(static crackling) - Oh, fight fans.

This Saturday night or night you don't wanna miss!

- [Announcer] (indistinct) Germany, Baron von Raschke.

(group cheering) (group booing) - [Announcer] From Stuttgart, Germany, Baron von Raschke.

(suspenseful music) - Baron von Raschke was the supervillain from the sixties, seventies and eighties that I watched as a kid.

He would scare the hell out of me.

He was like a psychotic German who escaped from a prison.

It was the most badass thing on TV.

It was like nothing else.

(people shouting faintly) When he'd put The Claw on sometimes he'd bloody opponent's heads.

I remember when I was a kid, (people shouting faintly) we were starting to realize, hey man, maybe this (TV blasting faintly) isn't so real after all.

Like we thought we had uncovered this huge conspiracy theory like wrestling's not real!

(static crackling) (people shouting faintly) And all of a sudden Baron von Raschke's on the air and he's doing an interview.

And my dad, I remember him saying, "Boys wrestling may be fake, "but I'd hate to meet that guy in a dark alley."

(laughs) - Always surrender to the power of the great Baron von Raschke!

- The characters that were that much larger than life.

(TV playing) You can imagine seeing them in a bar.

They're just a touch scarier, you know, and a little less cartoony.

But there's a grit to it, I guess I would say.

It's not a Hollywood production (laughs).

- [Announcer] All-Star Wrestling!

All-Star Wrestling is sanctioned by the AWA, the American Wrestling- - [Phil] The AWA is from Minneapolis.

They started in the fifties and sixties and that's where Jim Raschke, he was an Olympic wrestler, that's where he got his start.

And he met Verne Gagne.

He wrestled as an unknown for a while, but he wasn't very good at the interviews.

He said he was bumbling, just, "Ooh, I'm Jim Raschke," you know, and it wasn't going anywhere.

But then he met Mad Dog Vachon.

- [Announcer] So, here we are Mad Dog Vachon.

- [Phil] Who was psychotic inside and outside of the ring - This is gonna be special delivery.

It's a pine box.

- Mad Dog is a mad dog.

(announcer speaks faintly) And Mad Dog said, "Shave your head, get you a cape, "change your name, we'll make you a German."

He went up to Montreal, he wrestled the Mad Dog and his career took off.

(Raschke and audience shouting faintly) (traffic moving) In 1984, I came to Minneapolis for the first time.

I got my education in this place.

As I came up as a filmmaker, my first music videos were punk rock.

(music playing faintly) I did a lot of punk rock music videos here.

- [Band Member] And it's great to be playing here this evening at Seventh Street.

- So, for New Band Night 1985, I came up here with a camera with Rick Fuller.

Here are these bands my age that are screaming about the things that are in my head.

(band member singing indistinctly) It was no rules.

We made our own rules.

I mean, if you want an education in music, you go to the scene, you get in a band, you travel.

And that's what I did.

So, you get up here or you climb up from the crowd and you do your little dance and dive, and people would catch you.

I was here for Black Flag.

I did my little thing and I dove as a farm kid does from Wisconsin, at his first punk rock show.

And Dan Corrigan, famous rock photographer from Minneapolis, he caught me in midair and he showed me that photo years later, a fraction of a second in my life that was captured, which is very important to me, because out of that fraction I learned so much about punk rock, social attitudes, DIY.

I took that method and put it into music, music videos.

And eventually we used all of that right here in The Claw.

There's a couple bands I worked with.

I shot Babes in Toyland right here in the Seventh Street Entry, and in First Avenue.

One of my favorite bands when I first moved to Minneapolis is Rifle Sport.

They get a special star right under the Seventh Street Entry marquee.

(music playing faintly) Prince, he gets a special star 'cause this is First Avenue where he shot Purple Rain.

♪ Never meant to cause you any pain ♪ And, of course, if you look across the street, you'll see the mural of Prince.

That top photo is one of our cinematographers from The Claw, Afshin Shahidi.

He shot that still.

♪ In the purple rain ♪ Purple rain ♪ Purple rain ♪ Purple rain (train rumbling) I was casting a music video for Low.

This was in 1995.

And I went to a casting agency and I was looking for an old man, a gentle soul, to hand out balloons.

And I saw this photo on the wall of Baron von Raschke back in his wrestling days.

I'm like, why is he on your wall?

And this woman, the casting agent, Babs, she said, "Oh, we represent him."

I'm like, but he's the psychotic evil German.

"Oh no, he is from Nebraska "and he lives right here in Minneapolis."

I'm like, are you kidding?

So, I asked the band, what do you think of Baron von Raschkei in this Low video and Low, they're super calm, quiet music, the opposite of the screaming Baron.

And they thought it was a fantastic idea.

So, that's the first time I met Baron von Raschke.

And I realized his real name was Jim Raschke from Nebraski, they say.

The documentary was inspired by a play that Jim's son, Carl, wrote.

I went to the play and I realized this guy has been in front of the camera his entire adult life.

So, of course, he can put on a fictional play about his life.

And based on that, we started this film.

I was living in New York, and I would come back on weekends and I spoke with the cinematographer, Patrick Pierson about this idea of creating a wrestling documentary slash recreation, a hybrid.

- Cue the strings, take one.

(slate snaps) - We had shot a video for Low and the Baron was in it.

And Phil had worked with The Baron before.

And I don't know who said it, there's a part of me that says, I suggested it, but I could be wrong.

I said, yeah, we should do a documentary on The Baron.

- We did half fictional, half documentary (people shouting faintly) and we uncovered a lot of vintage footage.

- It was just about us having a good time and making sure that every single frame is something that's interesting to us.

Phil and I, I think we come from like the same like interests and background.

Like Phil was very punk rock, you know.

I was always very EDM.

I started just like anybody would in the industry, and it's a constant learning experience.

Taking what I learned from music videos and other things and applying that into the advertising world was a really big step.

And that's why I like music videos, 'cause every single one, it's like learning film all over again.

(rock music) - He had a lot of crew people, a younger generation than me and I had already been an established music video filmmaker.

So, I was just so glad that they could come with all their equipment, sound equipment, camera and everything.

- [Crew Member] (indistinct) take one.

(slate snaps) - And it was interesting learning from Phil what he had done in his career and then applying what my aesthetics were in my work.

And, I mean, Phil was like a great teacher, you know.

- And he's a very creative cinematographer.

Always willing to jump in and just go with the chaos and try to capture it.

Patrick Pierson is an integral part of the movie.

We couldn't have made it without him.

(soft music) When I was thinking about where to film these recreations, we needed a wrestling ring.

We needed lights in the ceiling, we needed a big space.

Right away, I thought First Avenue could work, this music club.

- We needed a place where wrestling actually would potentially happen.

And, of course, wrestling does happen at First Avenue.

It has for many years and it still does to this day.

- We filled this floor with folding chairs.

We used the stage here to create a wrestling ring.

(people chattering faintly) And we got Brian up here to turn on all these lights in the back.

Brian, could you turn on those back lights?

(siren blasting faintly) So, these lights were basically our set.

And then we took the stage.

We had these ropes with, I used pipe insulation like you put around a copper pipe, 'cause we covered that pipe insulation with red, blue and white tape to create the ring.

But it's basically, just ropes across the front.

There was no turn buckles or anything.

- [Crew Member] Action.

(person shouting faintly) - And out here we filled it with folding chairs that I got from a church.

And suddenly you got the wrestling world.

- In five, four, three- - [Phil] We turned a punk rock music club into a wrestling ring.

- A lot of our casting was actually just based on unique looking individuals.

(people shouting faintly) - Extras who looked the part of the sixties and seventies.

People I met in the bar the night before.

Baron von Raschke would be up on stage.

We had some stand-in wrestlers who would play the part of the sixties in Montreal, or the seventies in Minneapolis.

I said show up at 8:00 a.m., at First Avenue.

- And, you know, shockingly most of them showed up.

Most of them did.

(rock music) (people shouting) It was chaotic casting to say the least.

- We'd be shooting like five scenes at once.

We'd take the extras and we'd move them to the back and we'd move others to the front.

And we had a film crew.

I played the director, our assistant director played the assistant director.

We all got in vintage gear.

So, it was madness, it was chaos.

We had four cameras going.

Everybody was screaming and yelling.

I didn't even know what we got half the time.

(people shouting) This whole movie was just a wild ride.

I can't believe we pulled it off.

- The Claw was was pretty crazy.

You know, you'd walk into something every day, you wouldn't know what you were necessarily doing.

I know Phil tried to brief us in, but it still would not be what you expected when you walked in.

- All I knew is I wanted it to be wild, high energy, punk rock scream to capture the energy of the wrestling.

I think we did that.

(soft music) We did a rough cut of the scene where I played the director.

Damn right blood!

I got the blood!

(indistinct) And your comment was, "Man you're a bad actor.

(Patrick laughs) "We cut some of you out."

But a lot of the people who we cast were our buddies.

- Yeah!

- Mark Har played The Crusher.

- He was great, he was great.

- Scott Smith played Mad Dog Vachon.

- Great as well.

- [Phil] Jenny and her kid, Arrow.

So, she's actually pregnant in one scene.

Six months later she's holding her baby and she's going "Kill that mother."

(both laughing) - Keep it weird folks.

Keep it weird.

- Yeah, we would shoot right in the women's bathroom and that's what the wrestlers did.

They would shoot in any location they could find for an interview.

It might be a bathroom in this case, the women's bathroom.

(Patrick laughs) We did a shot right here, in here.

Because Wednesday show we got Mad Dog and the Baron.

- I'll tell you what (indistinct).

(static crackles) In my hands, The Claw (indistinct).

- We did a scene here where he's practicing it, right?

Warming up and learning how to speak like a German character.

(person speaking indistinctly) - I'm working on it.

- When we started going into the family story of Baron von Raschke, you realize he's sort of the Jekyll and Hyde of the wrestling business.

He plays the supervillain, but he's also a really kind and gentle family man.

- And it's funny 'cause my dad in the movie, you can see the contrast, he's like definitely playing, his persona is very heightened.

- They gave us all this insight into the family side, what it was like to grow up in a wrestling family.

A lot of this movie was shot by Bonnie Raschke, Mrs. Claw, the Baron's wife.

(soft music) 'Cause they would have all these parties where all the wrestlers would show up and they had a super eight camera in the early seventies.

So, that became a goldmine for us to uncover the family story.

(soft music) (traffic moving) - During the process, I was continually kind of adding to this collection of archival footage and I was also just trolling eBay in places for actual film.

And one of the things that I found was this print of the Wrestling Queen.

The subject of the film is my dad's future partner, Mad Dog Vachon.

He was training his sister, Vivian Vachon, to be in the wrestling business.

And this film crew followed and kind of made this movie called the Wrestling Queen and was able to, you know, I placed the winning bid, (objects knocking) stayed up into the night and here we go.

So, and we brought this here to Pixel Farm to get it transferred.

Phil and I talked about early on was wanting to kind of capture this very specific era of wrestling.

(crowd cheering) We had a digital copy of the Wrestling Queen that I had ripped from somebody who posted it on YouTube or something.

And so, when I found this film, we were just like, oh my gosh, what can we do?

And you know, we brought it here and they did their magic and all that red goes away.

Get things balanced a little more like what it probably looked like.

We were able to get this amazing transfer that has so much detail, (equipment clicking) but we kept in a lot of the life, you know, the scratches and dust.

You can see in the transfer (screen beeping) there's a lot of green sort of scratches and that's physical damage to the film.

And we, you know, we didn't mind that at all.

(soft music) (people shouting faintly) - In five, four, three- - One of the scenes we shot here was depicting a 1971 match that was live on TV where something went wrong.

Mad Dog Vachon got cut while he was quote unquote juicing.

Juicing is when they take a razor blade and they just slice a little bit in their head to let the blood come down, But they're not really hurt.

Well in one case, Mad Dog Vachon was juicing and he got kicked right when he was juicing and he hit a main artery.

(people screaming and shouting) This was live on TV in 1971, right here in Minneapolis.

And blood was literally splurting out.

It's a crazy scene, and you can hear the announcer suddenly go, "Break character.

Stop, stop the show!"

(static crackling) Well the wrestlers just kept going and blood is spurting everywhere.

The audience is losing their mind.

Grandmas and little kids in the audience.

(people shouting) (announcer shouting indistinctly) I was inspired by looking at the vintage footage of the wrestlers smashing into the announcer's table, diving into the audience, hitting folding chairs overhead.

It was crazy how they did it.

And so we emulated that.

I want to get these guys with blood, the craziness behind.

So, he is like, ha ha ha bah, bah, ha, ha, ha.

Some people gonna reach over.

(people chattering) (person speaks indistinctly) - (indistinct) Take two.

(slate clicks) And action!

(indistinct chattering) - We would get the actors who were playing the wrestlers to jump off the stage.

(people shouting) - [Actor] We need some security here please.

- [Announcer] Ladies and gentlemen, (indistinct) just smashed his head (indistinct) the table and oh, oh!

(people shouting) - We had fake blood flying everywhere.

- [Actor] I'll kill you.

(actor groaning) - And the whole filming that we did at First Avenue was madness.

Whether we wanted to or not, our film shoots were probably about as crazy as the actual wrestling matches that were done back in the day.

- First Ave was super game about letting us do what we needed to do.

And I mean, it's an institution, they're so cool here.

And they continue to be so.

(rock music faintly playing) While First Avenue was having a show and there's fake blood everywhere, we'd stay later to clean everything up.

I'm not sure whoever cleaned up the blood, but whoever they are, I thank them profusely for doing that.

(objects knocking) - For The Claw, a lot of this is vintage footage.

I gravitated towards film versus the TV video camera.

It's kind of a hybrid.

We mix our recreations with vintage footage and I gravitated towards old film.

We found some 35 millimeter film, 16 millimeter.

This is Pixel Farm in Minneapolis.

Dave Sweet, colorist extraordinaire, and Paul Sadeghi, (Paul chuckles) he runs this joint and he's also in the Claw playing a cigarette-smoking cop-beating (indistinct) cap-wearing wrestling fan.

- That's right.

- Just like that.

- Our stuff was shot digitally, but we would try to match the look of the 16 millimeter or 35 millimeter film.

- A smoke-filled arena was like an essential ingredient.

Like there wasn't a non-smoke arena in this era.

So, that's what I remember and that's what, you know, you can see it in the footage.

That's what we were trying to create.

- We knew going in that we were shooting in a raw digital format, which is just really stark, kind of like a television program.

(people shouting faintly) And we also knew what to do to create the film grain and the look that we needed to match the vintage stuff.

The idea was, as I was saying to Dave, try to make it look like you can't tell the difference between the vintage footage and the stuff we shot.

'Cause I wanted it to be a surreal experience.

And I think that's what wrestling is, it's like what is real, what is false?

- Here, I'm doing that kind of that vintage feel here.

Whereas, without anything, it looks pretty, I mean, it's still well shot, but- - [Phil] It looks very modern and we knew this going in.

- Yeah, very clean.

- There's Paul and some of the actors, it's very clean.

It looks like modern footage.

This magic brings it to life.

- (indistinct) Baron von Raschke!

- This is where we took all this chaos we shot at First Avenue and tried to make sense of it.

And they say, you write your film three times, you write it in script, you write it during shooting and you write it in post.

- And I think we kind of got there, 'cause you know, when you watch the film, it looks like it's a huge budget, but there really (laughs) wasn't one.

- Mr. Director turn the film!

(soft music) - The producing team saw a real opportunity to really lean into making this wild.

Like, let's not make this a traditional wrestling documentary.

Let's find like a really original way to tell that story and to use, you know, Phil's style.

So, for me it was a really interesting challenge and honestly both for me and Phil working together to just kind of bring together this narrative skills.

We'd just come off of doing Tuscaloosa and then jumping into this kind of hybrid documentary and finding the story within.

- And all of that was some of the stuff that I'm most proud of, I think, is just getting to know the Baron.

He's such a nice guy and he's nothing like his, his villainous, alter ego.

But it was fun celebrating somebody who had created that life for himself and was a part of our abstract little movie.

(soft music) You know, he was all for it, he was game.

- One of the aims I think was not just to tell my dad's story in professional wrestling, but was to actually capture an era.

So many people who are gonna see this film, their only experience of wrestling starts, you know, mid, late eighties and onward.

And that's a very different aesthetic sort of experience of wrestling.

And my fond memories and a lot of people who would remember my dad will have this different experience.

(people shouting) - I think a lot of it had to do with just getting something done right for the Baron and doing a film, a wrestling film, mind you that was like nothing else, like nothing else.

I've watched a lot of wrestling documentaries and I don't think they can hold a candle to what this movie became.

- It's a real testament to how Minnesota kind of comes together to make stories.

And that's what's really unique about this State is when people get excited about a project, I mean, they all really rally around it, and people will pitch in and do whatever they can to try and make the movie get made, try to make it a success.

(soft rock music) - When I made this movie The Claw, I thought, hey, this is the punk rock movie I never made.

We'll just take the same ideas that we might put in a punk rock movie and we'll put it into a wrestling movie.

And we kept that attitude through the whole movie.

- I'm proud that we just, we kept going for it, just rolling with the punches.

And I know that we all really enjoyed each other.

Like a lot of the people who helped out in this film are very successful in film right now in different ways.

Like there was a lot of like, who was the film of film in Minneapolis at that time who've all become very professional in film work and some are out in LA, and some are out somewhere else.

So, it was fun to be a part of that moment in that time with those people.

Everyone really still appreciates each other and it was kind of a moment in time for all of us.

It felt like going to film school for all of us.

(light switch clicking)