WrestleZone.com reader Jack E. Jones sent along the following …
Jeff Katz Interview Recap from www.IYHwrestling.com
Written by: Bob Colling from http://wrestlingrecaps.wordpress.com/
Jeff Katz is the man behind the Wrestling Retribution Project. You can find out more on the project at www.wrestlingretributionproject.com. The idea behind the series is to make it more of wrestling in a seasonal format instead of each and every week. Katz says it’s clearly wrestling and the biggest difference is that his company has a beginning, a middle and an end. He assures wrestling fans that it is a wrestling program. He has stopped watching wrestling on television for the most part. Katz believes that the way people get their content has been changing and he lists the several different avenues that people get their products.
There is a title in the company but it is “different from the norm.” Katz says he wants to do more of these but he isn’t certain that he will do it. Katz hand picked the roster because he is a wrestling fan and he wanted to get a mix of talent that was obvious. “This whole thing happened on accident.”
He changed the name of all the wrestlers because he wanted to cut the cord from the WWE. Everything doesn’t center around the WWE. Katz says it’s “tough shit” if people are upset that he changed the names of top independent talents because he isn’t going to please everyone.
OIB asks if the guy from James form Kentucky from WCW Live was real or a gimmick. Katz didn’t know because he was gone from WCW at that point.
The WWF boom in the 80’s with Hulk Hogan got him hooked to the product. He stumbled upon WCW later on and liked Ric Flair. He soon ended up getting into the international products. He has tried to watch stuff from the past as much as he could.
In a lot of cases, Jeff came up with the concepts that he wanted to do for awhile. He talks about MVP’s character who is a war hero but is actually sinister. He enjoys complex characters and that’s what we will see in the Wrestling Retribution Project.
He didn’t see any point in doing this in the normal manner. So, he has decided to put the product on the internet and he is well aware of the torrents and that people will steal the show. You’ll be able to watch the show on Netflix, Hulu and Itunes among others.
Lance Storm and Tommy Dreamer are involved in the project and Katz would pick their brain, but by the time he had hired them he had already written the script out of the show. As for Vince Russo, he wouldn’t see any point of working with Russo since he would book his own operation.
Katz talks about working for WCW when he was a teenager and says he was treated great while in the company and made great friends with several the wrestlers. When he gets married he will have WCW wrestlers at it.
He isn’t worried about his project failing like Wrestling Society X because of the distribution and doesn’t have a network like MTV2 giving him notes on what to do.
There were wrestlers that Katz wanted for season one but wasn’t able to get. He is interested in several wrestlers to bring in for a second season, if there were to be one. He created a model where he would be able to survive if all twenty of his guys were to be taken by a bigger promotion.
For the project there is only one championship. He wouldn’t have enough time to get more championships over in one season.
To find out more information on Wrestling Retribution Project please go to www.wrestlingretributionproject.com.
