WWE let a pair writers from the company’s creative team go last week, according to a new report from Pro Wrestling Sheet.
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The writers were SmackDown co-lead writer Steve Guerreri and in-office Raw lead writer Steve Oppenheim. The two had been involved with the company as far back as 2011 and 2012, respectively. Ryan Satin added that the two firings were not made by the newly-hired executive directors Paul Heyman and Eric Bischoff.
While Heyman was reportedly “side-by-side” with Vince McMahon during Raw several weeks ago, Bischoff will not report to his first production meeting for SmackDown until this coming Tuesday.
“My start was never supposed to be before July 22,” Bischoff said on the latest 83 Weeks podcast. “That was the understanding across the board. And it was reported wrong. Anything written and reported so far has been wrong as far as what my role actually is and will be and what my start date will be.
“This is such a big job. There is no way that me, or anyone else, is going to walk in and take control of anything, immediately. It’s going to be a long process. It’s going to take time. It’ll be an evolution over time. My process started a little bit this week in terms of integration. It’ll become even more tangible on Tuesday, which will be the first time I’ve attended a production meeting.”
Bischoff and his family recently moved from Cody, Wyoming to Stamford, Connecticut. On another recent episode of the podcast, he compared his new position to running WCW as executive producer, and eventually president.
“The magnitude of this opportunity and the challenge and the commitment that goes along with it is not lost on me,” he said. “There’s been a couple of times over the last few days where I’ve been driving around in my truck or taking my dog for a hike and going, ‘Wow!’
“It’s not maybe, this is the biggest opportunity I’ve ever had in this industry,” he added. “Granted when Bill Shaw made me president of WCW, obviously that was a very, very big moment. But I was learning on the job there. I had nothing to lose there. I was taking a company in WCW that had never turned a dollar of profit, that was such a distant number two to WWF at that time that we weren’t even really number two, a company that was fraught with a bad history and all kinds of internal issues. So I had nothing to lose. In this situation, this is an entirely different ballgame here.”
