Eric Bischoff Talks His Duties While He Was With WWE, Paul Heyman Not Having Creative Control

Last summer, WWE announced that Paul Heyman and Eric Bischoff would be the executive directors of RAW and Smackdown, respectively. Bischoff was let go by the company several months later.

Bischoff was asked about creative control in WWE on a recent episode of 83 Weeks. Bischoff noted that Heyman does not have creative control on RAW and that Vince McMahon is the one that controls everything. Bischoff was clear that he was not disparaging Heyman.

"Let me make one thing clear, and I can say this because this is public knowledge. What I'm about to say is not inside information. It's not me violating any trust, contractual or otherwise. There's one guy who has creative control. It's not Paul Heyman. I hate to break your bubble, and I love Paul by the way.

"This not meant to take a half-a** shot or anything like that, but Paul Heyman doesn't have creative control. And anybody who thinks he does is kidding themselves. I know Paul doesn't and neither does anybody else," Bischoff said. "One guy has creative control, and we all know who that is. When I said, 'while I was there, I didn't have creative control,' I was being honest. I didn't because one man did. Paul Heyman doesn't. Eric Bischoff didn't. Nobody who follows in my steps including Bruce Pritchard, you know how much I love Bruce, or Paul Heyman have creative control."

Bischoff went on to go into detail about what his role as executive director was. He talked about how the term "creative control" is a broad term and that his role dealt with a lot more than just the creative process on Smackdown.

"People use that phrase creative control very loosely and very broadly," Bischoff said. "They don't really have context. Let's put it that way as it relates to what goes on WWE. In terms of my job. It was the same job as Paul Heyman's. Again, I think this is pretty much public knowledge. I'm not giving anything away too much here. I'm gonna be general.

"Intentionally general as to not violate any personal trust or any contractual obligations, but essentially, I'll speak for myself, I oversaw just about everything that touched the Smackdown product including creative. I oversaw the creative team in terms of managing it, in terms of staffing it, in terms of making sure things get done when they needed to get done and presented to the one person who did have creative control as well as the things that were the business-to-business side of wrestling like licensing and merchandising and PR. Anything that had to do with Smackdown, I was directly involved in. As I said, it was a very big, very broad job. Very broad meaning it was just focused on the creative. That was a big part of it. Don't let me confuse anybody here by minimizing it, but there were also a lot of other aspects of it that were equally as important."

If you use any quotes from this article, please credit 83 Weeks with Eric Bischoff with a h/t to Wrestling Inc. for the transcription