We caught Sean Durkin’s The Iron Claw a few days back: totally good movie, do recommend. The film tells the (relatively) historically accurate story of the Von Erich family of professional wrestlers, a clan who had great success and suffered much greater tragedy. It’s a heavy, well-made film, perhaps most notable for elevating Zac Efron into Serious Actor territory. Some critics bemoaned a lack of character development, but I give it a pass in this regard: there’s too many characters to develop in a sufficient manner. I would have enjoyed some more historical nerdery on the early days of professional wrestling, some context on how the sport worked before the big WWF consolidation in the 1980s, but I can’t really make a case that the film (or the average viewer) needed this element. 

I came home wanting a bit more…I’d known a very basic version of the family story before going to the theatre, but I needed to dig deeper. Enter this absolutely wonderful article from Dallas Magazine, by Skip Hollandsworth. It’s from 1988, so there would somehow be more tragedy to come for the family, but it’s some good journalism. Read it before or after the movie, read it apart from the movie, but probably just read it. Worth it.