Bill Simmons & David Shoemaker On Making Mr. McMahon, Simmons Calls It The Strangest Process He’s Ever Done

Bill Simmons & David Shoemaker served as executive producer and consulting producer respectively on Mr. McMahon, and they recently weighed in on making the docuseries. The Vince McMahon series bowed on Neftlix on Wednesday and the two spoke about working on the series during The Bill Simmons podcast. You can see the highlights below, courtesy of Fightful:

Shoemaker on dealing with McMahon: “It was really hard, even when he was pseudo eager on the first phase of the documentary, it was really hard to get beyond the surface with him. Vince is, even prior to everything coming out over the past couple years, is just the most bizarre subject to try to do this kind of project for because even when he was eager, he wasn’t there on time, or on the days that he was supposed to be there.”

Shoemaker on McMahon’s team that was with him: “There was always a team, and everybody, Chris Smith, the entire production team, have done so many documentaries of this sort, and of all sorts. This is the guy that did Tiger King, and none of them had ever experienced a working situation like we encountered in Stamford, Connecticut. We would show up to shoot, and then just be all day long getting updates from Vince’s secretary about his ETA, pushing, like six hours, eight hours before the shoot, pushing it back an hour, pushing it back another hour, pushing it back another hour, and then he would roll in at 11 p.m, pitch black, with his little crew around him and shake everybody’s hand and say thank you for being here and then going to hair and makeup and then just emerge in the same outfit that he was wearing for every shoot. It was just such a bizarre situation.”

Simmons on the process: “It was certainly the strangest documentary process I’ve ever been involved with. I will say, though, I’ve worked with a lot of people and I’ve done a lot of these. I just could not believe how good Chris and his team were. I’ve never worked with a team quite like that.”

Simmons on the approach to telling McMahon’s story: “I don’t want to say too much because I don’t want to prejudice how people watch the documentary. I really want people to sit down and watch it, but the backstory of it was, Vince wanted to do a documentary, and the WWE, because I had done the Andre the Giant doc, and he was ready to tell his story. A big thing for us was well, if we’re gonna tell your story, it’s gotta be everything. We’re not doing an autobiography. It’s gotta be warts and all, and it’s like I’m ready to talk about everything. So the next step was finding a director, and the best thing was with Chris, he wasn’t a wrestling fan, and we actually decided it’d be more interesting. Let’s get somebody who doesn’t know this, and we immerse him into this world, and he’s experiencing everything for the first time, and we can help him with the wrestling stuff.

“So we get all these interviews and we’re going, and probably working on it for over a year, year and a half, and then the first wave of stuff happens with Vince. For the next two years, we’re trying to figure out, will we have to audible on the fly again, what’s this gonna mean? There’s a couple times when I think both of us thought this things gonna get shelved, this won’t happen. But the thing for me, we were trying to do a balanced portrait, as balanced as we could, of somebody who for 50 years had this [huge] impact on not only completely changing professional wrestling, the culture, television, cable, the pay-per-view model, the streaming model, there’s nobody like him. There’s no promoter like him. So the big thing was, how do we capture that impact? The second thing was, who is this guy? What’s real and not real? That’s where we kind of gravitated with the doc, but then all the sudden, there’s a twist here, there’s a turn here.”

Shoemaker on Vince’s interest in doing the series: “You said Vince was eager, he wanted to do the documentary at first, which is 100% true. But I don’t think Vince, it sounds so weird to say, I’m not sure Vince knew what it meant to do the documentary, and I’m not sure that he knew what story he wanted to tell. I don’t even know if he knows who he is enough to tell that story. It was really hard, even when he was pseudo eager in the first phase of the documentary, it was really hard to get beyond the surface with him.”