Canadian wrestler LuFisto is an OG of the indies and of modern women’s wrestling. She started wrestling in the late 90s on the Quebecois indies and expanded elsewhere in Canada rapidly. By 2000, she was in the states and by 2003, she had started appearing in Japan. The 2000s were a hot period for her development as she was doing matches in the big three global wrestling markets. Her work in CZW and SHIMMER bulldozed her name forward in the U.S.
It’s her work with CZW and its women’s promotion WSU in the early 2010s that is an issue now. WSU formed in 2006 by ICW/UCW founder Jac Sabboth. By 2013, it had gone through three owners before CZW owner DJ Hyde purchased part of the promotion. As a result, Hyde and CZW owned the back catalog of WSU shows.
CZW and Stonecutter Media
The story is basically CZW gave Stonecutter Media the rights to re-release content. When companies do this, it’s usually a bid to bring in more money. Depending on the publisher and their home market, shows can end up getting re-branded. The perfect example of this is Frontier Martial-Arts Wrestling and its deal with Tokyo Pop in 2000.
LuFisto and other women wrestlers were featured on a number of WSU and mid-2000s CZW shows. Stonecutter took the shows and rebranded them with some of the sleaziest, skin channel titles possible. From her interview on the Mr. Warren Hayes channel, these titles included CZW Girlz: Top Heavy and Tough and CZW Girlz: Hair Pulling Cat Fights.
If Stonecutter Media was re-releasing shows from the defunct NWWL or the WEW women’s promotion, that would work. No one would really bat an eye. WEW actually had titles such as WEW Extreme Hoface Vol. 1, WEW Cleavage & Carnage, and WEW Nude War Games. That promotion came to the dance with smutty branding. CZW and WSU didn’t.
WSU was based around a competitive brand of women’s wrestling. LuFisto and other wrestlers featured fit in.
LuFisto Goes Public
In talking with Hayes, LuFisto said that she found out back in March and was giving them enough time to correct things. A whole season sounds like more than enough time. The original titles to the shows can be found online. When she talked with CZW about this, she was told that she was respected and they said that Stonecutter was going that way with the content.
Now, CZW’s been around for over 20 years and has done distribution, promotion, and production deals with several companies. This isn’t the company’s first rodeo with this. If you’re handing over any creative work or content, there’s a discussion about how the content is going to be used or presented.
At least that minimum amount of negotiation should’ve been done before agreeing to a deal. If it looks like it could be a problem down the road there are three options. You can either accept it, sign and deal with the backlash. Re-negotiate the terms to remove or minimize damage. And finally, you can bail.
Apparently, nothing was done about it because LuFisto said more content floated out again. She said that she knows that what the company does with the content is pretty much out of the wrestlers’ hands. However, no one expects it to end up being marketed in a fetish wrestling way. LuFisto also noted that there was no heads up or mediation about how the content would be presented.
You can check out the whole interview with Mr. Warren Hayes below. Talk about this issue starts around 15:50.
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