You know you people right now are looking at the greatest
talent in the wrestling business today!
Christopher Colt, very shrewd individual.
I've often said that Chris Colt was the
best wrestler that nobody ever saw.
I love pain. I'm a psychopath, I'm sadist,
I'm a masochist. I do everything.
He was a maniac. [Laughing]
A Hells Angel, a Comanchero,
a space oddity,
and the original rock and roll wrestler,
Chris Colt tore up the territories in
the 60s, 70s, and 80s,
thrilling audiences with unhinged performances
and outlandish characters.
[Commentary] On the seat of his trunks, "Space Odyssey".
For all we know, Colt might well be from outer space.
I'm surprised there were times that
Chris didn't get stabbed or shot.
That's how good he was as a heel.
[Audience booing]
A talented performer, Chris Colt's in-ring antics
mirrored his volatility outside of the squared circle.
When you looked in his eyes, I thought,
my God, this is a madman.
Chris was an outlaw.
He did just what you didn't want him to do,
and he was happier doing it his way.
But beneath his psychedelic appearance,
a darkness lurked...
and Chris' obsession with death was no act.
Chris had his own Vietnam war
going on in his head.
I don't think that it was necessarily white
picket fence, two kids and a dog or whatever.
That's definitely not the life that he lived as a child.
"They threw rocks at me. Called me Queer.
Small towns can be so weird and cruel."
Driven by demons and obsessed with death,
he became a cult icon and a legend.
But who was Chris Colt?
Chris' favorite saying is, "Hey, man, I'm a homosexual,
I'm a drug addict, and I'm an alcoholic.
And I'll match you scar-for-scar,
and you'll look like a ----ing virgin."
I mean, Ozzy Osbourne was Mother Teresa...
next to Chris Colt.
♪
Chris Colt stood out from the average wrestler because
he wasn't just a rock star, he was the most wild,
over-the-top, strung out rock star
that he could possibly be.
I'm Jim Cornette.
Before I started my 40-plus year career in professional
wrestling, as a kid, I was a fan of Chris Colt.
Chris was overboard in every facet of life.
He wanted to have the most sex,
take the most drugs, do the whatever.
One time, he gets booked in a cage match.
♪
What's a cage match for?
It's to keep the wrestlers in, right?
They tell the fans, "No way in, no way out.
We're gonna settle this."
But they didn't count on Chris Colt
taking LSD before he got in the cage.
So now the match is going on, there's people watching it.
Everything's normal and suddenly, Chris Colt...
he starts imagining that there are giant spiders...
coming over the cage to get him.
And you've got to think,
what in the world would that be like?
You're almost naked, in spandex, in a ring
surrounded by a cage with thousands of people
looking at you.
And suddenly, the giant spiders arrive!
♪
And he's just freaking out.
And finally, he climbs over the cage...
And he starts punching people, fans.
Every fan was like something that
needed to be destroyed, in his mind.
The people, they can't see the spiders.
They don't know the spiders are there.
I'm watching the match from upstairs in the balcony.
Fans are just on top of him,
and they're just pummelling him.
But he was invincible.
Chris didn't feel nothing.
He was having bottles broke over his head.
He's like, "Agh!" He's like a monster.
I came downstairs.
I picked up a, a metal folding chair and
I started swinging at, at the fans.
It just became a riot.
My name is Bill Anderson,
30-year veteran of pro wrestling.
Billy Anderson!
In the summer of 1975, my rookie year,
I became a tag team partner for crazy Chris Colt,
as Bill Colt.
Cops started arriving, handcuffs going on people.
All I smelled was mace.
It was in my eyes and it- everybody's just burning.
The world is coming to an end in this arena.
And, here I am, 18, I had drank maybe
two beers in my entire life...
wanting to be a pro wrestler, that's all I cared about,
and there's my partner- a bloody mess,
drugged out of his mind, beaten up out of his mind-
and that's my new partner to start my career.
And I'm like, wow, what in the hell am I getting into?
♪
Chris Colt was one of the early guys in the business
who was wrapped up in the rock and roll lifestyle,
and part of rock and roll, especially in those days,
was drugs, chemicals, substances.
And when the other wrestlers were- back in the 60s were,
you know, still more old fashioned,
Chris was on the edge of it.
And he spent time around Janis Joplin.
He worked as a roadie for Joe Cocker.
So, this is the notebook in which
Chris Colt started to write
what he wanted to become a book.
There's about, oh, I think 100 pages or so here
of handwritten notes.
Chris Colt telling his own story.
♪
My name is Ty Haggard,
and Chris Colt was my great uncle.
As I read through this stuff, especially as a teenager,
it was like, holy cow, like some of this stuff is wild,
like, I don't know if this is appropriate for
a 13-year-old to be reading.
But, ah, as I read that stuff,
I realized that it was his intention for
his story to get out.
"I was bored in Phoenix one weekend and decided
I wanted to go to San Francisco for the first time
'cause it was always a dream of mine,
all the freedom of the 60s-
people getting high, having open sex on bars,
streets, it was all open.
One night I was walking to Market Street.
I noticed a girl sitting on some steps looking lonely,
chugging a gallon of wine.
I gave her a quick look, said, 'Hi,'
and kept walking.
She responded with, 'Hey, wanna have a drink?'
I turned and I said, 'Sure.' She just smiled.
Beyond her smile I saw sincere, deep eyes.
But I also saw tragedy, and hurt, and pain."
Then, as he's on his way to leave there,
he stops at a head shop and sees a poster on the wall and
then realizes that that's the person that he was
talking to, and it was Janis Joplin.
And, so he went back and asked her,
"Why didn't you tell me who you were?"
And she just wanted a friend that wasn't there
as a beggar or hanger on,
or somebody who only liked her because
she was talented or something.
And he told her- gave her a hug and told her,
"Janis, I will always be your friend."
"I styled myself as a male Janis Joplin in the ring-
jewelry, chains, clothes, attitude."
She left everything on the stage
like he left everything in the ring.
She was living in the moment,
she didn't care about the future.
Living fast and dying young.
That's the path that he figured he'd take.
♪
Chris told me, if not once
he told me 500 times...
"I plan on being dead by 27,
just like Janis Joplin."
And he did everything he could to be there.
Born Charles Fay Harris in Idaho in 1946,
and raised in the small town of Drain, Oregon,
Chris' chaotic upbringing set the tone for
the rest of his life.
Monday through Friday, it was a very loving home.
They had everything they wanted and needed.
They had clothes, they had money, they had food.
It's when they started drinking on
the weekends that everything...
Blew up.
My grandparents drank a lot and,
I've heard stories that on weekends they would
stop and get a case of half gallons of whiskey.
They would get drunk and have brawls and...
the kids were all involved and it got really brutal.
My name's Rhonda Rondeau, and I am Chris Colt's niece.
My mother was his sister.
Uncle Chuck, he'll always be Uncle Chuck.
♪
When he was, ah, like 10...
he came home from a friend's house- it was a Saturday.
Everything was destroyed in the house,
all the dishes were broke and,
his mom was sitting around the couch with a bloody face
and there was a gun sitting next to her that Grandpa
had hit her in the face with and split the...
handle of the gun.
It was a wooden handle.
"I thought she was dead. She was flowing with blood.
Blood out of her nose, mouth, ears.
We put her in the back seat of the car,
a '56 Chevy, trying to hide her.
He hadn't had enough of her yet.
He was a raving maniac. I screamed,
'I wish you were dead, you bastard,'
and he hit me.
Broke my ear drum.
He grabbed another gun
and started firing it at us."
[Gunshots]
"Sis was now behind the wheel,
successfully driving down an old dirt road...
making our escape to the highway."
I think by that time, my Uncle Chuck was like,
"Oh, my god, I gotta get out of here."
♪
Some weekends there was professional wrestling in,
in the area.
My mother and my Uncle Chuck...
They would drive to Roseburg, which was the closest
big town for him to watch wrestling matches.
He just fell in love with it,
and that's all he ever wanted to do.
"One day in high school, Drain High,
we were having an orientation class,
and the question came up,
what are we going to do with our lives?
My turn came, and I said, 'Professional Wrestler'.
The class laughed. It hurt me."
So, my uncle went out for the wrestling team in high school
and, he made the team, he was really excited about it.
And, then decided that he needed to stand out
a little bit and, bleached his hair blond.
They kicked him off the wrestling team,
kicked him out of school.
Then he got rocks thrown at him.
And so, I think that...
in his mind, he was like, "I'm gonna show them.
I'm gonna make it."
So, he jumped on a, a bus, went out to Chicago,
walked into wrestling school and said,
"Hey, I want to do this."
Well, that wasn't exactly how it worked.
It wasn't just an open invitation.
He found himself in a situation where
he had to make some money.
Met a kid on the street that was prostituting himself.
He found that to be intriguing.
And, saw that as a solution for how
he could become a professional wrestler.
"Now remember, I never had a sex relationship with anyone,
but I had heavy bisexual feelings.
I was more attracted to men than women.
I wanted one thing, to be a professional wrestler,
so with nothing to lose, I hit the streets
for the first time in my life.
I was scared, but it was survival."
He had a chip on his shoulder and I think that that
contributed to the "by any means necessary"
type attitude that he took towards it.
He was not going to fail.
He wanted to come back to his tiny little town
of Drain, Oregon...
as a star.
Finding his way in Chicago,
training by day and hustling by night,
Charles Harris begins his wrestling career
with a variety of ring names.
Maurice Chevier,
The Magnificent Chevier...
And finally, Chris Colt.
Colt Magazine was a, at the time one of
the early underground gay publications,
and that's where he got the name Chris Colt from.
I was to go into the army in 1966 and, I said,
"Chris, gee, you're gonna be drafted pretty soon, too."
And he said, "No, I'm disqualified."
And, I said, "Disqualified?"
"Yeah, I just checked off I like boys."
So, c'est la vie.
My name is Tom Burke.
I'm a wrestling collector and historian.
I've been friends with Chris Colt since were teenagers.
It was a different world.
It was a different world, and that was my first contact
with a person coming out, in that sense.
I don't know that it was...
that it was a big coming out party.
The challenges that that must have presented him in
the wrestling world at the time that he was doing it.
There were a lot of gay wrestlers that
people didn't know were gay...
but the promoters did, or the boys did,
but the fans didn't know.
I'm Princess Victoria.
I was half of the women's world tag champions
for the WWF.
Princess Victoria on the war path!
Another double Tomahawk chop!
There was one night, and one of the guys came over to me
and said, "We want you to go over and
spend some time with Chris Colt."
I said, "Why?"
And, not punching my own ticket, but he said,
"If anybody can turn him straight, you can."
I guess they thought he was missing something...
by not being with women.
But, that wasn't the case for Chris.
One thing I noticed when we were traveling together and
he would talk about the other boys in the circuit,
it always had this image in his mind that
they were backstabbing him...
and, out to get him.
Any territory, he was in and out.
He'd either have a personal issue or just something
would happen and he'd be gone.
The only place that he stayed for any significant portion
of his career was the small territory in Arizona.
♪
In Arizona, Chris teams with wrestler Ron Dupree and
takes the ring name Paul Dupree,
tag teaming as the Dupree Brothers.
It's a formative relationship in Chris' life,
professionally and personally.
Ron Dupree was my Uncle Chuck's very best friend.
They were, like, very close.
I only got to be with him a couple times in life,
but he was a very, very nice, kind guy.
They were a couple, you know, Ron was older.
Probably by about maybe 8 years, maybe 10.
Their love for the business kind of gelled them together.
Chris and Ronnie became lovers.
You know, I just never asked a lot of questions
along the way, but it was something
I understood to be the way it was.
I can't imagine it would have been easy to be gay,
period, in wrestling in the 50s or 60s,
much less to be a gay couple.
It was not something that was easily accepted,
and it wasn't information that was offered freely.
So, in a lot of cases, a promoter, or a booker,
or the wrestlers in a particular territory
might not even know and,
through a number of different gimmicks
they kind of changed their looks and changed their
presentation, but they were always together.
Weighing in at a combined weight of 450 pounds,
the world tag team champions, the California Hells Angels!
The California Hells Angels were a chance for them to
have a gimmick as a team and
sort of bring real life into the thing.
The metal, the studs, the iron cross,
the leather- well, they sell all that stuff
in the Village in New York City.
They were so far ahead of their time nobody
even knew what the ---- it was.
They used to say, "Okay, they're bikers."
No, they're gay!
Same tailer.
Pushing the limits of what's acceptable to audiences
of the era, Chris is determined to become
the ultimate villain.
Chris was so excited on TV once,
and he knew- Chris knew how to generate heat.
In those days in wrestling, trying to push the envelope
either meant you could draw money because people
would be shocked and, and surprised.
Or, you could go too far and get heat,
and the whole company could go under in the
twinkling of an eye because you...
you thought it would fly but it wouldn't.
♪
Chris was not an anti -American by any means,
but he took an American flag and, with a lighter,
and lit it on fire and burned it up.
They went too far,
and they got kicked off the television for it.
Not the wrestlers- the actual wrestling program
got taken off the air.
Even in a small territory in Arizona,
even 50 years ago,
even back in those days on a local television show,
even if you were heel wrestlers,
it was going a little too far to burn the
American flag on television.
Didn't fly.
Chris' time in Arizona comes to an abrupt end when
his lover, Ron Dupree, suffers a heart attack.
Though Ron can no longer wrestle,
the two continue their relationship
outside of the ring.
As Chris searches for a new tag team partner,
he ends up in a trio with Bill Anderson
and Mike Boyette.
Chris had approached me, and he said,
"I got a proposition for you.
And not that proposition, a different proposition."
He says, "I'd like to have you be Bill Colt,
my younger brother."
When they came to Tennessee,
the team was supposed to be
Chris Colt and Mike Boyette with valet Bill Colt.
[Commentary] William Colt, the valet...
preceding his brother, and he almost got run over!
Colt changed outfits, he changed gimmicks,
because he was so wrapped up in the rock and roll
lifestyle- the makeup, the hair he already had,
the personal habits he already had.
He wanted to create his gimmick,
being that he is a rock star.
Bill at the time, he has no body weight whatsoever,
he just started.
So, he's a lost ball in high weeds.
And, if you were gonna say, okay,
who is the professional wrestler that is using the
most mind-altering substances,
if you weren't pointing at Chris Colt,
you'd be pointing at Mike Boyette.
So, this team...
was destined for disaster to begin with.
♪
[Bill] One night we left Johnson City.
I'm driving, Mike Boyette's in the passenger seat,
Chris is in the back seat.
He's getting high just like he wants,
living the Janis Joplin, Joe Cocker life,
and all of a sudden, I feel
a punch to the side of my head.
And I look- I was like looking in the mirror like,
"What are you doing?" He says, "---- you."
And then he reached up with his right hand
and grabbed Mike's hair...
and yanked it and pulled him back.
Then Chris reached up with his other hand and
grabbed my hair, and he's pulling me.
And Mike just said, "Stop the car.
Stop the car!"
What I learned, Mike is nobody to 'F' with.
He was a Vietnam veteran,
he was a world Judo champion.
He was a very tough, legitimate guy.
So, we pull over.
Chris gets out of the car, walks around to my side...
Boom! As hard as he could, punches me in the face.
Then, he walked back over to Boyette,
did the same thing. And Mike says,
"This is your warning.
One more time and I'll kill you."
Chris went to swing, Mike blocked him,
hooked him in a front face lock
and just cinched on it.
And, Chris just went limp.
Mike just dropped him.
Chris was laying right beside the car.
Mike gets in the passenger seat.
He says, "Back up." I said, "What do you mean,
back up?" He says, "Just back up."
So, I start slowly backing.
I get about an eighth of a mile down the road,
and Mike grabs the wheel, puts his foot on top of
my foot on the accelerator, on the gas...
And he says, "We're killing this mother----er right now."
Chris Colt's erratic and violent behaviour comes to a
head as he's tossed onto a highway and stares down
a car speeding in his direction.
And Mike says, "We're putting an end to this shit.
It's never gonna happen again, ever."
It's the headlights getting brighter,
and brighter, and brighter, and brighter on Chris' body,
and at the last second, I hit Mike's arm
just to the side, and I turned the wheel.
I says, "Mike, we can't kill this guy.
We can't kill him, we can't do this."
And Mike says, "That mother----er deserved to die."
He says, "---- him, leave him, leave him."
I honestly did not really overanalyze the
story in my mind until many years later that,
I could've, I could've been in prison
the rest of my life for murder.
The cops could have easily arrested me and said
you... purposely ran this guy over,
first degree murder!
Could've been death, easily.
Bill Anderson and Mike Boyette leave Chris
for dead on the side of a southern road.
But the next day, when Bill makes
his way home to his Nashville apartment,
a surprise is waiting for him.
Open the apartment door, look in,
and Chris is sitting at our dining room table and
he has this big smile comes on his face.
"Come on in, sit down, sit down, sit down,
sit down." And I'm like looking at Chris,
never saying a word like, oh, I'm back to being a brother...
maybe a friend again, ah...
I don't know what's going on.
He says, "We're getting rid of Boyette,"
and that was the end of Boyette.
We were leaving Tennessee as a tag team,
going to wrestle in Seattle.
Before I could even get off the plane,
Chris was already off the plane and sitting in a bar.
Remember it just like yesterday.
Remember him sitting there with a drink in front of him.
And that's my last visual of Chris.
And I hadn't made up my mind
exactly what to do until right then.
And I said, "This is it, I can't do this anymore."
And I just walked away.
♪
Not long after his partnership with
Bill Anderson ends,
Chris' attempt to get his career restarted is
stopped when he suffers an unimaginable tragedy.
It was in Washington state at a small show that Ron Dupree
had ring announced at, and he had a heart attack
at ringside in front of all the people.
They called an ambulance, Chris rode with Ron in the
ambulance to the hospital and Ron died on the way,
right in front of Chris,
he witnessed the whole thing.
He had loved Ronnie all his life.
That was the only time that I ever heard him
come out and say anything of emotion of that way.
Chris was holding his hand.
Chris told me that he just weeped and weeped.
I don't think Chris ever overcame
the death of Ron Dupree.
♪
He was devastated.
Ah, 'cause they were so close, you know,
and he didn't know how to go on without him.
My uncle was like, "I don't know what I'm gonna do."
Well, they'd been together at that point for over 10 years,
not only professionally but personally.
That was a big turning point for Chris 'cause he kind of
lost an anchor that he had had that-
somebody to keep him tethered to
some element of reality.
"After losing my lover of 6 years,
I hit bottom, I thought.
The bottom under the bottom came later.
More dope was yet to come, more fixes were to be made,
more hearts were to be broken.
Mainly mine."
And he just metamorphosized himself
to fit whatever mood he was in at the time.
This is where he decides
he's not just gonna be called Chris Colt.
Now he's The Chris Colt Experience.
[Announcer] The Chris Colt Experience!
And Referee Joe...
♪ WELCOME TO MY BREAKDOWN ♪
And he uses Alice Cooper's "Welcome to my Nightmare"
as his entrance music.
What he did in that period of time...
was invent modern entrance music in wrestling.
He saw the tie in that it could have with the fans
to set a tone.
♪
Definitely a pitch black dark psychedelic edge to it
because that's where he was in his mind space.
I will not be responsible for hurting, crippling,
or putting anybody in the hospital that I
wrestle up against right now, man.
He'd make you hate him.
My name's Edward Giovanetti.
I wrestled for 35 years as 'Moondog' Ed Moretti.
From Idaho, Moondog Moretti!
Back then, you didn't have people like that.
He would shock people, he would scare people.
He's bizarre-ity at its best. He was so bizarre
he got banned in England, from wrestling on TV.
They called him the vampire.
They couldn't take how he was.
He was just too bizarre, he scared people.
And he was just being Chris.
When you look at the picture of Chris in his
younger years, he's a good looking guy.
As years progressed, and he got into
his demonic possession image where...
he would put needles and stuff in his face...
just totally strange.
It was like out of a horror movie.
You know, the whole vibe of "Welcome to my Nightmare".
He was living it!
Chris' life from that point didn't get better.
It definitely got more out of control.
Throughout the mid 1980s,
Chris' erratic behaviour and appetite for drugs
are both wildly out of control.
...And another disappointing loss for Chris Colt.
Into the 80s, if he popped up here...
It's gonna be a fight!
My god, he might look like he hasn't
seen the sun in 10 years.
Or if he pops up over here, now he's got more hair and
he's got a moustache and a beard
and he's gained some weight and he looks like
he might have once been out in the sun.
And over here, he's barely able to stand up straight.
And promoters kind of got tired of, you know,
is Chris gonna show up or, you know, how-
and if he does, what shape's he gonna be in?
From Germany...!
Several years later he's in Alabama as
Chris Von Colt and he's a Nazi!
And he just said, "Well, what is the most offensive
thing that I can do to the general public? Ah!
[Claps] I'll become Chris Von Colt and I'll be a Nazi."
Nazis were big in wrestling in the 50s and 60s
to get all the heat 'cause they were heels.
'Cause it was after World War Two.
When you get to 1987, he just wanted to
be a Nazi just to piss people off.
I think it was desperation maybe.
Trying to find heat, you know.
His reputation was getting tarnished left and right,
probably because, you know, at that time,
I think he was getting too absorbed into drugs.
Chris Colt started doing cocaine.
And, I think that that was a...
that was the beginning of the turning point.
Then from there, it switched to crystal meth.
I think that that's where it got really dark and
that's where the desperation came in.
By the late 1980s,
Chris Colt's wrestling career dries up
due in part to his mounting
substance abuse issues.
After alienating most of his friends and allies,
he fades into obscurity.
He was done wrestling.
He has no income, and so he gets this idea that...
he'll start busting drug houses.
"I would go on 6 and 7 days up.
By the way, now I'm addicted to crystal meth, speed.
Not like the cocaine a few years ago.
I'm clean from coke.
I just switched drugs to a more dangerous one.
One where you require no sleep, no food.
I'm in a dope house in Hollywood
in the Silver Lake area.
One of the biggest dope houses around.
It took me 4 buys just to get in.
I walk in, confident,
and place my order for an 8 ball.
As soon as the dealer shows me,
I flash my badge so fast they don't check it,
and say, "You're all under arrest!
I work for LAPD undercover!"
I tell them the house is surrounded by police cars.
I catch them off guard. Take the dope and run."
♪
You'd always hear a different story,
if you asked somebody, "Hey, have you
heard anything about Chris Colt?"
And they're like, "Ah, yeah, he's in Portland," or,
"He's in Seattle," and-
but they never knew anything definitive.
That's kind of what set about this mystique about
Chris Colt today with the modern generation because...
he has a 20-year career with the most amazing ups and
downs, and all kinds of outlandish behaviour,
and then disappears off the face of the earth.
But if- I mean, you could've said, oh,
he's become an international double naught spy or
an astronaut, it would've been
equally as believable because...
it was, his whole life was insane.
And nobody in wrestling knew where Chris Colt had gone.
Until somebody saw an adult movie.
♪
With him as a, as a gay man who...
at least in his work always had to kind of keep that
under wraps, he was attempting to
show the world that side of himself.
"This is not something that I see as shameful.
This is who I am."
I have not seen any of his productions,
but I understand that, again...
he was over-the-top with everything,
whether it was wrestling- I gotta take
all the bumps and cause all the riots.
Or with sex- I gotta have as much of it with
as many people as possible and I don't care
who and what and who's watching.
♪
I did not hear about him doing those videos until very...
late in life.
I Googled his name and what I saw was like,
oh, my god.
That is not my uncle.
That was very secretive.
I had no idea that he had done any of that.
Now I'm back! I'm back and I'm in shape!
And I'm ready to fight!
And I'll run you right out of town.
And then I'll ---- ya.
After disappearing from the wrestling scene
in the mid 80s, Chris Colt resurrects himself
as an adult film star...
Here with a professional wrestler!
...Shocking many from his past.
Chris was a dream to work with.
I sat him down in front of a camera...
and, as soon as I turned the camera on and yelled,
"Action!", Charles Harris turned into Chris Colt.
Ah-ha-ha-ha!
The same way that Norma Jean Baker
turned into Marilyn Monroe.
I'm Jack Fritscher.
I've been a writer and a university professor,
teaching film, and literature, and pop culture.
The editor of Drummer Magazine,
and I've written 20 books and I've shot 150 videos.
Well, Chris had been reading my writing in Drummer for
years and, he liked my Palm Drive Video movies
because Palm Drive Video's tag line was,
"Masculine Videos For Men Who Like Men Masculine."
In 1987, Drummer had a cover
featuring the Barbarian Brothers.
They were actors and body builders,
but their gimmick was acting like pro wrestlers.
And shortly thereafter that, Chris contacted me
about shooting a video and...
we set it all up that he came here and stayed for a week.
[Jack laughing] 1921?
During the San Francisco earthquake.
Palm Drive Video was like the USO,
entertaining the American troops during the war.
Palm Drive entertained gay men during the 1980s.
We specialized in solo videos,
that is one actor talking to the viewer
through the camera lens.
Chris Colt's heat was in his person, in his face,
and the way he related directly to the camera.
Yeah, I'm a street fighter.
I'm the original rock and roll wrestler.
The original Hells Angel of wrestling.
Chris knew also that I was not gonna give him a script.
He could let it all hang out and be as crude, and honest,
and open, and vulgar even as he wanted to be.
You want a wrestler dick? A real man?
A professional wrestler dick?
I am the king of wrestling.
He said one of the greatest powers he ever felt
in his life was walking into a ring and
making 10,000 fans scream.
The way he made 10,000 fans scream,
he put that energy into the camera
to make the viewer cum.
Most people don't bring this amount of energy
to the screen right away.
You have to build them up to it.
But he hit the set running.
I mean, this is not fake, this is real.
That's me in the mask, yes.
[Chuckling] I shall have these moments to remember.
Chris was trying to create a statement about his
triumph in wrestling, in his wrestling career,
as a homo masculine man.
Another victory!
One more time somebody goes down,
and they're gonna down on me.
Pro wrestling has always been
soft core porn for gay men,
and Chris knew that as a wrestler,
he himself was a fetish object.
I ran Hulk Hogan out of New York City!
He was scared to sign a match with me because
I'd take his belt and slap his ass with it!
Hulk Hogan was a god to the gay community.
When Hulk would play with the WWF at,
at the Cow Palace,
the Cow Palace would be, you know,
filled with gay men there yelling the Hulkster on.
♪
Because to them he was a strong, powerful,
well built, healthy-looking man.
That is 24 inches. That is, that is incredible.
That's awesome, I'll tell you.
And they were strong, powerful men themselves,
but they were afraid that they were going to
shrink away because AIDS is
known as the wasting disease.
I don't know if he was infected.
I presume that all my models in the 80s were infected
because you didn't ask and they didn't tell.
And, I made sure that everything on set
was very sterile and sanitized.
And, there was no discussion of that.
He looked perfectly healthy, but somebody with AIDS
can look perfectly healthy.
Chris came to me because he knew he needed a different
kind of publicity and coverage for this
last part of his career.
In a sense, movies are like a gladiator entering
the coliseum for his last match.
Hail and farewell, we who are about die salute you.
[Laughing]
He had hoped to have an extra act by
being a trainer and a coach.
But...
that never happened.
Almost 10 years after his wrestling career was over,
Chris Colt's wild and chaotic life
quietly comes to an end.
He was found in a back alley in Seattle.
I'm sure of that.
Sure of that part. How and...
what the circumstances were in regards to
how he ended up there...
I'm not sure.
I had heard through the grape vine that he was found...
in a chair, with a needle in his arm when he died,
when they found him dead, and he had been dead
for like about two or three days.
Shortly after he died,
I got a phone call from somebody
asking me if I knew anything about his death and
I said no, and they told me...
that they thought that he had died, ah,
of AIDS in some kind of
flop house in Seattle.
He died the way he wanted to die.
That, that was Chris, and on-
it was probably on the streets.
He didn't want to live in this world any other way.
I don't think it was peaceful,
I can tell you that.
He's not the type of guy who
was ever not at full tilt.
And, I would believe that he died...
in that same vain.
The official death certificate for Charles Fay Harris
dated May 23rd, 1995,
lists HIV as a factor in his death.
No autopsy is performed.
His listed occupation...
Professional Wrestler.
♪
Been a lot of years to try to make it here.
That's why this means so much.
He lived his life the way he wanted to live it.
He lived the rock star lifestyle.
And that's the way he would've wanted it-
I mean, if he would do it over again
he would've done it the same way.
He died too young,
although it's what he wanted.
Honestly.... [Exhaling sharply]
If he had it his way, it would've been 27,
but at 49, his body succumbed and...
I just, ah, I can only just say I'm really sorry that
he's gone and I wish he was here.
He was the first at so many things,
and he was so good at what he did- the way that
he could work, the way that he could bump,
the way that he could get heat from the crowd,
the way that he could talk on promos.
He was decades ahead of his time,
and his talents would be in the upper
20% of anybody in the business today.
♪
Chris was just outstanding.
He was ahead of his time.
I think Chris was one of the true
icons of wrestling.
A, a person who changed the
focus of wrestling,
and brought rock and roll into wrestling far earlier
than Cindi Lauper, Hulk Hogan, etc.
He was doing things like coming off of the top rope
with an elbow before a lot of other people were.
If Chris was not on drugs and alcohol,
Chris would've been one of the greatest.
If you reduce people to one word,
you miss the entire world of
what they are really about.
And so, reducing Chris to a drug addict,
an alcoholic, a faggot...
does not come anywhere near to the inner truth of
what that man was about.
And I think a lot of his addictions to alcohol and
drugs grew out of the homophobia that he
experienced in the world and in wrestling.
He was a complete human being.
You can go to online forums that talk about
pro wrestling, and they'll talk about the character
that was Chris Colt.
This is a real human being with his own demons and,
and family, and people that he loved.
He was a really, really good uncle.
You know, he would always bring us something...
when he would come to visit.
Sometimes it might've just been
a roll of toilet paper from a motel,
but we were happy to get it from him because...
he was our uncle.
♪
The last letter I got from him was 1991.
"I stopped drinking and drugging.
I'm clean and sober.
The way I should've been.
And from now on Chris Colt is buried.
Chuck Harris lives.
Want to talk to you soon."
And he signs off,
"Write well, keep well, your buddy...
the legendary Chris Colt, aka Chuck Harris."
Such is life.