Mr. McMahon is now streaming on Netflix and, as you'd expect, it's generating a great deal of discussion among pro wrestling fans.
The series, which was originally made in partnership with WWE and Vince does feature interviews with the former - and now largely disgraced - Chairman, but exactly how much of the real man are we seeing?
Executive producer Bill Simmons recently welcomed historian David Shoemaker (who also worked on Mr. McMahaon) as a guest on The Bill Simmons Podcast and reflected on how the project came to be.
"The backstory of it was, Vince wanted to do a documentary. I had done the Andre the Giant doc and he was ready to tell his story. A big thing for us is like, well, if we’re gonna tell your story, it’s got to be everything. He’s like, ‘I’m ready to talk about everything.’ The next step was finding a director and the best thing was, with Chris [Smith], he wasn’t a wrestling fan. We decided it would actually be more interesting."
"Let’s get somebody who doesn’t know this and we immerse him into this world and just experience everything for the first time, and then we can kind of help him with the wrestling stuff. So we get all these interviews and we’re going and probably working on it for over a year, a year and a half, and then the first wave of stuff happens with Vince."
"For the next two years, we’re trying to figure out if we will have to audible on the fly again? What is this going to mean? What’s this going to mean? There’s a couple times when I think both of us thought this thing’s going to get shelved. This won’t happen."
Mr. McMahon did still happen, of course, and now chronicles his rise and fall.
Reflecting on the experience of interviewing the highly secretive and private billionaire, Shoemaker looked back at the peculiar experience of visiting WWE Headquarters and being drawn into McMahon's unique orbit.
"You said Vince was eager and wanted to do the documentary at first, which is 100% true, but, I mean, I don’t think Vince, it sounds so weird to say, I’m not sure Vince knew what it meant to do the documentary and I’m not sure that he knew what story he wanted to tell, or I don’t even know if he knows who he is enough to tell that story. Even when he was pseudo eager on the first phase of the documentary, it was really hard to get beyond the surface with him. Chris Smith did a good job of sitting in front of him and just sort of staring him down until some things started coming out."
"Vince, prior to everything coming out over the past couple years, is just the most bizarre subject to try to do this kind of project for because even when he was eager, he wasn’t there on time, or, you know, on the days that he was supposed to be there. There was always a team reminding him of things in his past. There was always a team. The entire production team have done so many documentaries of this sort and of all sorts. They’ve been working this world forever. This is the guy that did the Tiger King and none of them had ever experienced a working situation like we encountered in Stamford, Connecticut."
"We would show up to shoot and then just be all like, all day long be getting updates from Vince’s Secretary about his ETA, like six hours, eight hours before the shoot, pushing it back an hour, pushing it back another hour, pushing it back another hour, and then he would roll in at 11 PM, you know, pitch black with his little crew around him and shake everybody’s hand and say thank you for being here, and then go into hair and makeup, and just emerge in the same outfit that he was wearing for every shoot. It was just such a bizarre situation."
Have you watched Mr. McMahon yet? You can check out a new clip from the documentary below: