Jim Cornette Explains All About the TV Distribution Process for JCP in the 1980s

Crockett TV Production / Local Promos

Arcadian Vanguard

 

 

The following is a transcript from a brief segment of the popular "Cornette Drive Thru" podcast where Jim Cornette shed light on the process Jim Crockett Promotions went through to duplicate and distribute their TV shows in the 1980s, and also how they inserted the local TV promo segments each week. 

The discussion took place on Episode #261 of the podcast, about 55 minutes in:

"The way they duplicated their television shows, now this is primitive, but remember this is 40 years ago, and it is actually the way that, you know, small budget promotions operated like this in house up until the times that the territories went away. 

Let's say we go to Gaffney, SC, on a Tuesday night and we'd do the syndicated television taping at the college gym there in Gaffney. It's 60 miles from Charlotte, so it's about an hour drive. They owned their own television truck, the NEMO truck - - National Electronics Mobile Operation. They'd drive the truck an hour down to one of these high school or college gym around Charlotte. They'd set up the lights, they'd wire everything, they'd run the cables - - they shoot two hours of television: NWA Worldwide and NWA Pro. And that goes from 7:30 to 10:00. And each show they role live-to-tape, and you know they're gonna put a VTR in, they roll it in the truck. They leave black holes for the commercial spots and for the local promos.* 

Then they'd drive the truck back to Charlotte and they'd park it back behind the office at Briarbend. And they'd take the two master tapes in, and - - remember ol' Leonard? The guy that did the night work there that alerted me that they were throwing away the entire film archive of Mid-Atlantic Wrestling when Turner broadcasting took over and bought everything.** Leonard would put the dadgum tapes on, and I don't know how many they could make at the same time, and this was the old one inch video reels, right? So you can imagine, you gotta unroll those and put them on the spool, and get 'em all synced up and everything. And then he would hit the button and they would make multiple duplicates of that master tape at one time. And then he'd do nothing all night but just run 'em back and copy the tapes over and over - - however many they could make at a time times however many, because Wednesday morning about 9:00, Gene Anderson would be in there with Jackie Crockett on the camera and all the top babyfaces and heels would come in and do local promos, from 9:00 in the morning until 3:00 or 4:00 sometimes. And then you'd immediately hop in the car and drive three hours to Raleigh or go to the airport to fly somewhere, whatever the case. 

But, what they would do, honest to God, is they would sync the tape up for let's say Philadelphia, we got local promos to do for Philadelphia because we got a show coming up at the Civic Center. So whatever tape was going to the TV station in Philadelphia, they would reel it up to the exact point of the babyface interview segment that needed to be inserted and we'd record those interviews right onto the tape that was actually going to the TV station. And as soon as we did that interview then they'd jump ahead to the heel segment, you know, in between segments 5 and 6 or whatever, and they'd do the two minute and twenty eight second interview for them. 

The interviews were 2:28 because they left a second to get in and a second to get out, else wise they're rolling over program***, right? Once the Philly interviews were done, they'd stick it back in the case, put a label on it, and whether it was Klondike Bill or Bunk Harris, whoever that day wasn't going to get chicken at Price's Chicken Coop for lunch****, they would take the tapes to the bus station and put them on a bus to the television station in the city that was going to air it that weekend. 

So it went out on Wednesday evening and it got there on Thursday. A lot of promotions did this, they would put posters and fliers for sponsors in small towns, they'd put 'em on a bus in those days, they'd put the TV tape on a bus. And they used to have a thing called Delta Dash where before these overnight services were just common in every city in America, they would take it and put it in a box, and take it the airport and they would put it on a Delta plane. You could Delta Dash something for something like $99, and it would go on a plane, and somebody had to pick it up at baggage claim at the other end. 

But that's what they would do, they would roll these interviews into the actual tape to the TV station that weekend, there was no post production per se in terms of "OK we're going to shoot all these interviews and were gonna slate them and then were going to go back and insert them, blah, blah, blah." No, that's why the local interviews don't exist anywhere else except in tapes of the television program that aired in that specific market. 

So when you see these local promos with Tony Schiavone and the orange background or sometimes the blue background, they had and the chyron, 'Tonight! Charlotte! Tonight Greenville, Chicago!' or whatever the case from Crockett Promotions, that has to be off the actual air broadcast of that television program that weekend [that was taped at home by a fan on a VCR] because they didn't exist anywhere else."

 

Footnotes:

*This was the big revelation for me: I had always assumed the local promos were sent to stations on a separate tape that would be inserted into the local brodcast by the station like any other local commercial. 

**I'm assuming this actually happened when Crockett and Dusty moved the head office from Charlotte to Dallas in 1987 or 1988 and closed down Briarbend Drive, but perhaps the TV work Jim describes above continued in Charlotte at Briarbend after the move to Dallas until the sale to Turner in late 1988.

***It absolutely now makes sense why there was always this short time gap before and after local interview spots where you would see the show's logo or whatever and could hear the crowd noise in the background of the studio going back to those days. They left room for the local promo to be a second or two early or late when taped directly into the master tape. 

****George South was the one who first told us about the weekly Chicken Coop ritual back in the day, and how he along with Bunk Harris or Klondike Bill, would sometimes make the pick-up, earning more tips from the boys than he made wrestling at the time.

PODCAST INFORMATION

Visit JimCornette.com for complete information including links on both of his wildly popular podcasts on the Arcadian Vanguard Podcasting Network.

Mid-Atlantic Wrestling on the Hampton Coliseum Schedule for December 1985

by Dick Bourne
Mid-Atlantic Gateway

I always marvel looking back at some of the old mainstay venues for Mid-Atlantic Wrestling in the 1970s and 1980s and how busy those venues were at the time. It sure isn't the same today for many of those that remain, as the larger multi-use facilities have strangled many of the mid-size buildings that once thrived.

 Take a look at this venue event schedule for the Hampton Coliseum in Hampton, VA for December 1985. It is loaded with a wide array of diverse programs, including of course a card of Mid-Atlantic Championship Wrestling on Friday night, December 6. Friday was usually Richmond's night if promoter Joe Murnick had his druthers, but with the Church of Christ holding a big dinner there on Saturday night (12/7) and perhaps something else booked in Richmond for 12/6, Hampton took the Friday slot. 

 

The card that night primarily consisted of the "B" circuit at that time, which had been anchored around Jim Cronette and the Midnight Express for most of 1985. Crockett had organized a "second circuit" to run all of the old Georgia towns now that they ran the old Georgia territory. (You will remember they got the WTBS TV slots from the WWF in in April of 1985 and absorbed all of the towns that Ole Anderson and Georgia promoter Fred Ward had been running up until that point.) That second circuit also hit a lot of regular or semi-regular smaller Crockett towns in the Carolinas and Virginia, too, and such was the case this night with Hampton. The "A" team, which consisted of Rhodes, Flair, Magnum, Steamboat (still around), Road Warriros, Andersons, etc., was likely in Charleston, SC perhaps even split over two locations. 

The Crockett crew would undergo some unexpected personnel changes during December involving two people who were no-shows on this particular card in Hampton. Billy Jack Haynes quit the promotion shortly after Starrcade '85, reportedly unhappy with his Starrcade pay-off and his positioning on post-Starrcade cards. More famously (or infamously perhaps) was the situation with Buddy Landel, who had just won the the National Heavyweight title from Terry Taylor at Starrcade and missed an important TV taping where he was reportedly scheduled to get a big push in a big angle, and was fired by Dusty Rhodes soon after. That hadn't happened yet by the night of this 12/6 show in Hampton, but Landel's no-show this night might have been indicative of his growing performance and reliability issues during this time. 

Thanks to George Pantas for forwarding this Hampton venue schedule to us. We love seeing stuff like this!

Saturday TV: World Wide Wrestling (5/10/86)

The James Boys Strike in Spartanburg!

Blooper! J.J. Dillon managing ....Dusty Rhodes??

Wow. November 7, 1987 - - the world was off its axis!

Or maybe it was just a severe case of confusion by the person at the newspaper who put this ad together for Jim Crockett Promotions.

Check out all of the managers in this ad - - and we mean ALL the managers -- and pay attention to how they are paired up:

Dusty Rhodes with .... James J. Dillon?
The Rock & Roll Express with .... Jim Cornette?
Freebird Michael Hayes with .... Paul Jones?
Jimmy Valiant and Bugsy McGraw with .... Skandor Akbar?
The Mighty Wilbur with .... Precious?

Whew! Can you imagine the confusion for some young kid seeing that in the paper before going to the big show at James Rhodes Arena?

Thanks to Mark Eastridge for sending us this funny ad.

Cornette: Tuesday Night at the Gardens

FROM THE BOOKSHELF
by Dick Bourne
Mid-Atlantic Gateway

Following in the footsteps of earlier books "Rags, Paper & Pins" and "The Midnight Express Scrapbook," the Louisville Slugger Jim Cornette hits another home run with "Tuesday Night at the Gardens: Pro Wrestling in Louisville."

Cornette and Mark James' new book (which actually came out early fall of 2015) examines the history of pro wrestling in Louisville, Kentucky, during perhaps the hottest period there 1970-1975. The famed Louisville Gardens hosted wrestling on Tuesday nights.

In typical fashion like Cornette's earlier collections of memorabilia and history, this one is loaded, too. Over 500 photos, newspaper articles, and programs grace the pages of this massive 275-page collection, all tied together by the wit and wisdom (and historical reflection) of the one and only James E. Cornette.

I'm a huge fan of the territory era in professional wrestling and welcome most every opportunity to learn more about the territories I'm less familiar with. The Memphis territory is one of those. Over the years, my friend Dave Millican has schooled me on the great history there, and I've enjoyed seeking out old footage and TV tapes. Now Cornette completes that education with his books. Cornette's earlier "Rags, Paper, and Pins" is a terrific collection of photographs and memorabilia from the Memphis territory broadly, where-as "Tuesday Night at the Gardens" looks at one city in that territory in about as complete a way as one wrestling city could ever be covered.

Cornette not only educates you on the historical events in Louisville that led to the boom period of 1970-1975 he covers in great detail in the book, he delivers all the details of the broader, extremely complicated, evolution of the promotional wars in that whole area involving the Gulas and Jarrett families and all the rest. It's a fascinating read.

Being a big fan of old wrestling venues, I also particularly enjoyed the entire chapter devoted to the building itself - the historic Louisville Gardens.

Co-author Mark James puts it all together in a beautiful, well organized, thoughtful, and complete look at a wrestling city as has ever been put together.

Full details on "Tuesday Night at the Gardens" are available at Cornette's website at www.JimCornette.com. Order directly from Jim and receive a free 2-hour DVD of rare, historic footage from the Louisville Gardens from 1970-1975. The book is also available on Amazon.com.