PREVIEW - #273 - Kayfabe

Michael and Us

Luke Savage and Will Sloan

Tv & Film

4.6 • 668 Ratings

🗓️ 4 October 2021

⏱️ 4 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

PATREON EPISODE - https://www.patreon.com/posts/56985194 The Superdelegate patron tier has selected BEYOND THE MAT (1999), a warts-and-all documentary about the lives of professional wrestlers like Jake "The Snake" Roberts and Mick "Mankind" Foley. We discuss what "the movie that Vince McMahon doesn't want you to see" has to say about the art and business of pro wrestling, and what pro wrestling can teach us about politics. PLUS: the Anti-Woke Film Festival and Keir Starmer.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This 1999 documentary about wrestling has been a long-time contender amongst the superdelegate,
0:07.2	Patreon Tears deliberations. It has often been in the conversation, and then this month,
0:12.9	it seems there was this push that this movie had to be dealt with. We had to get this out of the
0:18.2	running at some point or another. You know, somebody wanted
0:21.0	this one really hard and they would not give up. In fact, we even said we were eventually going
0:28.0	to get around to this, but us eventually getting around to it could have been six months from now.
0:32.1	It could have been five years from now, you know, but we did watch it. Yeah, and I got to say,
0:36.9	having watched it, I now understand
0:39.0	why people wanted us to watch it. Thoroughly enjoyed this one, even though I don't know anything
0:44.0	about pro wrestling, really. I've never watched it in any kind of meaningful way, but I thought
0:48.8	this documentary was really interesting and that the political angles on it are very obvious and represent things that I think
0:55.8	about a lot of the time. I agree. I found this movie quite compelling. I find it compelling
1:00.7	mainly because of the individual human stories it tells. I think if the movie has a limitation,
1:07.0	it's that I don't think it really has a big macro thesis on wrestling. It's the work of a filmmaker
1:13.6	named Barry Blaustein. I may be mispronouncing that, but he's a former Saturday Night Live writer
1:20.1	who has worked primarily with Eddie Murphy. He's one of the credited screenwriters on the Coming to America
1:25.9	films and the Nutty Professor films. And in fact,
1:29.1	the Nutty Professor was produced by Imagine Entertainment, which is Brian Grazer and Ron Howard's
1:34.1	company. And that company bankrolled this documentary. So I guess this documentary was basically
1:40.0	their gift to him for having made them a lot of money on The Nutty Professor. Blaustede is a lifelong
1:46.2	wrestling fan, and he essentially went into the movie with that spirit. He was like, I want to explore
1:52.9	my fascination with wrestling, and I want to explore particular wrestling personalities that I find
	...

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