Kemo
01-21-2022, 02:36 PM
Former WWE writer Kazeem Famuyide joined The Sessions with Renee Paquette to talk about his time writing for the WWE creative team. The job has long been thought to be thankless, and Kazeem Famuyide confirms it was that, even if he enjoyed his time there overall.
“You have no friends at creative,” Famuyide said. “The only friends you have in creative are some talent and basically just the other creative. You get all the blame when something’s terrible, and none of the credit when something’s good. And on top of that, just kind of being in there and seeing how the soup is made, really made me have so much more respect for everybody that goes through those doors.
“I was just like everybody else. I was like ‘I can do better than that. That’s trash. Creative is ruining this guy.’ And the first thing you notice when you walk into that room is that everybody in that room is a hundred times as big a fan as you are. They have thought of every cool idea, they have thought of every opportunity, every single thing. It truly is a machine over there. So it’s not as simple as ‘I’ve got this cool idea, let’s do it.’ We can have a whole hour-long thing on just the process.”
Kazeem Famuyide also described the travel schedule for writers, which basically had them working or on the road nonstop. Often a full week of work would end with the writers turning in their work, only for the script to then be thrown to the side for a rewrite.
“At the time I was there, you’ve got to remember, Smackdown was on Tuesday,” Famuyide said. “We would go Wednesday, we’d have a day off, I guess that would be our travel day. Thursday we’d be in Stamford, storyboarding the show. Friday we get out our first draft for the scripts and see what we’re looking at. Saturday, we’re getting ready to travel, if there’s a PPV you do travel to get there for Sunday. Sunday it’s the production meeting, and you sat in those production meetings. A lot of times we’re bringing those scripts that we worked on the whole week, and they’re just torn up.”
“You have no friends at creative,” Famuyide said. “The only friends you have in creative are some talent and basically just the other creative. You get all the blame when something’s terrible, and none of the credit when something’s good. And on top of that, just kind of being in there and seeing how the soup is made, really made me have so much more respect for everybody that goes through those doors.
“I was just like everybody else. I was like ‘I can do better than that. That’s trash. Creative is ruining this guy.’ And the first thing you notice when you walk into that room is that everybody in that room is a hundred times as big a fan as you are. They have thought of every cool idea, they have thought of every opportunity, every single thing. It truly is a machine over there. So it’s not as simple as ‘I’ve got this cool idea, let’s do it.’ We can have a whole hour-long thing on just the process.”
Kazeem Famuyide also described the travel schedule for writers, which basically had them working or on the road nonstop. Often a full week of work would end with the writers turning in their work, only for the script to then be thrown to the side for a rewrite.
“At the time I was there, you’ve got to remember, Smackdown was on Tuesday,” Famuyide said. “We would go Wednesday, we’d have a day off, I guess that would be our travel day. Thursday we’d be in Stamford, storyboarding the show. Friday we get out our first draft for the scripts and see what we’re looking at. Saturday, we’re getting ready to travel, if there’s a PPV you do travel to get there for Sunday. Sunday it’s the production meeting, and you sat in those production meetings. A lot of times we’re bringing those scripts that we worked on the whole week, and they’re just torn up.”