The Hollywood Backlot Brawl

Roddy Piper vs. Goldust WWF WrestleMania XII 3/31/96

ER: WWE did the impossible and managed to put on two straight nights of pre-recorded cinematic matches that were both completely different from the other and succeeded in two very different ways. I wasn't excited for the Boneyard Match and I was somehow even less excited for the Firefly FunHouse Match, so color me shocked when the former hit some wonderful peaks and the latter managed to be the only remotely interesting and engaging thing of the last 3 hours of Night 2. Several months ago I took a look at WWF's first big attempt to do one of these big pre-taped cinematic matches and never found time to post about it. This seems like a good time to talk about the Hollywood Backlot Brawl.

This was a truly bizarre match in nearly every way. It was originally supposed to be a Miami Street Fight with Goldust vs. Razor Ramon, but Razor put in his two weeks and then got suspended for a bad drug test, and for some reason I guess Vince just HAD to have a Goldust match not actually happen live at the arena. Vince just had to make people watch a pre-taped match on the Titan Tron, and so Roddy Piper came back for his first match in almost 2 years. I assume Piper was making movies with Billy Blanks instead of wrestling during this time, because he wasn't a super old guy at this point (he's younger here than AJ Styles is now) and was in fantastic cosmetic shape. But he hadn't been anywhere close to an active wrestler in 4 years, and so he comes out of retirement to work a short nasty fight with a high chance of injury, and the feud is based around homophobia and paid off with a running OJ gag that would have possibly been more fresh had it happened during Piper's previous wrestling match (again, two years prior).

The Backlot Brawl itself is short, just about 4 minutes, and everything done by both men seemed like it was done in an attempt to injure themselves. This was filmed somewhere a couple weeks before Mania, and Piper is waiting in a soaked backlot with a baseball bat. I mean, the entire area is soaked pavement. Piper had apparently soaked it down with a firehose, which definitely makes things more dangerous. If I was going to work a stiff brawl I would definitely want it to take place on not just an unforgiving surface, but a super slippery unforgiving surface. This whole thing is just so weird. Goldust cruises into the lot in a spray painted gold Cadillac, and Piper immediately breaks the driver side window with the bat. Goldust was sitting in the fucking driver's seat and Piper just shatters the window inches away from Goldust's head. Glass goes everywhere, Piper cuts his hand, Goldust is bleeding from somewhere, and that's just the first thing that goes wrong. Every spill in this looked painful as hell, both guys slipping on pavement, Goldust getting thrown into a catering table and head first into a couple of dumpsters that don't budge, both guys fighting on the Cadillac's hood (which is also super slippery, since Piper also soaked the car); Piper drops a painful looking fistdrop on the hood (painful because he slips and lands hard on his knee and hip), but then throws a very unfair and very unprofessional punch right to Goldust's head. Goddamn. But then he outdoes himself by punching Goldust again right in the face, a shot that reportedly broke his hand. And it sounded like a punch that would break a face and hand. This very short brawl is nothing but Piper wrecking Goldust with bat shots and punches, and Goldust taking painful bruising bumps onto wet concrete.

And then Goldust runs Piper down with the Cadillac. Goldust gets his lone piece of offense, a shot to Piper's balls, and then gets in the car, guns it towards Piper...and I keep waiting for Piper to move out of the way, and he doesn't. I'm sure the car wasn't going more than 20 MPH, but 20 MPH looks different when it's bearing down on you. Piper doesn't move, he jumps on the hood, and then Goldust throws it in reverse to get the hell out of the backlot, intentionally slamming into a parked white Bronco, scraping up against that dumpster (even after hitting it with a car, the dumpster still probably did more net damage to Goldust than he did to the dumpster), and finally shakes Piper off the hood. Other stuff happens back in front of fans, but nobody cares about that part of the match as none of it was going to approach anything as cool as the first 4 minutes of hyper dangerous outdoor play fighting.