Professional wrestling is an endless mill of larger-than-life characters and unbelievable stories—inside the ring and out. It’s easy to see why the colorful world has been a subject of enduring interest to documentary filmmakers. But much like the documentary form itself, professional wrestling raises questions about reality and how it’s presented to an audience, residing at the ever-blurry line between truth and fiction. While documentaries claim to be nonfiction, they’re just as “worked” as a wrestling match or a Hollywood movie, selling an artist’s vision as reality.
For many fans, the “wrestling documentary” is synonymous with the many documentaries WWE has released over the past two decades; originally produced in-house, WWE’s films are now largely outsourced to Peacock and the A&E Network, who produce the Biography: WWE Legends and WWE Rivals series, both of which recently premiered their latest seasons. But beyond WWE, there’s been a recent boom in nonfiction content about wrestling, one that claims to unveil the reality from behind the promotion. Dark Side of the Ring, which secured Vice TV’s biggest ratings ever while revealing backstage drama and trauma, is partially responsible for this new wave: Vice has continued to explore the reality of wrestling with last year’s Tales From the Territories, as well as films like Vice Versa: Chyna and The Nine Lives of Vince McMahon.
The surge in wrestling documentaries isn’t a Vice-held monopoly. Outside of its WWE-licensed work, Peacock dove into indie wrestling’s underbelly with Dangerous Breed, which investigates the troubled life and potential crimes of the infamous Teddy Hart. Alongside its just-launched partnership with Major League Wrestling, the REELZ Network has also debuted several new wrestling documentaries—the original Chyna: Wrestling With Demons and two episodes of the investigative series Autopsy, which examines the deaths of Owen Hart and Roddy Piper. Widely regarded by many as the greatest wrestling documentary, Hitman Hart: Wrestling With Shadows got a 25th-anniversary re-release that features new commentary from Dave Meltzer and Bret Hart. Last year’s Slamdance Film Festival featured a portrait of the late New Jack, and even streaming service IWTV has gotten into the game with its The Life Of series, following the day-to-day existences of indie wrestlers like Alex Shelley and Willow Nightingale. Even outside the documentary realm, upcoming films like A24’s The Iron Claw, about the fabled Von Erich clan, and the Sundance premiere Cassandro, the fiction debut of documentarian Roger Ross Williams, are evidence of a growing interest in presenting wrestling history in new ways. The titular luchador in Cassandro, played by Gael García Bernal, was the subject of a 2018 documentary, and the cursed Von Erich family saga was introduced to a new generation thanks to Dark Side of the Ring.
The splashy look of today’s wrestling documentaries are a far cry from the subgenre’s cinéma vérité origins. Many of the earliest wrestling documentaries were produced for public television, short films about the territories in places like Portland or Quebec—even Hitman Hart: Wrestling With Shadows was produced with Canadian state funding. These documentaries present wrestling as a curious novelty for an unfamiliar audience, approaching it like a subculture worthy of anthropological study. 1972’s Friday Night in the Coliseum, which examines Paul Boesch’s Houston-based Mid-South Wrestling, is as much about the audience as it is the talent or promoters, if not more so, almost like a Heavy Metal Parking Lot for old-school wrestling fans, asking what exactly draws people to this violent spectacle. Nowadays, the most high-profile wrestling documentaries overlap with the true crime subgenre, or at least attempt to market to that audience. The use of dramatic reenactments and menacing horror movie music in Dark Side of the Ring recall countless Netflix documentaries, while Peacock’s Dangerous Breed clearly borrows a page from the Tiger King playbook.
In an era of stricter kayfabe, completely pulling back the curtain on the business would have been a serious breach of code, so it’s not really until the 1990s and early 2000s, around the same time that WWE was scoring bestsellers with revealing memoirs, like Mick Foley’s Have a Nice Day, that the subgenre took off. Most of WWE’s documentaries are, for lack of a better word, propaganda, selling whatever narrative was good for business at the time, and rarely going deeper than surface level. In retrospect, documentaries like The Rise and Fall of WCW try a little too hard to make Vince McMahon’s former competitors look bad, while The Self-Destruction of the Ultimate Warrior is an outright hit piece on a wrestler who was at that time on poor terms with his former employer. The Dark Side of the Ring episode about the notorious “Plane Ride From Hell” made Ric Flair something of a temporary pariah in the wrestling world, but Peacock’s new documentary about Flair is a piece of pure hagiography that makes no mention of the many serious allegations that have followed the Nature Boy for years. The WWE-produced documentaries that resonate the most with fans are, unsurprisingly, the ones that stray from the formula, peeling back the layers of kayfabe—films like Undertaker: The Last Ride and CM Punk: Best in the World broke through because they presented honesty more than agenda.
But in wrestling, even honesty usually comes with an agenda. As a business notorious for smooth-talkers and snake oil salesmen, the history of pro wrestling is full of stories that fulfill the demand for unsolved mysteries and illicit crimes. That’s made it the ideal bedfellow of a content industry that can’t get enough of con artists, with seemingly every cold case, scandalous cult, and pyramid scheme in history mined for the subject matter. Many of the most successful documentaries over the past five years, from Wild Wild Country to The Vow, focus on subjects who are, in a word, cons. As we’re nickel and dimed in our own lives by political figures and tech billionaires, stories about grifters, scammers, and swindlers have become increasingly relatable and resonant with audiences. That’s not to say that every wrestler or wrestling promoter is a con artist, but there’s an inherent con to the work itself, the act of “selling” and convincing an audience to buy into a fabricated reality.
The unseemly cousin of the wrestling documentary is, of course, the shoot interview, which flourished in the same direct-to-video market as glossy WWE productions, claiming to strip back the marketing narrative and reveal the unvarnished truth of the business. What many consider the first real shoot interview, a 1994 conversation with Eddie Gilbert at a Ramada Inn in Tennessee, was even evocatively titled like a documentary: “Looking for Mr. Gilbert.” But just like documentaries, and wrestling itself, the shoot interview requires navigating several layers of reality; unlike a conventional journalistic interview, it’s ultimately a business transaction, where the talent promises to exchange secrets for a check. Despite their promise of honesty, shoot interviews are rife with tall tales and exaggerated fiction, that aim to make the wrestler themselves look better or bury someone else.
With the true crime content mill in overdrive, critics and skeptics have raised worthwhile questions about the ethics of the genre; by exploiting tragedy or forcing victims to relive personal trauma, true crime can be its own kind of grift. Vice’s most recent venture into pro wrestling content, the documentary The Nine Lives of Vince McMahon, overindulges some of the unconscious carny tendencies of the form. Though the two-hour film includes a few minutes on recently-revealed allegations, The Nine Lives plays quite literally as a “greatest hits” of Dark Side of the Ring, cobbling together a scatterbrained narrative of McMahon’s life from previous episodes about subjects like the death of Owen Hart and the steroid trials. In wrestling parlance, the documentary is something of a swerve, promising a no-holds-barred investigation only to deliver a toothless final product. Given the still-unfolding scandals around McMahon, as well as the multiple documentaries about him currently in production, The Nine Lives of Vince McMahon comes off as a low-effort rush job to claim the title first. The REELZ documentaries feel like a similarly shameless retread of Vice TV’s programs, given both Vice’s previous relationship with MLW and its in-depth examinations of Owen and Chyna. Even if the intention is to pay tribute to fallen legends, at what point is retelling the same tragic stories about wrestling just exploitative?
Professional wrestling blurs reality in entertaining and fulfilling ways, but the deceptive nature of “working” can sometimes encourage the worst instincts of already manipulative individuals. Wrestling documentaries can at times traffic in this deceptiveness, selling a specific version of reality to the audience in order to make a quick buck or put someone over. For the wrestlers who let their lives be captured, there’s sometimes the hope of redemption or greater fame, while for filmmakers, there’s a similarly convenient opportunity to get attention with a colorful subject matter. Vice Versa: Chyna, a stand-alone documentary similar in style to Dark Side of the Ring but separate from it, is a particularly tragic case study of how wrestlers themselves can be exploited by the camera. The film is an empathetic portrait of an iconic talent who never got her due, but it’s also a cautionary tale, assembled from the rubble of the unfinished documentary The Reconstruction of Chyna.
Down to the name, The Reconstruction of Chyna feels inspired by the underdog success of The Resurrection of Jake the Snake, a heartwarming documentary that saw Jake “the Snake” Roberts turn his life and reputation around with the help of life coach Diamond Dallas Page, an against-all-odds story that culminates in Jake’s induction into the WWE Hall of Fame. For Chyna and her team, too, the desired goal is recognition by the Hall of Fame—which D-Generation X “apologized” for during the faction’s 2019 WWE Hall of Fame induction—but the outcome would be much more tragic. Joanie Laurer didn’t have anyone as strong-willed or genuinely caring as Diamond Dallas Page in her corner—only leeching con artists who saw her as their own meal ticket. That documentary would become the television special Vice Versa: Chyna, which shows not only Chyna’s game-changing career and personal demons but how the failed documentary project may have been a crucial factor in her death. (Former business manager Anthony Anzaldo saw himself not as Chyna’s employee, but her “soulmate,” and even after her death he’s continued to exploit her image and memory. Erik Angra, the would-be director of The Resurrection of Chyna, was also arrested on drug trafficking charges in 2019, in connection with Chyna’s overdose.)
This kind of mutualistic relationship between subject and filmmaker—which in the wrong hands can easily turn parasitic—is deconstructed by Dangerous Breed. With a legendary last name and a fair amount of athletic ability, Teddy Hart seemed to have stardom in the bag. But just as soon as he became the youngest wrestler ever signed to WWE, he became the youngest wrestler ever fired from WWE, and has been dogged by controversy ever since. Indie promotions offered countless second chances, but Teddy seemed almost single-mindedly committed to burning bridges and squandering any goodwill, and his substance use and behavioral issues eventually exploded into domestic abuse and interpersonal violence. Teddy’s outlaw image allowed him to squeak out a living despite the charges hanging over him, but it would all come to a massive head during the #SpeakingOut movement of 2020, as wrestling fans became more aware of Teddy’s history of abuse and asked questions about the disappearance of ex-girlfriend Samantha Fiddler.
Teddy Hart, ever the worker, saw a potential platform to mount his comeback story, while would-be documentarian Frederick Kroetsch sees Teddy as the unpredictable character and future reality TV star who will launch him to streaming success. At the end of the day, even if Kroetsch condemns Teddy and even if Teddy sees Kroetsch as an easy mark, they’re still willing collaborators using one another as much as they’re working together. Kroetsch comes off like something of a misguided white knight: he claims good intentions in continuing to follow Teddy, hoping his footage could provide possible answers in the Fiddler case, or maybe that Teddy would implicate himself on camera like Robert Durst. But more than Teddy Hart’s troubled and toxic life, the real subject of Dangerous Breed is Kroetsch’s own guilt, as he was clearly played by Teddy and made complicit in an abusive situation. It’s the kind of complicated ethical conundrum endemic to both documentary film and pro wrestling: How do you know when you’re being used or played?
Filmmaker Robert Greene has a unique insight into the intersection of pro wrestling and documentary film. Greene directed the 2011 documentary Fake It So Real, an independent film about independent wrestlers in North Carolina fighting to scrape out an existence doing what they love. As a lifelong wrestling fan, Greene is influenced by wrestling even when it isn’t the direct focus of his work—in films like Actress and Kate Plays Christine, there’s a recurring interest in what you could basically call kayfabe, a study of how the ritual of performance bleeds into reality. In fact, Greene even employs professional wrestling as a teaching tool in courses on nonfiction film at the University of Missouri. “I use pro wrestling as one of the easiest ways to understand the weirdness of the documentary form,” he explained.
“It’s real in a sense, but it’s also completely made up in a sense. The ethical and aesthetic complexity is just below the surface. Even with the most boring documentaries you can imagine, if you think too deeply about them, you’re like, ‘Holy shit, this is immensely complex.’ Like, ‘What am I watching? Why is this OK? How did the camera get in the room?’ There’s an agreement in a documentary between a subject and filmmaker, that we’re going to work together to say something is real, when in fact it’s an agreement to say it’s real.
“Wrestling’s the same thing. It’s a bunch of people getting together to say, we know what’s going to get you excited, so we’re going to work to make that excitement and not hurt each other for real, so we can do it tomorrow night as well. We’re going to trick you into buying into this reality, because we can control the unreality.”
Given that human beings are infallible and imperfect, there’s only so much that can be controlled in wrestling and documentaries alike. In Greene’s eyes, it’s that conflict between what we can control and what we can’t that draws his interest. “The most interesting in both art forms is when the unwieldy gets in there,” he said. “Like, when Bryan Danielson sells anything related to his head injury. It’s totally real in one sense that he could be paralyzed or be injured and have to give up wrestling again. You can’t fake certain things, like getting thrown off the top of a cell, or a headbutt. But he’s using our knowledge of the reality of wrestling’s unreality to charge the work, and wrestlers use that awareness of reality to manipulate our emotions. I feel like the best filmmakers do that too.”
The subjects of Fake It So Real are working at a very different scale than someone like Bryan Danielson, but the fundamental principles still apply: it’s still an illusion that we’re told to believe in as viewers. “All the years ago that we made Fake It So Real, when I was trying to convince [cinematographer] Sean Price Williams to do it, he told me at first, wrestling isn’t good for movies,” he said. “What he was trying to say was that if you could see that it’s staged—obviously ‘fake’ is a charged term—where are the stakes? I think we proved with that movie that what makes it interesting is these guys are struggling for something, and the struggle is real, so to speak, but they’re also faking the whole time. It’s acting. I just love that because that’s what I think documentaries are too. I’ve been exploring that idea in different ways ever since, and I think if a pro wrestling fan watches my films, they can see the influence of wrestling.”
As another example of that struggle, Greene offers the classic Wrestling With Shadows. He sees the film’s central tension—between the steadfast principles of Bret Hart and the crass nature of show business—as a perfect example of the singular line tread by both wrestling and documentary filmmaking.
“Wrestling With Shadows is fascinating because no one believes more in their reality than Bret Hart,” Greene said. “It’s his dad, it’s his brothers, it’s his blood, it’s everything. This guy really believes he was the Hitman, and of course he was, but he was also put over by an apparatus that wanted to make money off of him. So he’s basically the most sincere documentary subject ever, but at the same time, he’s literally using the documentary filmmakers to help him negotiate a contract! He’s trying to figure out a way to get the most money out of the situation because he’s basically been underpaid his whole career, so it could not be more transactional. Or is it sincere? It’s that it’s both transactional and sincere, and it’s always both. You can say the same thing about documentaries as you can about pro wrestling.”
The relationship between filmmaker and subject is loaded in any kind of documentary: there’s always the chance that we’re being lied to, whether by the person speaking onscreen or the person behind the camera. But in Greene’s eyes, that ethical complexity isn’t a bug, but a feature, one that fuels his interest in both documentary film and pro wrestling: They both offer insight into how easily truth and reality can be turned into a commodity. “Like everything in wrestling, documentary film gets all chewed up and becomes another layer of promotion. That’s one of the reasons why I love wrestling: the promotion is pure. Everything else is pretending to not be promotional, but wrestling is like, of course we’re promotional. The only thing we understand is promotion.”
We’re always being sold something as wrestling fans, whether that’s literal merchandise, the emotional intensity of a feud, or the severity of a feigned injury. But even in the deceptiveness and dishonesty that comes with marketing, there’s a kind of truth: more than any other form of sport or entertainment, wrestling is upfront about being a business. We may not know what we’re being sold, but we know we’re being sold something, that reality is being manipulated to serve an end and produce an outcome. Other documentary subjects might claim to be truthful, but as a wrestling fan, you know you always have to take the historical record with a grain of salt; otherwise, you might get worked.
Nadine Smith is a writer, critic, and DJ based in Brooklyn. Her work has appeared in publications like Pitchfork, The Los Angeles Times, Texas Monthly, GQ, Rolling Stone, and more. She is on Twitter at @trillmoregirls.
