Wrestling documentaries like Hitman Hart: Wrestling With Shadows and Beyond the Mat were revolutionary for their time, pulling back the curtain on the most secretive business in entertainment. In a new episode of 1 Of A Kind With RVD, Rob Van Dam revealed how ECW wrestlers tried to sabotage the making of Beyond the Mat.

Beyond the Mat documentarian Barry Blaustein visited the ECW arena on the night of 1997’s Barely Legal — Extreme Championship Wrestling’s first pay-per-view. Classic scenes from that night include Paul Heyman rallying the troops backstage before the show and Terry Funk‘s historic championship win over Raven.

According to RVD however, some of the ECW wrestlers weren’t very welcoming to Blaustein.

“I hated Beyond the Mat because we still had the closed-door policy and this guy was wanting to film us while we’re getting ready for our matches and [it was starting] to piss me off,” RVS says. “The whole Sabu clique was angry.”

“[Blaustein] got sabotaged probably more than he ever knew. When he would leave… the camera, it was a big ass camera with VHS tapes recording on it and it’d be a stack of VHS tapes or whatever… some of the guys would be on a mission to sabotage him. They’d grab some of those VHS tapes and put them in holes in the wall, they’d go between the two-by-fours. When they remodeled the ECW arena, they had some VHS tapes in those walls. Probably worth something, but they probably just threw them away without looking at them.”

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RVD did have a change of heart when Beyond the Mat was finally released in 1999.

“When I saw the movie I thought it was so good that I wished I had participated in it a little bit more, without blowing kayfabe the way they wanted me to. I just wouldn’t have been as much against it. What we did was definitely damage to his progress, and I say ‘we’ because it was members of my team. I wasn’t one of the ones personally doing it.”

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