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The Real King of Pro Wrestling? The Ordinary Video Editor
It was easy to dismiss Mike Mizanin as a wannabe. In 2001, Mizanin—a soft-looking kid from the Cleveland ‘burbs—appeared on MTV’s The Real World: Back to New York, where he discussed his dream of becoming a pro wrestler. “The Miz is a character I created, and he’s ready for the big leagues,” he said in a confessional segment, coming off as earnest, awkward, and a bit delusional.
Yet, in 2006, bolstered by his TV exposure, the Miz made his WWE debut as the host of SmackDown, one of the company’s weekly shows. Promoted as a babyface (a good guy, in non-wrestling jargon) Mizanin instead came off as an overeager, fauxhawked douche. He desperately wanted to join the pantheon of WWE icons he grew up watching—Hulk Hogan, “Stone Cold” Steve Austin, the Rock—but it seemed like he’d never get anywhere close. The reality show history, coupled with his overly manicured look, made him too unlikable to get behind or take seriously.
Five years later, the Miz was a full-time wrestler and ready for his close-up: facing golden boy John Cena in the main event of WrestleMania XXVII. Minutes before the match, a video package aired on the megascreens of Atlanta’s Georgia Dome for more than 70,000 people, detailing Miz’s rise to fame. He was a heel now, a villain, and as Nas’ defiant “Hate Me Now” played under the footage, Miz shouted his bona fides to the audience. “You all were wrong!” he smugly told the WWE audience later. “All of you! I made it!”
Adam Pennucci hard at a work on a video package for WWE. Image: WWE
Adam Pennucci, the man who engineered the video package, had waited 10 years to use the song on a WWE broadcast. “It didn’t fit any of our heel characters, and it wouldn’t work for a babyface character,” Pennucci says. “Then along came the Miz.”
In his role as WWE’s Vice President of Domestic Television, Pennucci, 42, has long supervised the creation of video packages airing regularly on WWE television during cable programs like Raw and Smackdown, as well monthly pay-per-views like Royal Rumble and WrestleMania.
As part of the domestic TV department based in a production studio near WWE’s Stamford, Connecticut, headquarters, Pennucci and his team have produced countless “in-show” materials—cold openings, recaps, pre-match hype videos like the Miz’s coming-out party—that WWE uses to promote rivalries and create narratives for its most strategically important plotlines.
These videos are key to WWE mythology: they tell fans who to root for, who to hate, which moments to remember, and why exactly the wrestlers want to beat the hell out of one another. Having your story told in a package, as Miz’s was, is practically an anointing; as such, Pennucci and company help elevate characters for a global audience in the hundreds of millions.
And the packages are always at their best for WrestleMania, WWE’s annual Super Bowl equivalent—the thirtieth edition of which will unfold at New Orleans’ Mercedes-Benz Superdome this Sunday.
The Kid Stays Out of the Picture
After graduating from Syracuse University, Pennucci briefly worked for Major League Baseball logging games until he applied for a position advertised by Titan Sports, Inc. in 1994. Unbeknownst to him, the organization was the parent company of what was then the World Wrestling Federation. “I didn’t do any research,” he says. “When I was sitting in the lobby, I saw the [WWF] magazine and I was like, ‘Oh my God. Is this what I think it is?’”
But he made it into the fold, starting as a production assistant. Within a few years, Pennucci was producing taped editions of the WWF’s weekly show Raw. At the time, Raw was locked in a ratings war with WCW Nitro, the flagship show of their now-defunct competitor. It was a time known as the “Attitude Era,” and the approach as Pennucci describes it was simple: “hit you in the face, get over the characters, get over the storylines, but be quick about it.” You didn’t want to bog viewers down with exposition; you wanted them in the arena where the action was. As such, the quality of the video packages—their pacing, the filters and tricks used, the sharpness of the storytelling—dramatically improved.
Rosters and stories fluctuate, but WWE’s video packages are viewers’ polestars, distilling weeks’ worth of drama into catch-up montages. Home-invading rivalries, corporate oppression, bizarre love triangles, returns from injury: the narratives run the gamut. The domestic department’s latest notable creation is a video hyping the WrestleMania XXX match between John Cena and Bray Wyatt. In the clip, Wyatt—a demented, Manson-like cult leader—mocks long-standing WWE hero Cena for what he stands for. As images of Cena’s legions of young fans flash by, the idea of heroism, Wyatt posits, is just a vehicle for vanity and greed. “Hope is dead, as will be your legacy,” Wyatt promises. “Who will be left for you, John, when I take it all away?” Appropriately, Eminem’s “Legacy” scores the scene.
When he started with the WWF, packages were edited deck-to-deck using Betamax tapes. With today’s digital platform, Pennucci currently uses a combination of Grass Valley’s Aurora Edit, Avid and Final Cut Pro. The domestic TV department puts no limit on what they’ll use to punch up their videos, routinely combining recent in-ring and out-of-ring WWE clips with decades-old wrestling footage, and using all manners of effects, filters, transitions, angles, framing devices and assorted production tricks en route. (In one particularly left-field move, the opening for 2001′s WWF Invasion pay-per-view event incorporated grainy clips of FDR, Patton and Stalin to promote an inter-company feud.) Soundtracks have come from hard rock bands and WWE’s deep library of production music but also more risky sources: Coldplay, Enya, even an old vaudeville-style love song.
The average video package’s creation begins with WWE’s creative writing team formulating a show and then letting the video staff know what they’re looking for. If a package needs to air on Raw (which broadcasts on Mondays), the video staff will receive its guidelines on Friday or Saturday, then work all of Sunday and potentially Monday to assemble it. Storyboarding doesn’t occur unless it’s for unusual or major pieces, like a location-based shoot or a WrestleMania cold opening.
Structurally, Pennucci emphasizes three intertwined elements: characters, story, and above all, entertaining fans. Simplicity is paramoun. The internal mantra is “last week, this week, next week.” “When [you] remember those things,” Pennucci says, “it helps you tell a logical, linear story.” But when linearity gives to a more “artistic” story like a redemption plotline, then all bets are off: “If you can make somebody feel something, then you do it.”
His department’s finest example of finding the intersection between artistry and exposition came in a package promoting a 2010 WrestleMania rematch between Shawn Michaels and the Undertaker. As the long version goes, the two on-and-off rivals first faced off in 2009 at WrestleMania XXV; Michaels aimed to end the Undertaker’s one-of-a-kind streak of 16 consecutive WrestleMania victories but came up short; a year later, Michaels asked the Undertaker for another chance to break “the Streak,” but his opponent denied his request. That rejection only spurred Michaels on; he became obsessed with the Undertaker and the idea that no one else was a worthy WrestleMania opponent. This narrative was condensed into a dazzling, somber package that featured flashbacks, slow-mos, rewound footage, and heavy use of blue—all set to Placebo’s cover of Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill.”
Eventually, the Undertaker would consent to a WrestleMania XXVI match but only if Michaels would put his in-ring career on the line. He accepted.
In his time with the WWF and WWE, Pennucci has been on WWE programming only as a passing (and unacknowledged) background extra. But after Shawn Michaels lost to the Undertaker that second time, Pennucci became part of the show in a way he never knew was coming.
On the Raw immediately following WrestleMania XXVI, Michaels capped off his WWE run with a farewell speech, taking time to thank “a crazy, redheaded kid in Stamford, Connecticut.” “His name is Adam, and he is the guy that puts together so much of the videos that you’ve seen of me over the years, and I’m telling you, he’s the most talented boy I’ve ever met,” Michaels said as the audience applauded someone they had never met. “And Adam, thank you for making me look like a superstar.”
That Miz "Hate me now" promo is still the best thing Mizanin has ever been associated with (besides Maryse)
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