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PWINSIDER Q&A: MILLION DOLLAR BELT, WWE NAMING THEIR PERFORMERS 'ENTERTAINERS', THE 'WRESTLER' AND MORE

What happened with Virgil and the Million Dollar belt? I saw him win it at Summerslam, then the next time I saw him on PPV, it was gone. Did he drop it back to DiBiase, or was the belt abandoned?

Virgil lost the belt back to Ted DiBiase.  The title was then retired once DiBiase and IRS won the WWF Tag Team championships from The Legion of Doom.  The belt was resurrected when DiBiase was managing Steve Austin as "The Ringmaster" during the early days of Austin's WWF run.

Do you know if WWE planned to have Jericho regain the title from Batista all along, or was it panic booking brought on by the fact that they wanted Cena wrestling for the belt at Survivor Series, and they didn't want to do Cena vs. Batista as that is planned for mania? Is the booking really that short term in WWE? If they knew that they wanted Jericho vs. Cena at Survivor series all along, then why hotshot the belt to Big Dave for 2 weeks?

My guess is that they didn't want to kill Batista by having him do a job at Cyber Sunday and didn't want to do a screwy finish, so they did the quick two week title change.  It certainly appears the direction will be Cena vs. Batista at Mania, but things change weekly, so you never know.

I have a question about the upcoming Darren Aronofsky film The Wrestler.  Do you happen to know, does the film present wrestling as a shoot (ie, Mickey Rourke's character is really battling his opponents to try to win) or does it acknowledge that it is a work?  I am highly intrigued by the film but fear that if it was to presented as a shoot it would largely ruin it.

I've seen the film, which is very, very good and wrestling is treated as a work, i.e. performers working together, calling spots, etc.  The inside aspects of the business are treated matter of fact and seriously, not in a way that pokes fun at the wrestling business.

I was just wondering about ECW.  In the bottom left corner it says "WWE LIVE", is ECW broadcasting live?  Are they taping Smackdown before ECW now? and all of the ECW members working overtime on RAW (Bourne, Miz, Morrison) are they having to fly out from the Raw location to the ECW location the next day?  That's kind of hectic if you ask me.

ECW is taped about an hour before it airs on Sci Fi.   Yes, when talents are on Raw, they then go to ECW the next night.  WWE usually books their TVs within the same geographic location.

If the move to "entertainers" versus "sports entertainers" versus "wrestlers" is an attempt to avoid regulation, and taxation, by athletic commissions, doesn't that kind of imply that WWE thinks these commissions genuinely believe that wrestling is "real" and not staged?  I'm fairly sure the FBI isn't likely to expect Poppy Montgomery's help searching for   a missing person just because Without a Trace shows her as an FBI agent named Samantha Spade.  If these commissions are trying to get a slice of the pie in pro-wrestling despite it's non-competitive nature, it's not  because of what they call the guys on screen.

No Commission believes they are presenting a legitimate athletic contest but since they oversaw and taxed the business for decades, at this point, they do so simply because they always have.  That is what WWE is trying to break away from.  Whether this strategy will help, I don't know.

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