“I knew that he was funny going into it, but I didn’t realise how funny,” producer-director Stuart McClave tells BDE of the wisecracking Richard Williams, the subject of the new feature documentary On The Line: The Richard Williams Story (which had its UK premiere at Sheffield Doc Fest over the weekend following its Tribeca premiere).
The film is being distributed globally by Fremantle. It tells the extraordinary story of how Williams escaped poverty and extreme racism in Shreveport, Louisiana, built a new life in Compton, LA, and raised his daughters Venus and Serena to be tennis superstars.
“He [Williams] is just a very light person, a lot lighter than many people would expect,” McClave observes of a character who is often portrayed as cranky and eccentric by the US media. “Most of the time, he has a smile on his face. He is cracking jokes and keeping people on their toes. I was surprised by that.”
McClave himself is passionate about tennis. Her grew up in southern California and his dad took him out on the course when he was a kid. He showed promise, at one stage working with Maria Sharapova’s coach.
“But I started pretty late. Most players who go on to play professionally or even in college have to start between the ages of four and eight. I started at 13. I played competitively on the southern California circuit but that was the extent of my professional career…I ended up pivoting to film and journalism when I went to the University of Southern California.”
McClave’s passion for the sport helped him bond with his subject. Williams had taught himself everything about tennis in order to coach his daughters.
“When we were initially talking about doing a documentary together, we talked a lot about the history of the sport and how he [Williams] fits into the history of the sport, how Venus and Serena fit into the history, and how the game has changed since the Williams family came up. In these conversations, I think he understood that I was going to treat his story very delicately,” the director notes of how he built up his rapport with Williams and ensuring him that the documentary would take his perspective.
During filming, McClave accompanied Williams back to Shreveport and saw the places where he grew up.
“It was quite a humbling experience. Mr Williams wanted to take the crew to film there. That was surprising for me because I had figured we would be in Palm Beach where he lives currently…but actually the first time we filmed verité with Mr Williams, it was in the Cedar Grove neighbourhood, which is the poorest neighbourhood in town. It is also right next to the wealthiest, predominantly white neighbourhood.”
This was one of those towns where on one side of the railroad track houses are crumbling and falling to pieces, while a few hundred yards away are mansions that cost millions of dollars. The contrast is very stark. McClave believes that it was seeing the vast gap between the haves and the have-nots which gave Williams his burning desire to succeed.
In Shreveport, Williams is considered by the local community as a returning hero. “He is as big a celebrity as you can be there. People will stop him in the street and ask for selfies and autographs. They’re really doing it because they are celebrating not Venus and Serena but Richard Williams and what he has accomplished.”
McClave did a journalism major at USC’s Annenberg School For Communication. While there, he wrote a series of reports on Compton. That meant he knew the area well before he met Williams.
Compton is generally portrayed in a negative light as a “super dangerous” hotbed of gang warfare. Through his reporting, McClave saw a very different side of the city. “For the most part, there is this thriving community of loving and supportive people who have each other’s back. I think that is part of the making of the film. What we were able to see was a whole community that rallied behind Venus and Serena and really supported them, and not only when they became the superstars later on.”
When Williams and his then wife Oracene came up with their plans for Venus and Serena, gang members would protect them, making sure that the sisters could train with their father in safety.
At the time he embarked on the documentary, McClave wasn’t aware of the plans for the soon to be Oscar-winning King Richard that Will Smith was to star in. However, he feels the Smith movie benefitted his documentary. It ensured that everybody knew who Richard Williams was.
McClave also believes that his doc tells parts of the Williams story that weren’t covered in King Richard, for example about Richard’s youth in Louisiana and the events after Venus turns pro.
The filmmakers were able to draw on some very rich archive material. Williams himself filmed his daughters with a video camera from when they were an early age. The media was also fascinated with them long before they became Grand Slam champions. “I believe that Venus and Serena are two of the most filmed people on the planet,” the director notes. “There is much archive to sift through and a lot of it is material that wasn’t digitised before. One of the joys of making this film was to digitise tapes of them on the practice courts in Compton in the late 1980s when you really saw him coach the girls. As a tennis fan, I had never seen footage of him telling a young Venus and Serena, ‘get in her face!’”
We see footage of the Indian Wells tournament in 2001 where, notoriously, the Williams sisters were booed and heckled by privileged white fans. Richard Williams was racially abused. These are shocking scenes which show the prejudice lurking close beneath the surface in American life. “It was important to tell that story. It was also important to tell how ultimately Venus and Serena came back to play in the tournament in 2015 and 2016 and to show how the crowd has changed.”
When the sisters returned to Indian Wells after more than a decade of bypassing the tournament, there was catharsis and forgiveness.
Sports history is littered with cautionary tales about pushy parents who made fierce demands of their kids, lived vicariously through them and ended up alienating them. As a tennis player himself, McClave has seen very bad and “unfortunate” behaviour from moms and dads on the sidelines. This is not at all the experience of the Williams sisters. Their parents pushed their education as much as their tennis lessons. Richard may have introduced them to the sport but they both fell in love with it. Venus is still playing professionally in her early 40s – a clear sign of her enduring affection for the game at which she and Serena excelled for so long.
“They’re not going to hit balls all day. They have to be well-rounded,” their father always proclaimed, pushing them get ‘A’s’ in the classroom as well as to serve aces.
The director acknowledges that with so much focus on Richard Williams, there is a danger that the contribution of Oracene, the mom, gets overlooked. “She deserves 50% of the credit, as much as Richard Williams,” McClave says. He ‘reached out’ to her at one point but given the divorce, it wasn’t easy to include her. There is also far less archive footage of her than there is of Richard. Nonetheless, he argues that she is very much worthy of her own documentary. Would he make it? “I joked at my first screening [in Sheffield] that if she’d like me to, I am totally down to do it.”
Now in his 80s, Richard Williams remains the same driven figure that he has been throughout his life. Is he in a place of contentment? “I think he will be a fighter till the day he leaves this earth…he still has goals. He works hard toward these goals. He has a young son and is very involved in his life and in raising him,” McClave says. “He will always have that drive, forever!”
