Wrestling legend Mick Foley has shared a deeply personal tribute to filmmaker Barry Blaustein, the writer and director behind the landmark 1999 documentary Beyond the Mat. Blaustein died Tuesday at his Los Angeles home at age 72 after a battle with pancreatic cancer and Parkinson’s disease.
Foley posted his remembrance to Facebook, recounting a friendship that spanned more than three decades and began in an unlikely setting.
A 30-Year Friendship Born In A Las Vegas Motel
Foley wrote that he first met Blaustein in the fall of 1994 at a small motel off the Las Vegas strip, where he was resting up before a match with Sabu. Wrestling agent Barry Bloom, who would later become Foley’s longtime manager, brought Blaustein along to pitch him on a planned wrestling documentary.
“Little did I know that evening, and the men who participated in it with me would go on to change the course of my career and my life,” Foley wrote. The Sabu match, he added, also inspired his 2004 comeback and what he considers the best match of his career, a brutal Backlash 2004 encounter with Randy Orton.
Vince McMahon’s Cold Warning About Blaustein
Beyond the Mat hit theaters in 1999 and was named a finalist for the Academy Award for Best Documentary. Its climactic sequence captured Foley’s Royal Rumble 1999 “I Quit” match against The Rock, in which he absorbed a series of unprotected chair shots while his family watched in tears from the front row.
Foley said the film created real friction with WWE. “Vince McMahon was not nearly as enthusiastic about the film as I was, feeling it took away the magic of the on-air product,” he wrote, adding that the company once warned him, “you think that guy (Blaustein) is your friend. He’s not your friend.”
Foley pushed back in his tribute, noting that the events of the following decades told a very different story.
A Letter That Arrived Six Hours Too Late
Foley described flying to Los Angeles on one day’s notice for a recent Beyond the Mat screening and Q&A, after Blaustein’s wife reached out to say he had been diagnosed with stage four pancreatic cancer and was too weak to attend himself. Following the event, Foley spent hours at the Blaustein home with family and friends, calling the visit “extraordinary, even magical.”
When Foley was told Blaustein was down to his final days, he wrote a letter that evening and sent it next day air the following morning. “The letter arrived at the Blaustein home at 8 AM, just six hours after Barry had passed,” Foley wrote. “But I hope it serves as a reminder that I loved Barry, thought the world of him, and considered him one of my best friends.”
Blaustein’s Hollywood Legacy
Outside the wrestling world, Blaustein built a celebrated career in comedy. He wrote for Saturday Night Live from 1980 to 1983, where he and partner David Sheffield helped craft some of Eddie Murphy’s most enduring characters, including Buckwheat, Gumby, and Mr. Robinson. The duo went on to co-write Coming to America, The Nutty Professor, its 2000 sequel, and 2021’s Coming 2 America. Blaustein also directed the 2005 Johnny Knoxville comedy The Ringer.
Blaustein is survived by his wife Debraa, his children Corey and Kasey, and his granddaughter Daisy.
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