The news rumbled through the Internet like the proverbial lightning bolt, creating a unanimity of opinion rarely seen outside of sentences where the words "Hogan" and "comeback" are both used.  A collective electronic groan arose from the audience as the realization hit home that this was actually going to happen and that there was nothing that we could do to stop it.  It was going to be an fatal auto accident of a day for wrestling fans.

(No, I'm not talking about me coming to TheSmarks, which produced only one loud groan which could be heard for a two-hundred-mile radius around Toledo, Ohio and some general comments of "Scott, what the hell are you doing?".  Oh, yes, for those of you who don't know me, my name's Eric Szulczewski.  I'm the regular Tuesday news columnist over at The Shooters (that's www.theshooters.net) and a features columnist for Emzee (www.emzee.com) and The Oracles War Room (www.oracleswar.com), as well as a co-host on the best damn Internet radio show devoted to wrestling, The Edge Yes, ladies and gentlemen, Stephanie McMahon was going to write and book a major pay-per-view.  Survivor Series was her handiwork, and it certainly was a little car crash of a PPV.  When the news came out, the pessimists among us felt that this was the ultimate sign that the WWF was stuck completely in a rut and had reached the point of desperation, or that the seventh seal of the Book of Apocalypse had been broken.  The optimists felt that she couldn't do that much damage as long as Jim Ross and Pat Patterson could ride herd a little and stop her from exercising her worst aspects of judgement, aspects that have been demonstrated vividly in the past in her acceptance of a movie role when she obviously can't act her way out of a wet paper bag and her deciding to get involved in the whole Ministry of Darkness angle.

The ex post facto question thus becomes:  if Ross and Patterson decided to grow a couple sets and go against the boss' daughter, controlling her wilder impulses, what incredible disaster did they prevent from happening?  Scott Keith has noted that they recycled one angle from 1993, the Doink angle, for use by Kurt and Eric Angle.  Scott didn't mention that they were also recycling a second angle from 1993, namely Yokozuna viz. Rikishi's repeated Banzai Drops against the Rock.

(Regular readers of mine on The Shooters are now in complete shock that I used the name "The Rock".  Normally I refer to him as "the Son of Satan", "Hastur the Unspeakable", "Damien"...you see where I'm going with that.  Well, this isn't The Shooters.  Only half the staff here write for TS.  And, yes, I have already pled guilty to being a pretentious intellectual elsewhere, and, yes, I really do speak like this in real life.)

So we have two recycled angles from 1993 on Steph's arrest warrant for the capital crime of Abject Stupidity On A Major Pay-Per-View, but, as Jim Cornette said, the statute of limitations for angle recycling is seven years, so she can't be formally charged with that.  But what about the asinine ending involving the crane?  Trip must really be hurt badly in real life for them to have done this level of kayfabe violence against him.  Couldn't Steph think of a more subtle way of putting the guy on the shelf for a bit?  The mind boggles as to how far she really wanted to go with stuff.  We've already seen what happens when an uncontrolled id is given the book and allowed to twist a fed in a direction it's clearly unsuited to go.  See Russo, Vince; Nash, Kevin; or Bollea, Terry for further information.

It's now blatantly obvious what Stephanie McMahon's influences are in booking.  And that's not a good sign.  The WWF in the early 90s was a barren wasteland of imbecilic gimmicks, inexplicable pushes, and gaps in logic large enough for Austin to drive a beer truck through.  But being around the family workplace must have made an indelible mark on the impressionable adolescent Steph was back then.  It probably was magical for her, being around such paragons of wrestling as the Repo Man, Friar Ferguson, and the good version of Doink.  Turns out that it successfully warped her mind enough that she's going to go through with a pregnancy angle.

The thing is, we wouldn't have minded it if we'd found out that Steph was writing and booking Smackdown or even Raw.  However, the WWF is still perpetuating the fiction that, in these days of twelve North American PPVs per year plus a couple of UK-only PPVs, there are events on their calendar that are still bigger than others.  Never mind that Survivor Series' existence was based on Vince McMahon's desire to fuck with Jim Crockett's head by creating a PPV to go up against the first Starrcade.  It still has "history" behind it, a history that they didn't bother to take advantage of.  I thought, as did many other people, that the WWF would make more of a to-do about this being the Undertaker's tenth anniversary in the fed; guess they felt that a world title shot was enough of a celebration for Mister Calloway.  Maybe that was Steph's goal all along:  celebrate the history of the WWF by recycling past angles.  It's hard to think of what she was trying to accomplish with all of this.  Even after watching Raw and Smackdown, I still have no idea.  Never before has a wrestling audience been so uncertain of the direction the WWF is trying to go as it heads into Royal Rumble and the beginning of the Road to Wrestlemania.  Austin/Rock seemed like a shoo-in for Houston.  Then, suddenly, Trip was turned, and now Austin/HHH is talked about as the projected main event.  If Steph's goal was to provide direction, she's failed at that too.

When I first heard about Steph booking Survivor Series, my thoughts turned in the direction of Golden Age Hollywood, The Town That Nepotism Built.  Hollywood in the early days was a lot like wrestling:  family trees in both businesses look more like creeper vines, spreading out all over.  There are useless cousins and in-laws littered across both landscapes.  They're rather easy to parallel.  For every Jeff Jarrett (third generation in the business) who is worthy to stand with his forebears, there's an Erik Watts or Dustin Rhodes that can be found in Hollywood's secret vaults.  But on more occasions than could be expected, it turned out there was real talent that was occasionally overshadowed by the family connections.  Budd Schulberg and Carl Laemmle, Jr. produced some terrific films, but the fact that their fathers ran, respectively, Paramount and Universal overshadowed their achievements.  Harriet Parsons was a good producer and Bill Hopper an excellent actor on TV, but they were never able to overcome the perceptions that their mothers, Louella Parsons and Hedda Hopper, the twin viragos of Hollywood gossipuses, exercised their power to make or break performers and studios in their newspaper columns to get their children those jobs.

(In fact, in the case of Harriet Parsons and Bill Hopper, the exact opposite was true.  Their names got them through the door, but neither Louella nor Hedda ever pimped their children to any great extent.  In fact, Hedda was Harriet's biggest supporter in Hollywood and Louella always had a good word for Bill.  This is surprising considering that the relationship between Louella and Hedda would have had Eric Bischoff salivating at the prospect of a steel cage match between the two to capitalize on real-life heat between them.)

Vince McMahon has been compared to Louis B. Mayer by many people.  The comparison does stand up to scrutiny.  Mayer employed his nephew Jack Cummings as a director at MGM.  Despite protestations, he drew in son-in-law David O. Selznick into his conspiracy to get rid of his ambitious Number Two, Irving Thalberg (the Angel of Death took care of that problem for Mayer, though).  He bought up enough stock in Twentieth Century (pre-merger with Fox) to put in his other son-in-law, Bill Goetz, as Darryl Zanuck's second, thus gaining effective control of another major studio.  Compare the behavior of VKM, using his entire family on-camera and giving them positions of power in a publicly-held company.  Both Mayer and McMahon rode the coattails on a once-in-a-generation phenomenon to greater fame and fortune (McMahon with Hulkamania, Mayer with his control over the New England distribution rights to Birth of a Nation).  Even the aspect of both being hard-nosed businessmen applies.  Mayer put Selznick (his own son-in-law, remember) into a screwjob situation when it came to Gone With The Wind.  Warner Brothers had a better offer on the table for Selznick for distribution rights, and had Bette Davis and Errol Flynn on tap for Scarlett and Rhett.  Selznick, though, felt that there would be a public outcry if Clark Gable didn't play Rhett, so he accepted a worse offer from MGM in order to get him.  You can compare that to the Viacom and XFL deals at your leisure.

But there was one thing that Mayer never did.  Mayer was an old-fashioned Jewish father with two daughters, whose only ambition for them was to marry nice Jewish boys, preferably ones in the movie business.  Irene Mayer Selznick, though, took after her father in a great many ways.  She was incredibly capable, as she proved in the 1950s when she brought A Streetcar Named Desire to Broadway as an independent theatrical producer.  She was smarter and had a greater sense of realism than her husband, who Mayer saw as his natural successor even after David and Irene divorced.  If given the chance, she could have run MGM.  But she wasn't given that chance because, well, times were different back then.  Vince has given Steph that chance.  Unfortunately, what he did with Survivor Series is the equivalent of a Hollywood studio head taking someone whose biggest screen credit was that of Best Boy on a low-budget summer escapist comedy, giving that person a hundred twenty million dollars, and telling them that they're producing Star Wars:  Episode Two, and, oh, by the way, Lucas' writers came through with a really bad script, so could you do the rewrite?

Considering the creative state that the WWF is in right now, new blood is welcome.  However, if all the new blood has to go by is old ideas that have been successfully discredited, the situation can only worsen.  What can Steph do at this point?  Sit back, listen, and learn.  She has good teachers in the WWF in Ross and Patterson.  Discarding the egos for a moment, Trip may have some good ideas as well, and he's on the booking committee.  Hell, suck it up and call Terry Taylor and Johnny Ace down in Atlanta if you have to, Steph.  The point is, just because your name happens to be McMahon doesn't give you the right to automatically think that you can book a major PPV, no matter how much stock you own.  Having the pull is only part of the position you're in.  Exercising that pull without the talent and experience to make judgements beneficial to your company can destroy that position.  And believing that anything you do is beneficial because you're in that position is not only delusional, it's deadly.  Steph, if you have to, call Vince Russo and ask him.  No, you'd better not.  He hasn't learned that lesson yet either.