Bill Simmons gives details on the Vince McMahon documentary he helped produce for Netflix.
Simmons, who founded The Ringer and helped co-create the popular ESPN series 30 For 30, spoke about the McMahon docuseries during an interview with SI Media podcast. Highlights from the interview can be found below.
When Netflix will drop the series:
I think it’s going to be the first part of next year. Chris Smith is directing it, I don’t know if he’s one of the five best documentary directors or one of the three, whatever shortlist there is, he’s on it. We spent a lot of time on it. I don’t want to say too much.
Whether he’s seen it and what he thinks:
Yes. That was the initial conceit of it. I don’t want to say too much, but I think it has the chance to be pretty spectacular.
Says the documentary is in a few parts before commending his director and editing team:
It’s a few parts. I’m pretty passionate about this. I think people pump…they add parts or make this stuff longer than it needs to be because that’s how you get paid more to do a documentary. I’m anti-that guy. I want these things to be the exact right length. I could never figure it out with my column, my column was always too long, but shaping a documentary is a lot like writing a column and figuring out, ‘I love that paragraph, but I have to cut it out. This moves better if I take that out.’ With documentaries, if someone is doing it correctly, they are amazing pieces of art. It’s not just the director. There are a couple of editors, but there is usually one incredible editor, which we have for this. It’s a lot of people involved and there is real TLC. You can’t think of it like, ‘we can stretch this to six hours. This could be six instead of four.’ I think that’s crazy. This is about Vince McMahon, his life, and wrestling, so obviously, it can’t be two hours.
Whether McMahon will like the docuseries:
I don’t know. I would never speak for Vince. He’s been in my life for my entire life. I literally cannot remember my life without him being in it. If you look at him from…strip away all the other stuff and just talk about the last 50 years he had, pretty good topic for a documentary.
In a separate media appearance, Simmons revealed that McMahon will not have a say on the final edit of the project. You can read about that here.