Wrestling with Girls

Wrestling with Girls is the unlikely, outrageous, and at least partly true story of a major cultural icon of 20th Century America -- the man who brought professional wrestling to television. Hack Hallestrom is a lifelong loser on the verge of cashing in his one good idea. Unfortunately, he's about to die. Part P.T. Barnum, part Homer Simpson, Hallestrom is a forward-looking entrepreneur trapped in wrestler's trunks, just smart enough to get into serious trouble. When an opponent died in the ring seven years ago, he was forced to flee Minnesota rather than tell what he knew about a mobster's involvement. If he ever returns, there's a D.A. waiting to grill him, and a hitman who'll kill him first. But in wrestling's scripted morality plays, our future is written by our past, and Hallestrom's beginnings are about to write his end. Forced at last to take arms against his sea of troubles, the reluctant Dane returns home to confront his responsibility. With the help of the woman he's married to, the woman he thinks he's married to, and the woman he wants to marry, he just might get through. Wrestling with Girls is a comic noir fable about ambition and moral myopia in the go-go prosperity of 1950s America. It's also a loving look at the early days of modern professional wrestling, when the new medium of television transformed a carny grotesquerie into a living-room favorite.