Former WWE Co-Executive Producer Recalls The Company Having Trouble Paying For Milk In The Early 90s

Doug LeBow joined WWE in 1992 as a production assistant and went on to become a co-executive producer of the company. 

When LeBow joined, the company was coming out of what is often described as The Golden Age and slowly transitioning into a new era. LeBow didn’t grow up a wrestling fan and initially didn’t take the job as a production assistant when it was offered to him by David Sahadi. Then he saw the production studio. 

“I drive up, [Sahadi] shows me around (the production studio) and he’s like, ‘Do you want the job?’ ‘Yeah, okay, this is pretty cool, how much does it pay?’ ‘Well, a PA gets $21,000.’ That wasn’t enough for me,” LeBow recalled to AJ Kirsch on Tough Talk. “Here was my pushback, there was no HR or anything at time. ‘I need to travel, can you make it $23,000?’ He’s like, ‘Sure,’ and I started the next day. I mean this in the greatest of all compliments, it was such the wild west. The company was in transition. Vince had just come out of the steroid scandal on the positive side and the company had to battle. We had to battle through a downtime. So much so that in my first couple of months, we had to kick in a dollar a week per person to pay for milk because the company was having a hard time paying for milk. It was an interesting culture when I first got there and from PA to producer in under two years and then the director of a division a year or two after that. By 1999, I was running their in-house production and marketing division and we were doing one-hundred million dollars of business out of the New York office, just following the lead of Vince (McMahon) and Kevin (Dunn).”

LeBow went on to say that there was a lot room to grow and create during those years, which eventually led to the Attitude Era. 

LeBow left the company in 2006. He currently works as Head of Production and Development at ElevenO2 Creative.

If you use any of the quotes above, please credit the original source with a h/t and link back to Fightful for the transcription.