As for the reality of the "bookerman angle", Eric Bischoff and Kevin Sullivan both went on to claim that the whole thing was all worked, but very few were in-the-know. Even the firing was supposedly only a temporary thing and they planned to bring him back (like the WWE did Daniel Bryan for example).
Heyman and Styles have also admitted that the infamous ECW shoot was all worked as well, and the fan that caught the business end of Pillman's "boot-fork" was a plant.
The "Loose Cannon" was defintely a character, Pillman was just damn good at playing it. And the same can be said of Punk today. It's just that in this "information-era" and with the internet being what it is, there is always less of the realism element in an angle like this because we know so much more about what is really happening behind the scenes.
