Entire Scott Hudson Interview That Mentions Ted Turner And WCW

Question
Hi Joe thank you for your response about the Scott Hudson interview about WCW. I was wondering about what Scott Hudson told you about Ted Turner and WCW in WCW's dying days because I read your interview with Scott and even though I thought it was awesome I could not find anything about what you and Scott talked about Ted Turner in WCW in 1999 and 2000. I would greatly appreciate it Joe if you could please tell me what Scott told you about Ted Turner's position of power in World Championship Wrestling in 1999 and 2000. Plus did Jason Hervey help Eric Bischoff out in releasing any of the WCW Superstar Series videos because I know that Jason worked with Eric when he was in WCW and Jason was either the Executive Producer or the Producer on all of those WCW wrestler biographies. Thank You Joe Aaron Wake

Answer
Not a problem, Aaron.

Well this was the interview I had with him. This was the transcript of it, and some I left out for people to check out on wildtalkradio.com

Thing is, I no longer work for them so all of my library is gone. Including the interview with Scott

Now, what I was told involving Teddy was this:

He had the same position of power he always had, and never really lost it until the merger took place around 2001. But the thing is, he let Bischoff control so much that in 1999 and 2000, he mainly let Russo, Nash, Hogan, and the rest control the booking and everything else. Really, Ted supplied the money at this time. Bill Busch was put into the position Bichoff has really, although the Presidential role was taken out and BB was called Senior Vince President. Busch was the accountant of WCW, so it made little sense as to why he was put into the power system. He acquired Russo and Ferrera, but both were suspended and Busch was removed from power.

Then Time Warner, who owned Turner Broadcasting by this point, replaced him with Brad Siegel. Brad asked EB what he could do to make ratings better, and this brought EB back for a while as a TV manager in April of 2000. Then EB left and Russo eventually had control of all aspects of TV and PPV, by this time WCW's ratings went down so low that it wasn't even in the top 5 in ratings for Mondays. Add this to them already having to do Thunder on top of Nitro for 3 hours, then you had an issue and things were crazy.

This is why a lot of wrestlers say toward the end things got nuts and no one knew what they were doing until sometimes 5 minutes before they went out.

Scott told me that Ted really never did much, he was just there to supply cash and let the craziness happen. It seemed Teddy always was happy and around when WCW was in it's highest of highs, but never around when WCW was in it's lowest of lows. By this time, Ted was still trying to keep his other ventures going well like TBS, TNT, Warner Bros, and Castle Rock. But by the time WCW really was looking bad, AOL bought them up and eventually sold them off to Vince McMahon.

So basically, Ted played the same role he always played.

And yes, I believe Jason did work with Eric on the videos. I don't know if he helped in distribution, but I'm pretty sure he helped on the videos themselves.