Tony Khan On AEW’s Creative Process, Collision Being Easier To Put Together Than a Year Ago

Tony Khan gave some insight into the creative process during the AEW All In post-show media scrum. Khan spoke about how the process has evolved and talked about the number of people involved in the process, and how he heads up the team. You can see the highlights below:

On the creative process in the company: “There’s like 27 people involved in the process. And it’s like a football team. When I go in and I’m at a football meeting where there’s a lot of people contributing ideas. And you have a dozen coaches on offense and a dozen coaches on defense, everybody puts something in. And at the end of the day, I have to decide. And I get pitched hundreds and hundreds of ideas a week, and I can do less than half of them. And some of them are great ideas that just don’t make sense because you need somebody else that somebody else had a better idea for, or that we were already pretty far down the line with. And it’s like a big map. And I get pitched hundreds of things, and then I have to decide.

“But that’s a lot like other sports. You know, this is a sport. And that’s something I’ve been trying to hammer into people. I’ve said that a lot this weekend, people tell me they’re going to try to do something, and I say, ‘That wouldn’t fly and that doesn’t fly, because this is a sport’… this is my 13th season as a professional sports executive, and in other sports, nobody’s ever told me, ‘I’m going to try to do something.’ It’s like, ‘You’re going to f**king do it.’ So that’s how it works. In other sports and in this sport, that’s the whole point of having a head coach.”

On having different people for different creative: “There’s lots of ideas, and the cool part is, we have like — like I said, there’s probably 27, 30 people in any given week that will come in with different ideas, trying to contribute to different parts of the thing. And it’s like in football where you have like — you have your quarterback coach, your running back coach, your wide receiver coach, tight ends coach, your offensive line coach, your assistant offensive line coach… different people that are focused in different areas. And so I’ve got some people that might work with other people more than others. So like Jen [Pepperman] would work with Mercedes, but she might work on promos with other people that she has a good rapport with. I come up with ideas for Toni and Mariah, and none of the coaches I had were really good for it because none of them understood what the f**k I was talking about. And everyone was looking at me like, ‘All About Eve and Sunset Boulevard?’ So there was only one person in the back that even knew the references, and that’s how RJ [City] got involved in the creative process, and he does a good job on things.

“Jimmy [Jacobs] is really good, because Jimmy’s the only person goes to every show. I go to every show; there’s nobody else in the company besides Jimmy missed maybe like two shows in the last year, but he probably has the best attendance record of — certainly anybody in the back office, almost anybody in the entire company. So just to have a stenographer and one person who’s hearing everything people come in and say. Jimmy will contribute some ideas, but he gets way too much s**t online because people think Jimmy’s putting this and that and that. He’s not putting a lot of stuff in. He’s really good because he’s the guy that’s there every week. He’s not biased on anybody’s stuff or toward any one person…. and so it’s like a big thing. We have this really, really good group of people but at the end of the day, it’s like a football team.”

On how the process has changed since last year: “I think this year it’s helped [having multiple people] because last year, we had literally just launched Collision. I frankly think it’s an easier environment backstage at Collision than it was a year ago to do things. I think it’s a lot easier flow between the two shows than it was a year ago. I think the locker room is in a much better place than it was a year ago, as evidenced by when we came up here vs what happened here a year ago. And I think it’s a much easier job I have dealing, because I had to deal with the people on Collision last year and it’s a much easier meeting process to put the TV together than it was a year ago than this time too, if that makes sense. Because we were obviously dealing with a lot of things going into Wembley last year, which obviously showed up.”

If you use any of the quotes in this article, please credit AEW with a h/t to 411mania.com for the transcription.