Connect with us
Extreme and Obscene: Rob Black’s XPW

TV

Dark Side of the Ring Remembers the Time That Pornographers Ran a Wrestling Promotion

Dark Side of the Ring
Extreme and Obscene: Rob Black’s XPW Review

It’s hard to imagine a more perfect topic for Dark Side of a Ring than Xtreme Pro Wrestling (XPW), the independent wrestling promotion from around the turn of the Millennium that took the ethos of mid-’90s ECW and the WWF’s Attitude Era, and added one more element: That was essentially operated as a West Coast offshoot of Extreme Associates, a porn production company, but once ECW got a TV deal, XPW was left on their own. 

Sure, WWE had Val Venis, a character who was supposed to be a porn star. But XPW was run by actual, real-life pornographers. 

The episode, “Extreme and Obscene: Rob Black’s XPW,” goes through the whole sordid story of XPW, which featured some memorable wrestling from ECW veterans, but collapsed relatively quickly amid all sorts of legal woes. 

XPW was founded by Rob Zicari, also known as Rob Black, who had been a porn business entrepreneur for a while before turning to wrestling. Extreme Associates’ porn was on the subversive side, even by the standards of the time, and the sexual content in XPW made the lowest moments of sexism in the Attitude Era look like nothing. Rob Black also did the Vince McMahon/Eric Bischoff thing in which he both owned the company and played an on-camera villain character. 

And there wasn’t exactly a firewall between the two companies. They shared an office — with employees of the wrestling company sharing a workspace with nude adult performers. David Marquez, the guy who produced XPW’s TV shows — a guy with an award-winning news background — was asked to edit adult videos with some extremely questionable subject matter. 

Indeed, wrestling has a long history of being sleazy and disreputable, and if you don’t believe me, I invite you to watch all of Dark Side of the Ring up until this point. Small-time indie wrestling, even more so. But not many federations have been quite so mafia-like, as illustrated in the incident when the wrestler known as Messiah had his thumb cut off by assailants- in an assault, the documentary implies, was done at Rob Black’s direction. 

Extreme and Obscene: Rob Black’s XPW
Image: Vice

There are some fun details, including that New Jack was given hundreds of porn DVDs by the company; New Jack, who died in May, is interviewed on camera, with the episode dedicated to his memory. We also learned that the company, very much illegally, forged insurance documents for at least one event. It might have been wise for that guy to check on California’s statute of limitations for insurance fraud before admitting that on camera. 

Black and Borden did not participate in the documentary, and we quickly realize why: While Black was never charged in connection with either the thumb assault or the insurance fraud, but he was prosecuted by the federal government on obscenity charges, after publicly challenging then-Attorney General John Ashcroft to come after him. This put him in league with the likes of Hugh Hefner, Larry Flynt, and Al Goldstein, other pornographers-turned-free speech martyrs, though in Black’s case he likely did much worse stuff than produce bad pornography. 

The prosecution left Black and Borden unable to continue XPW, and they ultimately served a year each in prison. But in a shocking twist ending, it turns out Rob Black is now… running a hamburger stand, and is happily married with kids.

Watch Dark Side of the Ring

Now Streaming

Written By

Stephen Silver is a journalist and film critic based in the Philadelphia area. He is the co-founder of the Philadelphia Film Critics Circle and a Rotten Tomatoes-listed critic since 2008, and his work has appeared in New York Press, Philly Voice, The Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Tablet, The Times of Israel, and RogerEbert.com. In 2009, he became the first American journalist to interview both a sitting FCC chairman and a sitting host of "Jeopardy" on the same day.

Click to comment

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Facebook

Trending

2025 Oscar nominations predictions: See contenders for Best Picture and acting, from Demi Moore to Wicked

Celebrity

Why Steven Spielberg Is Disappointed With Vin Diesel

Film

Box Office: ‘Dog Man’ Shows Bite With $36 Million Opening Weekend

Film

Aaliyah’s Brother “Rashad Haughton” Claims She Would’ve Been “Biggest Star In The World”

Celebrity

Mac Miller’s “Balloonerism” Review

Celebrity

Mia Khalifa dating history

Celebrity

The Weeknd Donates $1 Million to Los Angeles Wildfire Relief Efforts

Celebrity

Rabbit Trap Review: Dev Patel Stars In A Blend Of Cosmic And Folk Horror

Film

Who is Bree Purganan? The untold story of Jalen Green’s mom

Celebrity

Patricia Cornwell Net Worth: The Crime Fiction Mavens Fortune

Celebrity

‘Together’ Review: Dave Franco and Alison Brie Are a Couple Falling Apart (and Fusing) in a Looney-Tunes Bash About the Body Horror of Love

Film

Rachael Kirkconnell says ‘everything was fine’ the night before her breakup with Bachelor star Matt James

Celebrity

Jim Jones Finally Drops Cam’ron Diss “JOMO” After Weeks Of Intense Online Beef

Celebrity

Trevor Noah Returns to Host 2025 Grammy Awards

Celebrity

‘Two Women’ Review: From Quebec Comes a Cringy Remake of a 1970 Sex Romp

Film

DDG Pledges His Unbreakable Allegiance To Drake

Celebrity

Connect