meeting because I knew this was a make or break. This is like the final test. This is like, you're going for a job at Goldman Sachs and you're meeting with the CEO, you know? But I didn't realize how like he was in that character for a while.

Maybe that is out of character for him. I think that's who he is. That's who he is at this point. Yeah. And he was self-effacing and he said that he used to be that guy because as we got more into it, it was like, I was expecting a little bit different from this.

Once he realized that I had a respect and a reverence for the story and for Andre and for the culture and for the company and where they come from and where they are now, I think that he realized then that, you know, all right, so he's got the technical know-how. He knows how to put a movie together, but does he have enough respect for us? And the important part for me was to go in there and it was twofold was to, you know, there's there's the good side and the bad side of Andre. Just like I told him, there's a good side and the bad side of all of us. Yeah. And if we only try to portray the good side of Andre and portray him as the gentle giant and it's this love letter to Andre, this puff piece, it's not going to be valid. And it's not going to it's not going to be valid and it's not going to, it's not going to hit in the ways that we want it to hit. And he was all for that. Like there were, Andre could be great and he could be a pain in the ass. He could be this and that, just like everybody else. And

there were reasons why he could be that. And we get into it in the film. The other thing that I was interested in was pulling back the curtain as to how these things were choreographed, how these matches were choreographed, like how we could just go off on the premise, start on the premise that wrestling is scripted and not real. It's high entertainment, and these are talented athletes and performers, but none of this stuff is a true athletic contest. Which we only say actually once overtly in the documentary. Shoemaker says, I mean, of course this is fake. Yeah.

And when he said that. As a 10-year-old, he's in a 10-year-old's voice. But I was wondering, like, are they going to give us a note? Like, hey, can you cut that one? But they didn't. No. I said to him, like, are you cool? Because I was really fascinated with how they just, how, what was the derivation and the evolution of that storyline in WrestleMania 3 with Hogan?

Because if we just portray it as a sporting event, then everybody knows what happened. And you also have a certain amount of skepticism like, OK, well, we know it's fake and we know it's... But if you tell... That was true suspense. That's the one match that we had to actually create some suspense. Because truly, when they went in the ring, no one truly knew what was going to happen. Because we established earlier in the film that whatever Andre wanted to happen, happened. He just had that kind of power and that kind of strength that if he didn't want to go along with the script and he was in a bad mood that day, it wasn't happening. So he could have walked out of there with the belt.

And then Vince would have had to adjust to the entire evolution of that business. Vince is a really, I mean, I love Vince. I feel like he's been in my life, my whole life. When we had a teleconference call with him in Mike Lombardo's office, this was before we even figured out who the director was going to be. And Vince didn't seem that realistic that they were going to want to do this because they had never outsourced any idea before. And he was on this teleconference call, and I told Lombardo, who was running HBO at the time, like, at some point Vince is going to test us,

and I don't know how. He's going to do one thing. He's going to overreact to something. He's going to get mad at something. Like, just be ready. Ride it out. And he's on this call, and it's like the TV I have over there. They're on it

and at some point he just seized on something i think lombardo got like one wrestling thing kind of like he he called he got the wrestlemania wrong or something and vince came in and did it and there's such energy with that dude it's really yeah i don't did he do that in your meeting well you you had warned me a couple of times he's going to test you. So I can't remember that. How did he test you? I've dealt with the alpha males before and I was like, oh, I could deal with this. And then I was like, how is he going to test me? Is this going to be like physical?

Is it going to be feats of strength? He's going to fight you. So what it was, was that I was saying to him, I was trying to be open with him about the fact that I'm not a wrestling expert and to pitch myself as this is the guy you want doing this because I'm coming at it with a with a clear eye and an objective vision for it and not just like someone who comes in with an agenda and I said so I don't I'll be honest with you I don't know anything about the current WWE days but I did follow it during its glory days. And that's the one time that he like, he went from that like straight ahead at the back of the room thing. And he slowly turned to me and said, the glory days. Yeah. Are these not the glory days?

I was like, I said, I said to him, I regretted that the moment it came out of my mouth. So let me let me rephrase what I just said. In my mind, those were the glory days. The first golden era. The first of many golden eras. But I remember thinking, can we swear on this? Yeah. I remember thinking, oh, fuck.

I just, like, months and months of work on this thing, and now it's done. Because I just said those two words, and now I did it. Like, Bill told me he's going to test you and I just failed the test and that's it. But then we got the feedback like right after like Vince loved Jason. We're good. Like, okay, great. Also, one of the genius parts of the movie, and you talked a little bit about doing an A structure and a B structure, but the B structure basically explains the modern history of how wrestling came to be.

It explains how Vince came to power. And I think maybe because you weren't this hardcore fan, you knew to pick the right people, one of whom is our colleague Shoemaker, but Dave Meltzer, you have these historians. Lawler. And Jerry Lawler telling the story about Memphis. How did you figure out how to build that part of the story

while also dedicating enough time to Andre? We never really knew it was there like it was until you did it. Until we did the territorial. Until you actually did the cut and it was like it was there. Well. Because initially it was like Andre's story and then, oh yeah, there's gonna be a little wrestling in there. And then when you did it. At first, around last summer, we started shooting it march 23rd 2017 was that that interview with vince and that was now keep in mind that's nine

months after the glory days like that yeah i was like oh well i fucked it up and they were looking for somebody else you we forgot to mention you bonded with him because he took you to the wrestling museum or the yeah we went to we went to the wrestling museum they basically have like a wrestling hall of fame in the court, but it's just in the basement and it's everything. It's like, what did they show you? Like Andre's socks? No, it was Andre's, like the coffin that Andre was transported over

from France to North Carolina in when he died is still in that. The plan all along was to start in the warehouse and snake through and find this coffin because the story was supposed to be like i was thinking like vince kept this coffin for a reason right why does this mean so much to him that he kept it and it turns out that the everyone we talked to was like this is this is like the beginning of me realizing that all of this is mythology vince was like the coffin is there right i didn't know the coffin is over there but the entire history of wrestling was in this warehouse by the way the coffin is kept there's a stack of

coffins it's probably 12 of them it's like go to home depot except it's much more dramatic lighting but it's like it's just home depot like rows and rows and rows of stuff you bonded with him that day over that that's when i felt because you're sending me pictures yeah and vince was like a proud dad showing him like his basement basically. But is the, so there's a coffin museum at the section. So there's, there's like the second shelf,

the second shelf of, of one of these huge, you know, aisles of memorabilia. And just, it's not categorized at all. It's not Oregon. I said to him,

like, do you know how much money you can make if you made this into a theme park? Do you know how much money people would pay to go i asked michelle this year that too i was like how do you not have this in a building the ring from wrestlemania one is there everything's there wow like the uh the huge like neon bulbs when the rock came out like that is there i had pictures of every i had pictures of like who's the who's the guy who like had like the thor you're just sending me like weird shit i was just getting these texts of like there's like cardboard boxes that are that says like andre's socks yeah and then it was like cardboard box andre's singlets and trunks i was like that's gonna be

the most foul smelling box in the history of sports memorabilia like it's just sitting on a shelf but when he did that and stuff the history of it was becoming more and more apparent. Yeah. I interrupted. He asked about like, when did we realize the B story of like how it went from the territories to the wrestling room. Well, that's a doc that I was interested in doing anyway. That's a business story. Like I think Koppelman had mentioned before that like that could be a 10 part scripted series of a guy like taking over. From his dad.

That's almost like a mafia story. It's incredible. Because he got, there's a lot of stuff we left out of the stories of him getting threatened scripted series of a guy like taking over that's like dad that's almost like a mafia story because he got there's a lot of stuff we left out of the stories of him getting threatened by by other territories like these guys were not giving up these territories easily yeah it was not easy to just take memphis yeah he was just vision well memphis never got taken some of them are still around to this day but writing in different ways the guy who was in kansas city the the famous wrestler in kansas city but can, they never really got either. He pulled a gun on Hogan.

So when Hogan came back to the WWF, because Vince Sr. banished Hogan from WWF for doing Rocky. Yeah. And Vince and K-McMahon, the Vince that we know, he doesn't like to be called Vince. Not before it came out.

It was when he was filming it. He was like, fuck you, you're out. He was like, well, if you want to be a movie star, this is the wrong business for you. You're out. So then he came back and he went to, he went to, what's the Minnesota territory? I'm forgetting now because we shot this.

I just remember we did nine versions of the map. But then last, last time at the premiere, the map was like, I was like, this is cool. This looks good, you can read the letters. That's right. I was so happy. So he came back and then Vince recognized, like that's where Hulkamania started was in that territory up in up in like Minnesota and in the Midwest. And there that's where Hulkam and then Vince realized, all right, we're going to take him over.

So that story always fascinated me was how this one guy went against the wishes of his father. These unwritten rules that like no territories are going to infringe upon the other territories. And this young maverick comes in and says, you know what? My father is aging. I bought the business from him for a million dollars. And I am going to go in and systematically take these guys over. And I'm going to be such a visionary that I realized that syndication and the rise of cable television is what's going to enable me to do this. Yeah, I'm like 80% on that one, on that part of it you don't believe that no i think i think

sometimes you can have a little bit of fortune and luck with that i think he wanted to take over america i don't think anybody saw the potential of cable tv in 1982 i really don't because i was there like basketball was on the usa network for two years and it was it was kind of like what's this like a lot of people didn't even have cable. But I think as he was taking over America, cable started happening and then it just kind of drifted together. There's a lot of things. He could have that vision.

Let's assume for a second he did have that vision. If Rocky III doesn't happen and Hogan doesn't play Thunder Lips, we're not having this conversation right now. Because they needed that guy. They needed the one person to personify what wrestling was to take it to the masses. He caught Hogan at the perfect time. Yeah.

And then by 84, when did he buy everything? In 82? He bought it in 82. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I think by 84, he realized what cable, how big it was. Yeah, and that's when he took, basically he took the USA Network and he took half of their primetime programming that's what i was gonna say it's not

unlike what we have now where there's so many streaming services and places to put things like cable tv needed content and they were willing to program the hell out of wwf at the time and so that is and you in the film you point out all of the stars that he hand-picked from all the territories and said this guy's coming over here mach Macho man's coming over here. Polo endorse coming over here. His version of that would be that we didn't handpick them. They called me. Yeah. Because these guys recognize I'm only getting on my local TV

in, say, the Crockett territory. And I'm Roddy Roddy Piper. And I want to have that national audience. I want to be on cable television nationally. But by the way, as a fan of the WWE, these guys would show up. And most of the time, I didn't know who the fuck they were. At first. Yeah, I'd be like, here's Jimmy Snuka. I'm like, who's

this? Oh my god, it jumps like because all I knew was this one WWE show I watched. That is the one thing that jumps out too about Andre, which is like, he's the only figure that they didn't have to create a character for. You know, he just is Andre. He's just this massive.

Terry Todd says it in the closing montage. He never needed robes. He never needed capes. He didn't need this alter ego. He didn't need any. He was just Andre. He had such a charisma and such an electricity about him that when he came out,

and there's other guys who have been big people in WWE and other sports that don't have that kind of charisma and that kind of electricity about them. He just had it. The B story was the hardest thing to figure out because, and that was how many cuts before we got it? We, when you and I watched five, you and I watched around Labor Day, like 130 minute

cut. And then even the second cut, it wasn't there yet. It still wasn't there. No, that was because it was, it was unwieldy because it was like, it was threatening to overpower the Andre part the Andre's day story yeah the history of wrestling is the beast story I always you have to balance it and not go too far one way I use the analogy that like if your main story is your highway you can get off and exit and you can go out to eat but you can't stay the night so we get off the exit and we're talking about the rise of Hulk Hogan we're in danger of staying overnight.

But what helped was that you just need to keep on peppering Andre in somehow. What helped was that when he won the title from Sheik in 84, Andre the Giant is there pouring champagne on him. And that was a deliberate attempt on the company's part to say like we are passing the torch now to like Andre the Giant is passing the torch as the alpha dog in pro wrestling to Hulk Hogan. So then we can pepper him back in. But we finally figured out. Yeah, when you do it right, there's like a shorthand. And we were like just always about the exit. And we're in the exit too long.

Yeah, we got to get back out. The hardest thing to figure out was the middle piece because we go to the ranch and it's like, well, Andre, oh man, people made fun of him. He had a rough life. It was way harder to be a giant than you think. And then it's like well andre oh man people made fun of him yeah he had a rough life it was way harder to be a giant than you think and then it's like but he had this one place the ranch and we have to get in and out of that ranch as fast as possible but you have to cover he had this whole surrogate like friend family thing and he had a daughter and he had a daughter and and his and he had a an ambivalent relationship with his daughter. Yeah, and how far do we want to go? The more you go down that road, the further I am from WrestleMania 3. Yeah, because 10 minutes ago, you're laughing about him farting.

And now you're talking about him being an absentee father. And you're like, wait a second, what kind of documentary is this? Are we done having fun now? Is it just going to be sad for the rest of the time? What was that section, like three and a half minutes at the end? At first, it was like 10. Right. And in the end.

And we just kept, it was like, no, it's basically like what has to be in. Yeah. And then. But then you sit in an edit room for so long and you live with that section. Everything starts seeming long because you can lip sync these things. And you know when all the laugh lines are coming and when all the plot points are going to hit. And it's like, oh, three and a half minutes feels like 30 minutes. But to the people watching at home for the first time time you don't want it to go by too quick so sometimes you have to get away

from that section and go to another one and come back with fresh eyes what finally happened we realized that the link was him breaking his ankle and him taking time off yes is coincided roughly with the rise of cable television and the making of rocky three but you found that 60 minutes footage that we didn't have initially yeah so some of the footage we found even after you've done like two cuts jake rogal and matt max and the 60 minute thing because it was outdoors it was at the ranch come at the ranch was morally safer and then all of a sudden it's at the ranch still was 60 minutes but it was the gateway to go from the ranch he had a daughter yeah it didn't work out that well you also use this neat trick of like letting morally safer explain right his physical it resets issues the things that he

has to deal with which you know you wait a long time in the film before really explaining acromegaly and all these things that he had to deal with which was a cool choice but you have to think like the the audience home, at what point does the alarm go off where it's like, all right, you know, we have 44 minutes before people are going to be like, all right, what was wrong with this guy? Why did he look like this? I think, I think we were just about the timer was just about to ring there. And the link there was that we were talking about his daughter and his, we were saying that his life, his daughter acknowledges that his lifestyle didn't, didn't allow him to spend as much time with her as he would have wanted.

And we, I hope, responsibly expressed her ambivalence towards it. She said that I understand, but it still hurts me that my father didn't want to spend that time with me. But then it's like, how far do you go with that? But then Tim White wraps it up and says that he didn't see her and it hurt him. A lot of things hurt him, just like that hurt you or me. And we go right into his physical ailments. So that was kind of like, thank God for morally safer in 60 minutes. But initially there was more in there and there was more background with him and the woman.

It was tough. It was. Well, and it was like, it's just, it kept, it kept going further off the exit. Then she wanted to visit and Andre wanted her to visit, but he wouldn't let her visit if the biological mom was going to be there and that she didn't want to go without the mom that now we're on like now we're now we're staying overnight and you had somebody saying like uh no andre really loved her he was a really wanted to be great it was like we can't put that because he wasn't in her life it just came up i'm not a father but you are and i remember you saying like i'm a dad and like it's it's disingenuous to say like oh he

loved her to death he would have done anything for her, but he didn't want his. But he wasn't in her life. So it's like, what do you do? Yeah. Let's take a quick break to talk about our friends at Squarespace. They make it easy to build beautiful websites, whether you're starting a business, changing careers or launching a creative project or whatever you're up to. What are you up to? Whether you need a landing page, beautiful gallery, a professional blog, or an online store,

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will help you no matter how hard or how easy your problem may be. Start a free trial today at squarespace.com. And when you're ready to launch, use offer code BS. That's my initials as well as the initials of the Rookie of the Year, Ben Simmons, to get 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Again, that's squarespace.com, offer code BS. And since we're here, don't forget to check out theringer.com slash shop. Bunch of t-shirts available that are Ringer related, couple of hats, more things coming down the road

over the next week or so. So check that out, theringer.com slash shop. Back to Jason and Sean. What was the most difficult thing, the strand of story that you couldn't put in? The most difficult thing to cut? I'm gonna have a different answer than you. Well, we struggled for a while at the outset of this thing with how much of the mythology do we want to explore and how many of these outlandish stories do we want to acknowledge and then either confirm or debunk.

And you can make a choice early on to go farcical with the doc or to go factual and definitive history of this guy. So there's a lot of stories out there. You know where I'm getting. There's a lot of stories out there that we found to be false, but they weren't so indelible. This is not like George Washington chopping down the cherry tree. I cannot tell a lie that everyone, every first grader knows that.

To 95% of the audience, these are not indelible stories. So do you want to take someone down a six and a half minute road to tell a story that turns out not to be true? Which by the way, a lot of documentaries do. And then by the time it's done, it's you go, why did we just spend six minutes doing that? It took us nowhere. We just found out it wasn't true. And then we would have to do the mathematical equation. Like, all right, if we do spend four and a half minutes on that, what are we taking out? And our solution was,

we'll do a podcast right before the doc comes out and we'll explain why samuel becca was in there because it's a bullshit story yeah i'd love to explain by the way it wasn't really true that he drank 119 beers every night it happened a couple times it may have been oh certainly not every night but like you every once in a while my twitter feed will show up like uber facts or something like that the world record for alcohol consumption is andre the giant 156 beers in one. 156 seems to be the number that everyone's accepted. And oftentimes in the interviews, people would say, you know, I heard he drank 156 beers. And the follow-up question was always, well, were you there for that? No. Well, how many did he drink

in front of you? And the most that we got, the thing is that these are still impressive feats, right? So Rick Flair said he drank 106 beers in front of me. Rob Reiner says that he drank 20 bottles of Nouveau Beaujolais in one day on the set of The Princess Bride. Terry Todd, who followed him- And he was adamant about it. Yeah. He said, I'm not exaggerating, twice. We always kept it when the person was adamant.

Yes. Rob Reiner's like, it was 20? I kid you not. It was 20 bottles. I'm not exagger it was 20 bottles exaggerating 20 bottles terry todd who was a respected writer and wrote a long-form piece about andre that this is classic piece for sports illustrated spent a month with him and he said i personally saw him consume 7 000 calories of alcohol a day and this is not some like writer who's going i didn't know there was going to be math what

well he broke it down for us 7 000 how many drinks he said well it depends if you're having uh ipas or what you're he said that's 20 to 25 beers yeah maybe four or five bottles of wine and i loved it he said several mixed drinks because that's like five to 80 vodka sodas yeah but we had so we had people so it's like if we have people saying i saw that why include someone saying well i heard he drank 200 right immediately you invalidate your doc and so we we decided very early on it's gonna be all first person stuff well and then you also had when you is the embellished stuff we acknowledged it like the rows of teeth and all that stuff yeah well um it's clear yeah, this is what happened.

McMahon says that he was so larger than life that any story you heard about him, you'd believe it. And McMahon said, I used to tell people he had 82 teeth and they were in rows like a shark. And then Ric Flair says that Larry Henning told him that he had two hearts and he believed him. Because there were these stories that people would just believe so that was we were acknowledging that there is mythology about him out there that exists but Samuel Beckett did not walk him to school

we could not find proof of that happening we in fact found proof of it not happening where did that story first come from you and Koppelman talked about it you guys talked about it like you knew it was a thing. But I'm not as familiar with that story.

So where does that... Did Andre tell someone that one? I never heard it until we started working on the doc. So wherever it derived from, there's been a couple of graphic novels

that have been published that told that story. And in the author's defense of those graphic novels, there's a disclaimer at the beginning that these are based on stories and interviews. And we're going to illustrate these things and bring them to life. And we're stretching the truth here.

What's true is that Samuel Beckett did have a home that was down the road from Andre's village where he lived outside of Paris. It's like Rue de Samuel Beckett now. It's famous for having that house there. But the legend is that Andre, by the time he was 12 years old, was so big that he couldn't fit on the school bus and that Samuel Beckett built a cottage with the help of Andre's father. And as a favor to Andre's father, he would bring him in his flatbed truck to school. And that they had several conversations and developed this unlikely friendship

and they would discuss cricket. They had a gay relationship. I never heard that one. But so we asked his brother about it. And his brother looked at his wife in the interview and was like, what? He had never never heard this like these people are not privy to a lot of the the pop cultural mythology that we are they live in rural france i mean it's like going back in time so he looked at her and said i don't they're like murmuring to each other in french

and what he said was first of all there was no bus to school. We walked two kilometers to school to the schoolhouse. Oh, and also part of that story is that Andre had to leave school at age 13 because he was too big for the classroom. He just couldn't fit in the desk. So there was no bus to go to the school. Everyone left school by the time they were 14 in rural France in those days. You either go to work in the field or you go to a trade school or whatever you do. And he said, Mr. Beckett,

we did remember Mr. Beckett lived down the street. And if he saw us walking in the rain or something, he would stop his truck and all of us kids in the village would hop in and he would give us rides sometime. So I'm sure that there's a seed of truth. We've already spent too much time on this. Yeah. This didn't happen. It didn't happen. It didn't happen. I'm sorry, internet. Like so many other Andre stories, it did not happen. Maybe he did drink. The other one, like there's another one that like he passed out in the lobby of a bar and they had to put the piano cover over him and the businessmen and women were waking up that morning in the hotel and walking around him.

They thought it was a construction site. Come on. Well, there was other stuff we couldn't include that we actually think might have been true there was some there were some graphic some graphic stories he was in japan and could not fit in the bathroom so he would have to um when he had to relieve himself not number one um would have to do it in a hotel blanket and then the maid service would have to take it out tie it up you didn't want to animate that and put that in the film decided not to decided not to include that and by the way that was by the way it seems like it was true

that's that's more plausible than samuel beckett talking about cricket with him he's in japan that's a practical hotel rooms can't literally can't get in the bathroom it was necessary to acknowledge because one of the first questions people have all the time is how do they go to the bathroom? How do they have sex is another way to go. How do they have sex? What were his proportions? There were some female members of the ringer staff after we screened it for our staff who were quite curious about the mechanics of Andre's sex life. What's a topic. I asked some questions that I never thought

I'd be asking about those mechanics. And I think Hogan's the one who says, I didn't know anything about his girlfriends. I didn't know anything about this. No one was really willing to go through the X's and O's of how these plays developed. Literally. But we did have to to and Ric Flair

his first appearance in the doc is him saying that he had a size 24 ring and size 27 shoes baby what else do you need to know so that was an important part but we took that we had that out for a while we did and to your credit you said put it back in it wasn't my credit

there were some other executives that said take it out I don't get the joke. It's uncomfortable. And luckily you came, you came to our defense. No, I just said to you, look, people are going to watch this and they're going to want to know. That's going to be one of the main questions. Yeah. Did women like him and did he have a big dick?

Are just going to be two questions and let's, we can spend 90 seconds here and bang it out. And by the way, if you noticed in the theater last night, people were all in on that section. I was actually. They were all the fucking we've done a lot of screenings you know from two to twelve people and there's been some awkward silences at that point it depends who's in the room not last night no last night it played well in that room definitely classic hollywood that's what they're interested in yeah my big thing that uh you asked like the big regret of cutting it and it by the way we should have cut

it but the whole part after wrestlemania 3 when he actually wins the title for two seconds and you ask like the big regret of cutting it. And by the way, we should have cut it. But the whole part after WrestleMania III, when he actually wins the title for two seconds and then gives it up, and it's the only time he held the title. And the evil twin ref. The evil twin ref. Ted DiBiase.

And it was like, here's Andre's greatest moment. He wins the title, but then he immediately gives it to Ted DiBiase and he held the title for two seconds. And he was the complete sellout then. Yeah, and he was the sellout. This is the antithesis of the Andre that we've

come to know. I do remember that storyline. It easily could have been in there, but it goes back to the exit thing where once he loses WrestleMania 3, it's like we get to the end.

Well, I remember asking Shoemaker and other people who actually are historian and Meltzer, like people who know this for a fact, because I need these guys to keep me honest.

Are we safe in saying that it was a precipitous decline in his career after WrestleMania three? Now that's the truth. We got to go. We got to wrap this up. I don't want to spend 15 minutes on his angle with Jake, the snake and whether or not he was really afraid of snakes. We've the climax of that film is WrestleMania three. And then you have to start wrapping it up. Now we have to tell how he died. And my goal always was to get back. I love bookends and I wanted to get back to Moliere. And my, maybe my favorite moment is the chair in the end with the brother. Cause that's the most humanizing. I just, I love anyone who we could talk to who presented him as Andre Rusemov,

the human being rather than Andre, the giant the fictional character that's where my interests lie because i i had more interest in the human interest story than i did in the wrestling story and by the way that's that's an advantage of like doing this with hbo like we had to go to france yeah we spent a lot of time and it was worth it with nice equipment it was worth it made it made the documentary better i'll tell you a story. When we knew that the stars were aligning for this. So knowing that we were going to shoot in the hotel where he died, it made budgetary sense. Because we were going to have to rent a room there anyway for a day or two. Because we wanted to be there for that.

To stay at the hotel. And he died in 93. And we were thinking. We were coming from the. I mean, I thought about this before. But we were coming from the airport. Like off the red eye. Like everyone psyched up. But we're exhausted. And we're thinking we were coming from the I mean, I thought about this before, but we're coming from the airport, like off the red eye, like everyone psyched up. But we're exhausted. We're thinking like, all right, what are the chances that someone's going to work in the hotel who was actually there around the time that Andre died?

And then can they put us in touch with someone who was there the day that he died? So we get out of the van and the guy who's helping us into the lobby with our equipment. I asked our translator. The first thing I asked him to do was ask that bellman. And the bellman was the guy who discovered Andre. And he's in the dock. A, and B, to take it further. 25 years later. Our director of photography stayed in the room where Andre died. And this was not deliberate. So he's loading the stuff into his room. And the guy in French says to our translator, this is actually the room where it happened. And we're looking at each other like, listen, I don't believe in a lot of mystical things, but it's like, all right, someone's pulling some strings here.

This might go well. That was indicative of what happened for those eight days while we were there. We went into Moline with a stack of black and white photos and we're literally not is 40 people live in this village. And we were knocking on doors saying like, good afternoon, Andre, the giant lived, grew up here. Do you recognize any of the people in these photos? And a couple of the guys said, yeah, that's me. Cause we wanted to know about his childhood. And then we said, where's his brother? And they said, well, he hangs out at this pub one town over. So we were like private or like private investigators we get in the van we go to the pub

and they said he was just here and they give us his address we bought a bottle of wine we went and knocked on his door and said we're a camera crew from hbo in the united states we're doing a documentary on your brother would you participate because we couldn't find his phone number normally you book these things in advance we were on the ground yeah he told me he was doing this and i was nervous so we're going to france we're going to andre's hometown we're just going to try to find people and stuff that was basically no i know but it's just it could go journalism man that was fun you were trying to tell the story because it's so i'm so used to being able to google that yeah yeah what's that were we even 100 positive like

his brother was there no we we knew they were living we knew from i had i was just kind of one of those let's hope this works out i had lunch with his nephew who we interviewed but uh he was he was one of the cuts in the doc he didn't make it um he made it last night he was bummed he was bummed that he wasn't in the doc he said to me in french like fuck that jason no he was that's what he and uh andre's daughter daughter and Jackie McCauley, who ran the ranch. Those three last night pulled me aside and said that was the real Andre. And thank you for doing that. Yeah.

They seem genuine. Those are the people. That's what psychs me out. There's plenty of people in the industry who come up. Oh, that was great. You know what happens at those. It's like, yeah, you believe them or you don't. Although, as Sean pointed out, everybody went to the party after, which is a good sign for the film.

Yeah. When the party's full, you know that they like the movie. When the party's full, it's a good sign. When they're not trying to avoid you and say, there's always like the, you know, there's a shorthand, there's a list of shorthand for like if you come out of a movie that's not that good, it's like, hey man, congratulations,

that must have taken you a long time. Yeah. Or like, hey man, how long did you guys edit that for? I knew we were in good shape last night because I was kind of trying to hide because I didn't, I was trying to find my kids and then somebody grabbed me and they were like,

Stephanie and Triple H want to see you immediately. They're really excited. I'm like, okay. They'll be chokeslammed through the dessert table. No, no, it was a pleasant thing, but they were like, they want to see you. And I went over there and they were both like so emotional and happy.

And Stephanie had never seen it. Well, Stephanie, I mean, you should tell this story about how we, I mean, she was, we interviewed her.

We interviewed her. And this was still, I still haven't spoken to her. I wanted to speak to her last night. She can listen to this. Well, I think we're going to see her in New Orleans. That's true.

We're doing a screening the day before WrestleMania in New Orleans. I think that she's introducing the movie there. So I was glad to hear that, that she had a positive reaction to it because her interview was so good. We were high-fiving after that. She's definitely in. She had an

attachment to Andre as a little girl and there's pictures to back this up. She said he was my best friend and he was my uncle and they had this, like, really cute relationship. But at the same time, so if we tell that story and then we portray the story of Andre as an absentee father who saw his daughter Robin three or four times, it's not that we were trying to paint a better picture of Andre than was real, but it would have confused, in my mind, it would have confused the viewer. Like we've already said, like, listen, Andre had his shortcomings and his, his, uh, his paternal neglectfulness was one of

them. If we all of a sudden paint him as this nice paternal figure with, with Stephanie, it just, it muddled things. And I felt bad that we cut her out of it, but that was the reason why she would have been in. This goes back to the key to a documentary which we were arguing about the other day was somebody else's documentary that i won't mention shall not go named um but if you're gonna do these correctly you gotta cut stuff out that you like you just have to it's the hardest thing to do it hurts it fucking hurts and there's there's things that you have in there and you're like god i can't believe it i always tell you just have to i tell our editors i tell our camera crew that there's shots and there's moments that you are going to be that you know are going to be in

this thing that are not going to be in this thing so i'm warning you now like are you going to be pissed off at me but i'm telling you it's going to be for the better for for everything and that goes for me too like i was positive we were going to do that sequence of finding the coffin at the beginning and then it was going to end with the coffin and the door to the warehouse closing like i knew that's how we're going to start and finish this thing it never came close to that who was i remember when he went to france and then he came back and he was like it was unbelievable this happened this happened this happened and the back of my head, just from being experienced with other people who went off

and the trip they fall in love with. Like, yeah, too much burgundy. No, like the stuff that they shot on the trip and like, oh, and I got this and I got that. And then it's really hard for them to, for the directors to cut that stuff out because they're attached to it because it was a lot of work to find it it was a lot of work to get it it means something to them but at some point it doesn't necessarily mean it has to be in the doc

we cut out jason was good about that jason's like whatever's best for the doc best idea wins that's our motto all the time that's how it wins so but in the wrong hands somebody would have kept seven more minutes of french well we could have done all that we could have done a half hour on france we could have done a half hour on the ranch we could have done you know several shorts people fall in love with the shot like yeah how the sun is beautiful like the guy who shot the drone footage for us killed it yeah like that that shot of the weed at the beginning where we pan up that's that's our dp shot from on the ground that's actually in in uh carolina and we made that look like france but um you hit a point where you have to be able to just one example we're going door to

door and you're right you're so proud of like of like you're high-fiving that you found a guy and there was a guy named i forget his last jacques poulain was the guy's name and he was a first grade classmate of andre's and we found him like we went on the ground and found this guy and found guy named, I forget his last, Jacques Poulain was the guy's name. And he was a first grade classmate of Andre's. And we found him. Like we went on the ground and found this guy and found his house. We were bribing people with like flowers and wine and stuff. And we knocked on his door and it took us a couple of days to convince him to be on camera. I think he had a bit of a speech impediment. He just didn't want to be on camera. And then he told us in the interview that Andre was a little bit bigger than all the other kids in first grade, but certainly not a giant.

And that was in the original open. And that he had his hands were so big as a little boy that they would have him play goalie because he was good at stopping the ball. We took that was for time. It was like, all right, how much. Now, that's a cool story to tell now, but that's an example of like, you gotta... We had said from the beginning, we need to get him to North America

and get him famous as soon as possible. Still check all those boxes. What was that, like nine minutes? What, the original? Getting from like credits, France, all the way to when he moved to America. Probably 11, like in the finished version. If that goes 13,

you can even feel it in the theater version. If that goes 13, you can even feel in the theater yesterday, people at some point are going, is Hulk Hogan going to show up? Like, you got to take care

of everybody. Exactly. And we got, we pushed it as far as we could go with, now he's here, he's under the giant, uh-oh, music.

And it was also, like, we put that, the music montage in and it was like to wake you up, like just as you're, like,

you never want to lull someone to sleep at any point, but it was like, all right, all these shots are beautiful. And it's cool that he, they're all black and white. There's a lot of subtitles. Yeah. It just gets to be like, wait a second. I came here for to scratch this nostalgic itch. And you guys are telling me about how it's all subtitles and black and white footage and rare stuff, but I'm done with this. Boom. Then you have to hit them with this seventies pop song and show them a bunch of b-roll of guys getting cement blocks cracked over their head and guys

getting choked in ropes just how ridiculous the 70s it's just like now just giving visual popcorn of like fun stuff from the 70s and waking people up we had one more obstacle which was people die really prematurely in wrestling so as soon as this was a go it was like we made the list and it's like we have to interview these people first it sounds it sounds grim but there there's old people in this and it's like all right let's go fast like let's get them we gotta we gotta go well you just don't know everybody's still alive that we interviewed the the flare health scare that happened last summer happened hours after that interview. Yeah, really?

Let's say, thank God he's still with us. But if things had turned out differently, that would have been his last interview. And he was not looking good. No. He was not feeling well. He was not looking well. So it didn't really surprise us that things went south for him. And thank God, like I said, like, thank God things took a turn for the better.

And it looks like he's for the moment. But we had people that were dead that would have been, like, Rodney Pepper would have been unbelievable. Well, Bobby Heenan. Bobby Heenan would have been great. Bobby Heenan was a lot. He passed away during production, but he was also incapable of being on camera. Right. But to a man, all of the people who were alive said, oh, man, if Bobby Heenan were alive, he would have loved this project so much.

And he would have made it come to life. We didn have stud we didn't have macho man macho man um I just hated macho man yeah but that's actually something I remember when Bill first told me about this whole idea I think you don't realize that having seen the movie now but I feel like the degree of difficulty on this movie is really high because your subject is dead. By the way, that cannot be overstated. I mean, that's... Dead subject is a nightmare. He also does not speak English as his first language and he also is like

a mythological figure as Shoemaker points out in the movie and so you have to parse truth and falsehoods all the time. One of the best notes that HBO sports team gave, and they were great to work with too, on either the first cut or the second cut, they were like, we need more Andre.

First cut. And you were like, he's dead. I gave you all the Andre. And they were like, we need more Andre. And you were part like, oh, fuck these guys. But then part like, you want more Andre? I'm going to find you more Andre. I mean, we had. And you went out and found like five great clips of andre that we didn't have it was a great note and we went back to the drawing when that yeah because they were right

that's what bothered us they were like they're right don't speak for me i was i was no no of course you're right they're right we need more andre let's go so myself and jake rogall and matt max and all of us used to work with the people giving us notes. So this was we had a very we have a shorthand with them. Like, all right, I get it. But I'm telling you, we've given you all we got. Well, it'd still be great to have. They were actually really cool.

The 60 Minutes clip. So then we went back to the Jack clip. Oh, he speaks here. And actually, some of that stuff ended up in the closing montage where he kind of was like, all right, we don't have. Remember that one of our first closing bites was like, it was Vince McMahon saying he loved this. He loved this. He loved life. Yeah.

And it was so trite. It was like, I just, I was like, you know what? It's not feeling right. You were like, no, it's good. The music's good. It works. But it's like, it just sounds like an eighth grade book report. Like that would be the last line of like, and that the story yeah i know i know but you know and i i

could sense that too it's like you know when it hits you know what the opening was the same thing it opened with this hogan thing that now is in like the 20 minute mark of the movie which is where it should be talks about it used to the first time i saw andre and i watched him walk in clodsdale horse because the note was like initially the movie kind of opened like how it opens now. And then we got notes like, you need a star in the beginning to be Mark. So we tried Hogan in there. And the reality is it worked better with Terry Todd and David Shoemaker. We didn't even see either of them.

Also, there's like trusted people that I show it to before even the network's's in and you have the same kind of, you have your kind of coterie of people that you show it to. It's my wife and kids. I have my brothers and some buddies from home that I show it to. And one of my buddies from home was like, he doesn't even know what we're doing. I was like, check this out. This next project. He's like, oh, you're doing a Hogan doc? Because what we did was we we

led up oh no the original first thing the before the hogan story the original opening of this thing after we abandoned the coffin story was the moment the moments leading up to when hogan slams andre and then we cut to black right on the slam because we were gonna like revisit that later on i didn't like that yeah and i didn't like that yeah and i didn't need it but it's one of those things where you're like all right let's just throw everything in the board and let's let's decide what doesn't work and that clearly did not work we we did that opening that was like version number nine or ten oh the one that we have now the one that we have now yeah oh yeah that took a while it should be like there should be some

a lot of blood on the tracks like when you finish this thing it should be. Like there should be some, a lot of blood on the tracks. Like when you finish this thing, it should have been like, I love it when it's like, all right, here's my plan. Please tear this apart. And I think that that just comes with experience. It's just like, all right, I don't have all the, 10 years ago, it's like, this is the thing we're going to do. And if you don't like it, then you're wrong. Your taste sucks.

It's like, no, all right, here's my plan. Tell me why this sucks. And it can't be a lot of people either. The process was the right process. Yes, it was. We had exactly the right amount of coaching. Like all the notes should flow through in person. The thing I've learned over the years is the director spent so much time with it that they become fragile and they really do like, damn, no way.

No, it's not even you, it's everybody. It's you're so immersed. You're so deep in it you can't see it anymore and if you have five different people going you should do this you should do that this is wrong you feel like you're under attack it's like getting fired at so it has to come from one person i don't have kids but i would imagine if you go to like a parent teacher conference and you think that your kid's an angel and the teacher's like well you know she's having trouble with this and that it's like what are you talking about no no no no this is you're wrong about it now every teacher is saying like listen yeah she does talk too much in class you're like wait maybe she does talk too

much like maybe we need to address that so it turned like if you re if you respect if it's a small group which it has to be i could have 40 people i respect but if you have that many voices shouting at you then it's but if there's that many voices shouting at you, then it's. But if there's a small group of people whose opinions you respect and they should be different. That's that. What's the old saying that if everyone agrees with you in the room, you're in the wrong room. Or if you're the smartest guy in the room, you're in the wrong room. So if we all have the exact same opinions on this thing, that's why the fulcrum of this thing creatively was the day that we watched the first rough cut. And then we you took you said first of all this is in way better shape than i thought it was going to be it was it was like too good of

a rough cut well that was like an hour 40 i didn't understand why but where's my two and a half hour rough cut that we have to chop down so it was already tight ish but it was also that like bill is very very good at seeing it you know like i before, you can get locked into the minutiae when you're sitting in a dark edit room for three months and you're slaving over this one moment and which angle you're going to use. Bill's very good at seeing the 30,000 foot view of it. Like, this is what's important. You were the one who recommended adding the Rocky III stuff in there. It's like we have to start scratching these nostalgic pictures. Yeah.

Six million dollar man. Yeah. Well, that's kid of the 70s thing that I didn't even realize. My favorite part of that clip, by the way, is that like, so Six Million Dollar Man, he plays a Sasquatch and he's chasing the Six Million Dollar Man

through the woods. Got a huge laugh in the premiere last night. As it should, because he's a seven and a half foot Sasquatch and instead of just beating this man to death, he rips a tree out of the ground and chases him with it. Why do you need to use that as a weapon it's an object you're fine with just your paws and your claws you could scrape this guy to death and lee majors takes one look at him and i love that he kind of delays a little bit and he's like i can take uh and then he rips the tree out of the

ground he's like no i'm getting the fuck out of here no and he runs off camera that got one of the biggest laughs because it was just the preposterousness of it. Who was the most fun person to talk to? Flair. I mean, we were laughing so much on Flair. He's got a great PR in the doc. Flair goes like six for seven

with five threes. Flair's slugging percentage is about 1100 in this doc. 10 rebounds. Yeah, he owns four of the 10 biggest laughs and he's only in two scenes. I'll tell you, can I tell the Robin Wright story? You remember that story? Oh yeah, definitely. So Robin Wright, which, you know,

is every 80s kid's first crush, first of all. Still like unbelievable looking. Incredible. I mean, still probably the most beautiful person in the world. Just drop dead beautiful, right? And when you interview people in that world, they come with handlers and hair and makeup and a publicist and whatever.

And we're told that Robin will do this. Well, I wrote and said, I wrote to her agent and he said, write a letter and say why you want her in this. And I wrote a letter and saying that like, you know, huge respect for your career. And we want female voices in this because it's such a masculine industry

and a masculine story and this whole thing. And then I got a lot of, not a lot of women in this doc no we needed robin wright we did she's a breath of fresh air after looking at like jerry lawler and pat patterson anyways jerry lawler not not known as just a drop dead gorgeous yeah maybe back in the day yeah no no disrespect to jerry um so she said yes and then we scheduled the interview and i said like we have hair and makeup for her we can like we can get a car for her whatever they said no she's gonna show up at noon at this hotel in santa monica she'll do her own hair and makeup she's fine and i'm waiting in the in the lobby for her feeling like i'm 10 years old because robin wright's about to show up and

i'm gonna say hi to her right she hops out of her car at valet and walks up to me i said hi i'm jason she's in chucks and jeans and like a button down shirt and just like casual. It doesn't even look like she's wearing any makeup. It's the best looking person. Just like just like there's no one else in the room. There's no one else in the world at that point as she's walking through the lobby. So we get onto the elevator and she says, so I heard you did Rob Reiner and Billy Crystal yesterday. And I said, yeah. And she said, I talked to Carrie Elway. When are you going to interview him? And I said, well, you know what? We have so many characters who were in

this doc from The Princess Bride that we only have a certain amount of time to spend on The Princess Bride in this doc. So we elected to do Billy and Rob and you. And she said, well, by the way, we're in the elevator at this point going up to the room where we're about to shoot this interview. She says, well, I don't know how you're going to do a documentary about the Princess Bride without Carrie Elwes. And I said, oh, this isn't about the Princess Bride. This is about Andre the Giant. And she said, what? So I said, no, this is about Andre the Giant.

She said, oh, I only have two stories about Andre the Giant. And I said, I know exactly what they are. And we used them both. And I told her what they were. You talk about slugging percentage, batting average. This was the high. So we sat down and now I feel terrible. Like we sat down, we were like getting her ready to go. And this is a credit to her. She had a couple of like flyaways in her hair and normally like a hair and makeup person would come over. And I was like, Robin, you just have a couple of flyaways there if you want to fix them she looks in the reflection of the metal camera the back of the metal camera and looks in the the

lens the matte box and fixes it there and she's like ah it'll look fine like she did not care at all it's like all right what do you got and i teed her up for those two things i'm the most beautiful woman in the world i'll be fine but she didn't come off as that at all it was like she just had other places to be the interview was four and a half minutes long we used about four minutes and 12 seconds of it they used half of that in the promo like her batting average was like amazing 994 for like normally you use the standard is like you use one seventh of someone's interview she came in and hit four threes in a minute she really did yes this was like she didn't read your letter though huh what's that she didn't she never got a chance to read your letter sounds like i didn't i didn't even ask her

oh and also it was like i don't even know she knew what network this was for i was like but i had a whole thing like is she gonna sign a release do we have to do it through her lawyer and i said robin you know we have a release she's like boom scratches her name and said thanks guys that was it she was in and out within six minutes from from from sit down that was that the hbo component of this there is like a little halo effect with them like i don't know if we get everybody who's in the princess bride if we're doing this for no no if we're doing i don't want random network yeah if you're saying like we we're independent filmmakers and we're going to sell this afterwards like there's no way you do we don't get any of the you don't get schwarzenegger like on a moment's notice. Right.

Unless you are a, you already have these names and B it's for HBO. They, they, they come with a certain cache. There's a gravitas there. That's like, okay,

we're already, if these guys vetted HBO, vetted these guys and they're doing this doc, then it must be. The one thing we blew is the rock because we'd pushed for that for months and months. And as it turned out, he loved the doc and never realized

we had asked him to be interviewed for it never got to him and uh oh i had one great story and it's like oh man all right yeah well because this is where google does help like if you google the rock and andre there's several pictures of him like throughout his childhood the rock's dad wrestling with rocky johnson tag teams teams with Andre and all that. So he knew him really well. And I'm thinking like, all right, it'd be great. We were going to do a whole section about Andre with children. There's that famous photo at the beginning with the little kid looking up at him.

And then Stephanie was going to be a part of that. When did you know this was going to be good? Sean has to go. Sean's going to go. We'll finish it. Thanks, Sean. Sean's going to pick. We'll finish it. Thanks, Sean. Sean's going to play golf. Later, man.

Good luck. Hit them straight. When did you know this was going to be good? I hate that question because I've seen it 300 times. No, but I mean like good in the sense like when you do these things, there's a part of you that thinks like, I'm going to fuck this up. This is going to suck. Yeah, definitely.

But then you hit a point where you're like oh when we came back to france we we had an a straight a interview like a nine and a half out of ten i always i always report back to our guys uh in the in the edit room our guys and girls in the edit room of like how it went and it's always a baseball analogy so it was like how did vince go it's like stand up double. Yeah. How did Hogan go? 420 dead center field, three run home run. Right. How did, I won't, I won't mention any names that didn't go well, but it was like struck out looking. Yeah. Never took the bat off my shoulder. So when we had like the stand up double and the home run and all that, so we had that in our,

in our arsenal already. So, you know, you have two characters who were great, who were major to the story, Vince and Hogan, and both of those interviews couldn't have gone better. Then we came back from France and I knew that we had his backstory and I knew that we had debunked a lot of the mythology that was out there. And we had these shots of the hotel where he died. Then I was like, all right, now, now we can start filling in our spots. So now we need our Flares. We need our Schwarzeneggers. We need our Lawler. We need to go down to Memphis to get him.

And then we need to get all of our B-roll together. But when you have those tent poles, if you have the important guys who are going to keep your house on stilts, which is McMahon and Hogan and his backstory and great B-roll. I mean, I can't say- And the glue guy. Dave Shoemaker. You need the two glue guys dave shoemaker you need the two great interviews you need the two or three wild cards and you need the blue guy if you have like those six people the rest is it's really like building like an nba team like if you build

like a clubhouse for a baseball team or an nba team you need your start you need a guy who's going to hit your jumpers all the time jerry lawler every time we threw to him he was hitting an open 18 footer every time we needed him to. Well, you and I are anti-narrator, which sometimes you need a narrator. But I always feel like if the interviews are good enough, then a narrator is a cop-out. This is the first time. I'm anti-narrator in a sense that I admire people who can do that. Like our friend Ezra Edelman did the OJ doc, which was eight hours of material with no narrator, which is, I don't think people understand how difficult a feat that is to get every one of your interviews to say exactly what you need them to say in a compelling way.

This was the first time I haven't used a narrator. So this was kind of going, and I remember the first conversation. I wouldn't let you use a narrator. That was the first conversation we had. It was like, you can do whatever you want. You're not, don't use a narrator for this. You're good enough. You don't need to do it. You can do it. I really feel like if somebody's good enough, they don't use a narrator for this you're good enough you don't need to do it you can do it i really feel like if somebody's good

enough they don't need a narrator but you do need the glue guys because if we didn't have shoemaker if we didn't have the french guy yeah uh the french general patrick and if we didn't have like jerry lawler and mean gene yeah they kind of became the narrators anytime we needed to shove something forward yeah well that's why you save a guy like Shoemaker for later on in the shoot. That was smart. Because otherwise a narrator would say, in the early 80s, the advent of cable television was looming and this was going to happen to the-

But that's a good example though. So a narrator, conventionally you'd have a narrator say that. You went and found this commercial of cable tv yeah like i i just think that's a higher level to do this i i always feel like it's lazy to use the narrator there's ways to there's reasons to do it like when you did the uh the fab five one you're telling like this deep dive story of all these different you know this six-year run and it's would be really hard not to have a narrator. When it's statistical, that's when it's hard because the guys who could give you the facts

that you would give a narration. So if you say like, if you say in 1992, the Michigan Wolverines were a six seed in the South bracket, you know, like you can get a writer to say that you can feed him that line. But if Mitch album says it, it's not like it's so compelling that it's better than if a narrator, sometimes you need that shaman to take you through, especially when it's like, all right, the bulls were in the middle of a 13 game win streak when Steve Kerr went down with a collarbone injury and blah, blah, blah. I bet if we did the fab five thing over again, we could do that narrator. Oh, I would do, I would, I would do, I hope that I've grown in seven years since we did that.

And when I- Some of it's time too. If you don't have, if you have a limited amount of time to make it, then you need the narrator. We interviewed Mitch Albom for the Fab Five on March 1st. And we, that premiered on March 13th. I remember that.

Yeah. We- He wouldn't do it initially, right? Or there was some sort of screw up with it it wasn't a screw up i think that he was i think he wanted to be a producer because like he wrote a book called the fab five yeah so he wrote the definitive book and we were holding out for cweb too which was all other disaster that was another that was so the the thursday after the super bowl i get a call that weber wants to talk at after he goes off the air for Turner, he was on their

Thursday night show. And it was myself and executive Keith Klingscales at ESPN and Chris. And it was like, all right, Chris is finally going to come to the table. Mind you, we're airing this thing on March 13th. And when they greenlit the doc, it was supposed to be November 6th was our first shoot date with Jalen and Jimmy King and Ray Jackson at Jalen's apartment. That was the first day of shooting. And we were going to air this thing to commemorate the anniversary, the 20 year anniversary of the Duke game, their freshman year in December. So we were going to have 13 months to do this. And someone dropped out.

Jack Nicklaus dropped out from doing the 30 for 30 about the 86 Masters. By the way, that broke my heart. Broke your heart. It broke my soul because that meant we had to actually finish this thing in four months. Remember I always tell the story about the Andre goes back to like that first 10 or 12 we had when the initial 30 for 30 didn't. That was one of your first. 86 Masters was one of the other ones. It was like 86 Masters, Duck and Daryl, Andre the Giant. Bo Jackson. Bo Jackson. It was like the 12 essentials. I think Hagler, Leonard.

No, there was some boxing one in there. Boxing ones are on my, I mean, you know mine. Legendary Knights had done some of them. Yeah. But yeah, anyway, the 86 Masters was on the initial list. And then all of a sudden it fell through. So then that- We're speeding up.

That time slot was open. It was like, can you do this in nine fewer months? And we didn't have C-Web. And it was like- We kept waiting for C-Web to realize. We can get him to jail and said, we'll get him. And I think it was like this Mexican standoff where like we were saying to C-Web, we're going.

And he was saying like, they're not gonna go without me. And then finally it got to a point where it was like, all right, we're not going to do this. And he realized it and he called and we had a conversation that night. And he said like, here are the stipulations under which I will do this. You got to use my composer. And we said, fine. And he wanted, he was going to do a book and he wanted some advertising. He wanted a guarantee of like full page advertising and ESPN the magazine. And they're asking me and I'm saying,

I don't have the authority to like, sure, okay. They'll iron this out. And they said, all right, done. Like, and he said, I don't want it to be just a producer in name. I want to participate in this and you'll come down to Atlanta next week. We'll do a two day shoot at my house.

I have pictures. I was like, all right, Eureka. Now we can scramble and do this thing within a month and finish it radio silence there was some jail and c-web stuff going on oh there still is and i mean it made this whole thing made it worse but then then we found out c-web was shopping his own version of a fab five doc well as he was the funny part is that I got a call afterwards after the fab five aired and I got a call from one of his agents and they said, um, great job on the doc. Would you be interested in doing a fab five doc with Chris Weber?

That's weird. Yeah. That's, I think that was the, my exact response. I re I don't remember how this was communicated to him and how involved that was, but I know we communicated to him and I think I might've sent him an email and I think he might've had an AWOL account at the time, which is how I remember it. But it was basically like, cause at that point we'd done enough 30 for 30s and this wasn't a 30 for 30, but now it's become a 30 for 30. What's that? Oh yeah.

It was, it was at the time it was that weird. It was ESPN films. That's when like on guard, the Chris Herring one was there. Yeah was yeah when they were like we don't want to call these 30 for 30 anymore and we're like why everyone's calling the 30s let's keep it going now no now it's the point where people say like i heard you doing a 30 for 30 on andre the giant yeah actually it's for hbo it's like well whatever it's the same thing it's it's like kleenex and band-aids but um but we knew enough from the first series and we knew how rewatchable these things were. And at that point,

some of the ones we were picking for whatever, for between the 30s, but then eventually in the back of our head, volume two. And you just knew they were going to be rewatchable. And this one especially. And I remember it was communicated to him. And I'm pretty sure I sent the email. It was just was just like this is gonna be on for the next 30 years you're gonna feel like a

fucking idiot that you're not in it like we're telling the ship that the train is leaving the station all the time and you're not gonna be in it and other people are gonna be telling your story like we're doing it anyway like just be in it so i remember that an email went out such a mistake between the five guys like this would be like to, to, like to, to screenshot this thing would be fascinating. There was an email between the five guys. And I think Jalen said like, listen, this is how we're telling our story. Let's all get together and tell this. We got to do it. And Chris responded. I was, I was either CC'd or BCC'd on this. And Chris responded and said, I would love to be a

part of this, but because of these sanctions, I'm not allowed to speak about any of this stuff. Which is bullshit. So then I jumped in and replied to all of them and said, hey, great news. Mary Sue Coleman, the president of Michigan at the time, says that you can speak about whatever you want. You're free to go to a Michigan game. They just can't invite you. So this is great. When do you want to do the interview? And then radio silence.

So when we called him on it, it was like, he never wanted to do it. Because it was a territorial thing with him and Jalen. It was. It was an alpha dog thing between him and Jalen. And it always has been from the time they were 12 years old. It's gotten worse. Well, it hasn't gotten better.

We know that. The second finals that I worked with Jalen, Jawan was on the court in Miami yeah I sent you that I took a video because I I wanted Jalen to have it

well this is legendary yeah this story and Jalen walks over and C-Web's talking to Jawan and C-Web sees Jalen and just turns his back and Jalen

high fives him and C-Web is just kind of walks away like two feet with his back to him and waits for Jalen to leave. The thing is that I— It was so fucked up. These guys were like brothers. Yeah. I feel—I have no hatred at all, no ill will, ill feelings.

You were just in the middle of the whole thing. I just wanted it to happen because I thought I truly want those banners to go back up for these guys. I do think that people misremember this is the fab five scandal this was tractor trailer and all the egregious stuff happened way after these guys that's why like that they had to to have these sanctions across years and years of this stuff so i haven't i have no ill will towards chris yeah it's a mistake. I just, I'm not mad at him either. I just wish he had been in it.

It just would have been better. Here's what I do wish. He went on Dan Patrick a couple of years ago, a year or two ago, maybe. And there's other examples of this, but here's an anecdotal example of it. He went on and said, I would have loved to have been in it.

They didn't contact me until a week before they finished. I have, I have all the emails. I called and emailed him and his agent week after week after week after week to ask them because I was not going to take no for an answer. At least I was going to, I was going to die trying. Yeah. And we, we, you know, we died trying and he, finally we couldn't do it anymore. But we did mitch album on march 1st for march 13th if he wanted to do it on march 11th we would have done it but he just never came around we have uh andre april 10th 10 o'clock we should mention there's an easter egg i'm not going to give away who it is but my favorite thing about this entire documentary somebody is interviewed wearing the same clothes as the oil painting of himself

that's behind him on the wall and I'm not going to tell you who it is but as you're watching these interviews look in the background to see if there's an oil painting of any of those people wearing the exact same outfit that they're wearing as they're getting interviewed it's fucking crazy

did you frame it intentionally? you did right? don't know if did you frame it intentionally we did you did right it's tom stuckus he's our dp he's a genius i will not say it it was a wrestler so keep your eye out for the wrestler and just it's just magnificent characters try and think of a who would have an oil painting of themselves in their apartment and b who would wear the exact same outfit for the day of the shoot when the camera crew is coming over. It's so good. We should have done it with everybody.

Who has an oil painting of themselves? I think that might be a style we use from now on is that we bring an oil painting of the subject of the interview and hang it strategically in the back and soft focus. You're still single, right? I'm single. So if you're still single 20 years from now, like, is there an age where you're like, fuck it, I'm just getting an oil painting of myself? I have several in my closet throughout the years. I was going to make a little collage. You know what the Slimmer could use?

An oil painting of me. And if I ever sit for an interview in a documentary, I'm going to save the outfit from when they painted that painting and make sure I can fit back into it. It's so good. That's a great catch. It's a great Easter egg. Yeah. That entire day. I mean, I could tell you that was a bizarre, that, that was, as we were setting up for that interview, I called my shot. I came out to the truck and I said, I'm going Bay Ruth with

this one boys. I'm calling my shot. It's going to be a home run. And it was a dribbler to third base. And I was out by three steps at first base, that interview, we did, we did get a couple of moments out of it that we needed but that interview was a that was a frustrating day because I thought he was going to be our MVP and it turned out it's a lot of talk that wasn't the case let it talk until the cameras are that's what you know when people never know really good stories you gotta say shut up wait until the mic is on and then tell the story can we talk about what's next for you or no we We can't. Something's coming up. Something's coming up. Things are happening.

The planets are aligning, I hope. It's a dream project if it happens. Isn't it cool that this thing's going to be on HBO and they have like eight channels and they just show stuff over and over again? It's just going to be out all the time. I can't wait. I do think it is one of those that's like you mentioned before like one of those that if you're the jumping channels you can just jump in at any point it's like oh wrestlemania 3 is coming up it's a very rewatchable doc because there's a lot of just like oh the farting section's coming up yes yes yeah we should we certainly do have enough deleted scenes that we

should we should release those we should do that My biggest challenge is making sure we didn't give away some of the juiciest, best parts before the doc comes out. I'm a proponent of that. Because I think that like- No, because this is too good. You can't. That you do it when- I have no objectivity with that.

You do it when you're trying to pull more people to the doc. We don't need to with this. We have this stuff lined up ready to go. That's a little cocky. Let's go- No, it's Andre. People love Andre. Let's go Winston Wolf, it's Andre. People love Andre. Let's go Winston Wolf on that, please.

And not start doing something yet. What do you mean? I think we're being a little cocky by saying that this is so good that we don't have to show anything. I didn't say it was so good. I say the interest is there. Okay. Yeah, I'll give you that. Definitely.

People are like, Andre, when is it? What date? Like, we don't really need. Like, they're showing up. It's not like we're like, there's people out there going, I'm not sure if I want to watch this. They're certainly not wondering what it is about based on the title. Yeah. It's like, I'm on the fence with this Andre the Giant doc. Is there a clip I could watch that might pick my mind up?

I would give my biggest self-critique in my career would be that the titles of the documentaries, we've discussed this before because we had discussed several permutations of a title for this doc. When you look back, we did a doc about five freshmen playing called the Fab Five. I mean, you know where I stood

from day one. You want to call Andre the Giant? I just thought that's where it was going to end up. If you look at my... You really wanted Giant. Or we were talking about Eighth Wonder.

Like, I just think that my titles are lazy i suck at titles but we also i'm also of the opinion that no matter what you cut like like um courtship of rivals is the name of the bird magic doc that as we got a bird of magic bird magic that's the doc no one says like have you seen oj made in america they say as you see the oj doc but that was the case for Under the Giant. Yes. But they're going to call it this anyway.

It's like, ask three people around you what the OJ documentary is called. And they would be like, OJ? Yeah. Nobody knew it was OJ Made in America. It was like, so we're going to do a film about the Fab Five. What should we call it? It's not like we had this, you know, we didn't need a think tank to come up with the Fab Five. We're going to do a film about the 85 Bears.

Let's call it, because that was supposed to be called Immortal. And then people were like, what does that mean? It was like, wow. You just called the 85 Bears? It's just called, because that's what people are going to call it. It's the Saving Private Ryan analogy. What's the movie about?

They're going to save Private Ryan. Okay. Great. Yeah. Someday, someday I'll have a cool title for a doc, but until then, until, I mean, these, I'm lucky enough that there are these like indelible pop cultural figures and teams that we have covered that it's like, well, that you have to call them that, you know?

Wow. This is a great process. I really enjoyed it. I hope we get to work together again. It'll happen at some point down the road. Likewise. I hope sooner than later. Good times.

Congratulations. It was really fun last night watching that. It was, that was a good night. Awesome. Thank you. Thanks for having me. All right. Thanks to Cous good night. Awesome. Thank you. Thanks for having me. All right. Thanks to Cousin Sal. Thanks to Jason Hare. Thanks to Sean Fantasy. Don't forget, Andre the Giant. 10 PM, HBO, Tuesday night, available on all their platforms. If you miss

it for whatever reason, DVR it. You can watch it on HBO On Demand. You can watch it on HBO Go, HBO Now. Anything with HBO in the title, you can probably watch it on. Check that out. And thanks to ZipRecruiter, the smartest way to hire. My listeners can try it for free at ZipRecruiter.com slash BS.

We have two more big podcasts coming this week on the BS pod, plus me on the Ringer NBA show Wednesday night after all the games are decided. Stay tuned for that. Don't forget to check out the ringer.com. Lots of good pieces going this week, including Kevin O'Connor's award ballot for MVP and a whole bunch of other

stuff, which is on the ringer.com right now. Spoiler alert. He picked James Harden because he's a rational human being. Anyway, check that out. Thanks. Talk to you soon. We'll see you next time. you