Watch the Wing Bowl trailer to see many of the competition highlights described in the story below (you know, copious nudity, drunken guys falling into fire, etc.)
Nobody Died: The Wing Bowl Story
Philadelphia Film Society Bourse Theater
400 Ranstead St.
Philadelphia
Oct. 26, 2024
Native Minnesotan and mother of four Molly Schuyler ate eight pounds of cottage cheese in fewer than five minutes to earn a spot in Wing Bowl, the now defunct, football-focused, Philly-raised chicken-eating competition.
On Saturday night, the skinny legend arrived at Bourse Theater to down some loaded memories at the encore showing of Nobody Died: The Wing Bowl Story. The film won best local feature at the 33rd Philadelphia Film Festival last weekend.
The documentary is a taxonomy of highlights pulled from each of the competition’s 25 years. It culminates into an overstuffed ode to the deliberately distasteful annual eating event.
The only thing more spectacular than Wing Bowl itself might be the Wing Bowl movie.
It’s packed with characters ripe for the picking: Beyond Molly Schuyler, we meet contestants with aliases like “Arson Arnie,” “Badlands Booker,” “Fat Daddy Evil,” “Doughboy,” “Slushee Shelly,” and long-time champ, “El Wingador.” Many of those distinguished individuals were in the sold-out crowd that gathered at 10 p.m. for Saturday's screening. I brought my 63-year-old mother along, and we had to stand across the street from everyone else in hopes of attaining rush tickets.
Beyond chewing hundreds of chicken wings, each competitor had to swallow something special to enter the official competition. One Wing Bowl wannabe ate dirty ice stored underneath his car fender; another somehow consumed a raw cactus; and one extra-special somebody set out to eat two gallons of ice cream before getting sent to the hospital for a “minor case of hypothermia” after his lips turned blue two scoops into the second container.
The movie begins with an attempt to define what the fuck Wing Bowl was.
“It’s pandemonium,” “It’s craziness,” “It’s a bonafide shit show,” strings of interviewees reflect in flashes of interview.
Over an hour and a half, the film chronicles Wing Bowl’s rise and fall. It all began in 1993 when WIP talk-radio hosts Angelo Cataldi and Al Morganti invented a buffalo wing contest for Eagles fanatics depressed over the team’s sad seasonal performance. “We were just recruiting a few fat guys to eat chicken,” Cataldi recalled — but still, a couple hundred people showed up to a shitty hotel where the winner took home a hibachi grill.
Every year after until the Eagle’s 2018 Super Bowl win and the surge of so-called cancel culture (at which point the show was shut down), Wing Bowl escalated into deeper absurdity and insanity with tens of thousands of people pouring into the Wells Fargo center to see shit go down. Cut to shot after shot of shirtless women, gravy-soaked faces on the verge of vomiting, and one particularly violent video of a drunk dude falling into a bonfire …
“Again, no one died,” Cataldi reminds the audience repeatedly.
Interviews with the retired producer from inside his glassy home splice up footage from the dirty pits of Wing Bowls past.
By the time Molly Schuyler took home gold in 2018, the competitive eaters were winning tens of thousands of dollars in rewards. Women, including plenty of porn stars and strippers, sought to gain “Wingette” status, knowing they’d win the big bucks by participating in the largely alcohol- and testosterone-fueled scene.
The movie easily relays all the fun that came with Wing Bowl. It touches only lightly on the realities of the people who opted into the contest.
Long reigning champ El Wingador — who describes during the film his routine of strengthening the 2,800 tendons in his jaw by chewing ten pounds a week of frozen tootsie rolls for “pitbull” status — speaks briefly to the seven years he spent in federal prison for cocaine distribution amid his Wing Bowl fame. He was sorry to “disappoint” his fans, only to find that they — naturally — welcomed him back with open arms (wings?) upon his reentry.
El Wingador at a post film Q&A: "I eat chicken everyday."
Schuyler mentions getting into competitive eating as an alternative to working at Applebee’s. The first time she went to Wing Bowl was the first time she was able to get her nails done (paid for by the promoters) — “and I ate two of the fuckers during the contest!” she cracks.
Most of the star power — like one guy who became known for bashing cans of beer open on his forehead, all whilst splitting his skin into shreds — is supposedly made up of normal joes looking for some attention. If they hurt themselves in the process, the film seems to infer, that’s their decision.
In a post-screening Q&A, Schuyler said that Wing Bowl made “people that aren’t something into superheroes… It was probably the most exciting thing I’ve ever done in my whole life and I wish it would come back.” The community created around the event, she said, is real — and full of people who kept her alive during dark days in her life.
The movie, however, doesn’t dive deep into why the show was cut short (if you can call 25 years "short"). It’s taken for granted as everyone interviewed agrees again and again throughout the film that it was pure luck that nobody was killed during the show’s two-decade history.
Part of the reason for that, according to Director Pat Taggart, who dubbed Wing Bowl “the most unique event in the history of media” at the start of the screening, is a lack of cooperation of WIP. “They told us we couldn’t have their footage and that we couldn’t interview anybody that still worked there,” Taggart stated. Fortunately, he noted, it “was not hard to get a press pass to Wing Bowl — if you had a blog with two readers you could go.” Evidently, there was tons of video from other sources to make the film work.
The layers of latent power that made the show work — and that got Angelo Cataldi rich off watching “fat boys eating chicken at 6 in the morning,” — go largely unexamined.
But filmmaker Pat Taggart seemed to sympathize with all of his subjects, Cataldi and contestants alike, in their shared belief that Philly should bring Wing Bowl back.
El Wingador wants to BRING WING BOWL BACK!
A strip club owner stood up during the Q&A to pledge his gratitude to Wing Bowl: “It was the best day of the year,” he grinned.
Taggart said that too many high-horsed prudes declared that Wing Bowl was “wrong” and that the show’s treatment of women, for one, was objectifying.
“It was a voluntary event for adults once a year,” Taggart rolled his eyes. “If you don’t like Wing Bowl — just don’t go!”
I wondered whether I would ever attend a Wing Bowl if Philly managed to make space for its return. I don’t think I’d like to watch a bunch of bros smelling of bad self-esteem hurt themselves for my entertainment — but that’s probably because I’m one of few to have a full-time job that doesn’t require a high degree of self-exploitation.
I left the theater only slightly nauseous from what I’d just watched. But, to be fair, that could’ve been because I laughed pretty hard at more than half of the movie’s highlights. Capitalism might make people crazy, I thought, but with crazy comes creative.
In the meantime, if anyone asks me who my dream dinner party guest would be, I’ll respond with “Molly Schuyler.” I’d love to tear into a rotisserie chicken with her and find out how she kept all that cottage cheese down.
Follow Philadelphia Film Society on Instagram to see where the Wing Bowl movie goes next — it may make it's way to streaming services soon.
