Blood, barbarism, and Ron Howard’s beef with a billionaire: “He wants to dominate and control”
The only thing harder than being pissed off at Ron Howard is having Ron Howard be pissed off at you, with the film and television veteran earning his stripes as one of the nicest guys in the business.
At no point in his 70-year career has the two-time Academy Award winner added anyone to his enemies list, become involved in a public spat, or resorted to name-calling or mud-slinging, which is remarkable when you think about it, considering that Hollywood is a place where ego and vanity run rampant.
He’s had his issues with a few collaborators, but when being needled by Wilford Brimley four decades ago stands out as the most vicious of the bunch, it speaks volumes to how Howard really is that guy who would simply refuse to let butter melt in his mouth. However, there was a time when he voiced his disapproval for a billionaire mogul, long before they were officially designated as a wrong ‘un.
Are there two more diametrically opposed personalities in entertainment who somehow ended up working together than Ron Howard and Vince McMahon? It’s unlikely, and to nobody’s surprise, the chalk-and-cheese combination hardly saw eye-to-eye when the former’s Imagine Entertainment produced Barry Blaustein’s documentary, Beyond the Mat, which cast the latter’s WWF in an unsavoury light.
Even though the doc was made with McMahon’s approval and blessing, when he realised that plenty of screentime was dedicated to Mick Foley suffering head trauma and experiencing the after-effects, including taking a battering across the head from Dwayne Johnson with a steel chair while his wife and children cried in the audience, he tried to distance himself from it.
Veteran wrestler Terry Funk and the retired Jake Roberts’ stories painted the industry as a dark, dingy, and depressing place, populated by blood, barbarism, brutality, drug abuse, crippling pain, broken families, and the devastating physical, emotional, and psychological toll that the industry can have on the performers who dedicate their lives to it, which didn’t sit too well with the WWF chief.
When he saw the finished film, McMahon backed out of a gentleman’s agreement to advertise Beyond the Mat on his weekly TV shows, which reached an audience of millions in the United States, and distributor Lionsgate considered filing a lawsuit, accusing him of using strong-arm tactics to convince the networks that showed WWF programming not to advertise it at all on their channels.
“Vince McMahon, who runs the WWF, is an amazing business guy, and he’s done a remarkable thing with his organisation, but this is kind of the way he does business,” Howard told The New York Times. “He wants to totally dominate and control anything that has anything to do with wrestling.” He didn’t even find out the ads were being pulled until the day they were due to start running, and he wasn’t happy.
Lionsgate’s co-president, Tom Ortenberg, suggested that “Vince always thought he’d be able to buy the film, and I believe, when he was ultimately rebuffed, is when he turned on the film.” Either way, the WWF head honcho tried to pretend it didn’t exist after giving the crew unfettered backstage access, and Howard was miffed. Sadly, they never settled it in the ring, which would have been a hell of a thing to see.
