‘350 Days’ Hits Theaters July 12
“Superstar” Billy Graham, Bret Hart and dozens of other legends star in new documentary.
For one night only, wrestling fans are turning back the clock to foreign objects, tie dye and baloney blowouts.
Dozens of legendary characters are sharing their war stories in a new documentary, peeling back the curtain into life as a professional wrestler before the tour buses and million-dollar contracts. 350 Days hits select theaters for one night only on July 12 in conjunction with Fathom Events, the production company behind Mayweather vs. McGregor and Ted DiBiase’s The Price of Fame.
The two-hour film is the brainchild of Darren Antola, a noted cut man in the boxing world who loved wrasslin’ as a kid. “You always hear these guys talking about working 350 days a year in the old days,” Antola said on Corrigan’s Corner on Team LeftJab Radio. “So I wanted to make a high class production and get all these guys together to talk about their lives.”
Antola and fellow executive producer David Wilkins and director Fulvio Cecere recruited someone with experience in a high class wrestling production: Evan Ginzburg, associate producer of The Wrestler.
“When these guys approached me to work on this, I had reservations,” Ginzburg said. “I knew it would be very hard to top The Wrestler. But I saw that these guys had their heart in the right place. They were going to do a quality film, not a shoot interview in a hotel room where you stare at a guy’s head for two hours.”
The names listed in the film resemble a Royal Rumble that truly could be called the greatest: “Superstar” Billy Graham, Bret Hart, Paul Orndorff, Abdullah the Butcher, Tito Santana, Stan Hansen, Lex Luger and many more. Plus, several legends like George “The Animal” Steele, Jimmy “Superfly” Snuka and then-99-year-old Angelo Savoldi have been filmed before they passed away. After the documentary ends, Ginzburg conducts an on-screen interview with J.J. Dillon to talk about the recent passing of Bruno Sammartino as well as comparisons between the good ol’ days and sport-entertainment.
“These wrestlers sacrificed for their art,” Ginzburg said. “They’re away from their families, away from their kids. They can’t be at their son’s birthday or daughter’s wedding or on Christmas or Thanksgiving because it’s Starrcade or Survivor Series. They sacrificed their bodies. They show you the damage that wrestling did to them.”
The team spent five years crisscrossing the United States and Canada to meet up with these stars of yesteryear. Ginzburg said that the editor of the film – Michael Burlingame, who has worked on music documentaries featuring Dave Matthews, Neil Diamond and Bob Dylan – is not a wrestling fan, which is by design. Instead of focusing on details that only diehards would care about, he has cherry picked the most powerful, poignant, moving comments in the film that would appeal to any audience.
“This isn’t about who was the booker in Chattanooga in 1972,” Ginzburg said. “These are legends pouring their guts out. Wrestlers hate the word ‘fake.’ Gravity isn’t fake, my hip replacement wasn’t fake, my knee replacement, my three divorces, my kid not talking to me. None of that is fake.”
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