The year is 1972, and the narrator’s voice is clear to people of a certain age. From the air, we see a custom-built home atop the iconic Bel Air. Let’s let ABC “Wide World of Sports” host Jim McKay take it from there.
“What you’re looking for isn’t an airplane terminal or a resort hotel,” McKay says. “No, this is a private house. Sitting majestically on one of the highest hills in the posh Bel Air section of Los Angeles. It’s a home as dazzling as Disneyland and even bigger than its owner, a gigantic man. There are 21 rooms here, an eight-and-a-half-foot bed and a plunge pool.” 15 ft. They say it’s the deepest private pool in America. In height, it’s two and a half times higher than the new world record for pole vault set by Kjell Isakson. The front door is 14 ft high and weighs one ton. The owner of this house? Well, the owner is Wilt “The Stilt Chamberlain, Los Angeles Lakers’ 7-foot basketball star.”
Then we see a shot of Chamberlain, dressed in a flowing red shirt and light blue pants on his custom-made couch, discussing in detail how he built his The house is in the shape of a triangle (a former site for anti-aircraft missiles during the Cold War) which he named “Ursa Major. One writer described the collector from the above view as Darth Vader’s helmet.
I recommend Watch the entire “Wide World” clip. It’s like watching an episode of “MTV Cribs” decades before the actual show even debuted. Chamberlain was, of course, ahead of his time in many things, from his uncommon offensive and defensive stats to his embrace of player empowerment to his financial support for women’s sports. He’s one of the coolest athletes of the 20th century – and we now have a documentary worthy of the man.
This week, Showtime Sports presents “Goliath,” a thrilling three-part documentary series (167 minutes total) examining Chamberlain’s life, career, and influence. The doc will premiere on demand and on air Friday to all Paramount+ with Showtime subscribers before it goes live on Showtime this Sunday at 10 p.m. ET. Episodes will be shown every Sunday after their debut.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QLNw7UCy1V4
An exploration of Chamberlain, directed by Rob Ford and Christopher Dillon, and executive produced by Ford, Kevin Garnett, Gotham Chopra, and others, belongs in the conversation with ESPN’s best “30 for 30” doc. Most will walk away from this doc with a fresh perspective on Chamberlain, who was once vilified as an athlete who couldn’t win a championship in contrast as an incredible rhino who led not-so-talented teams like others to the finals. He’s also sober about Chamberlain’s flaws and mistakes, directly attacking his most famous statement — that he’s slept with 20,000 women in his life. As sociologist and civil rights activist Harry Edwards says in the film: “One of the most misunderstood mothers was Wilt Chamberlain.” This is undoubtedly true.
“We’re always looking for some kind of exciting story – that’s our brand,” said Stephen Espinosa, president of Showtime Sports. “We want to be a little edgy, a little bit unpredictable, and take on projects that other networks might not or wouldn’t do or be ashamed of. For Wilt in particular, he’s clearly one of the few names in sports history where she’s recognizable by name.” Only the first. So awareness and knowledge are there. But despite its mythic status, I think most of us have gotten it wrong all along. I don’t think there should be an appreciation.”
Ford and his team conducted 44 interviews in all, 41 of which were used in the series. Those interviewed include the live-action Chamberlain sisters (Selina Chamberlain-Gross and Barbara Lewis), old friends like Sonny Hill, and basketball teammates and opponents including Billy Cunningham, Jerry West, Pat Riley, Rick Barry, and Wally Jones. Chamberlain’s author Gary Pomerantz has a prime time, as do longtime basketball journalists like Bob Ryan and Jackie McMullan, who have ties to Boston and delve into Bill Russell and Chamberlain’s relationship. The filmmakers had hoped to get Russell for the project, but he was unable to do the interview due to health reasons (Russell died in July 2022). There have been other iconic characters that filmmakers tried to get but didn’t work out for various reasons, including Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Michael Jordan, and Arnold Schwarzenegger.
The film is told mostly in chronological order, beginning with Chamberlain’s childhood in Philadelphia and his rise to high school basketball prodigy. His time at Kansas was the inciting wound—he never got over a three-way loss to North Carolina in the 1957 NCAA Championship game—and the filmmakers expertly document how Chamberlain was unfairly tagged in that loss, starting a narrative trend. Ford is a big fan of basketball, but he was deeply fascinated by Chamberlain’s story off the court.
“This movie should have happened a long time ago,” Ford said in an interview last week. “It was long overdue. What was special was that Wilt’s estate was willing to back the project and give it the impetus it needed to happen. They are very protective of Dip, as they like to call him. Then there was the Kevin Garnett component. He’s a huge fan, he drove the project, he excited the family.
“I would say, selfishly, we storytellers were able to earn the family’s trust and trust and allow them to be vulnerable in the process. They gave us the goods we needed to make it real and authentic. We have all of his sisters in the movie, nieces and nephews, and close friends.” And straightforward, basketball or not. When we first started talking to these guys, you could feel the heaviness of Wilt’s presence starting to materialize. They speak honestly and truly about the good and the bad of Wilt as they knew him.”
Because this piece is period, there were challenges inherent to the images. For example, there are no hours of archive footage of Chamberlain growing up in Philadelphia. The filmmakers needed something visual to highlight Chamberlain’s best stories and ended up making two big choices. The film uses artificial intelligence technology to recreate Wilt’s voice with archive footage provided by the Wilt Chamberlain Estate. Story producer Chloe Boxer and co-director Dillon came up with the idea as a way to use the vast amount of first-person material from Wilt, including his many books and numerous interviews. There’s a fine line for such a narrative to come off awkwardly and distract from the movie. Here, it does not. A second bold choice was to use a company called Manual Cinema to do shadow animation, which gave Wilt’s stories visual resonance.
Espinosa said Showtime Sports had numerous meetings with filmmakers about whether the film should use AI-generated audio, and cited the controversy surrounding it. “Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain”.Espinosa said he supported doing so because Chamberlain had provided enough first-person material where everything expressed in the document is either a direct quote or a summary of what Chamberlain had said and thought earlier. Showtime has revealed the use of artificial intelligence in all of its press materials.
“We asked ourselves, ‘How can we make this possible from Wilt’s voice, from Wilt’s point of view, to the viewer,’” Ford said. “We want you to feel like you’re actually meeting, experiencing, and feeling Wilt Chamberlain. He is no longer with us, so it’s a challenge because resources are limited.”
“Wilt is a larger-than-life character, one of the most recognizable and iconic American historical figures today without an exhaustive deep dive of the sort,” said Espinosa. “We have to swing big. We have to take risks. So we chose it with AI plus shadow animation. Those are really scary choices. But if you can land that plane, you can make the movie something really special.”
Of course, no Chamberlain documentary could be done without exploring the comment in his 1991 autobiography, A View From Above, in which he wrote that if he had to count his sexual encounters, it would be about 20,000 women. The filmmakers discuss this in a variety of ways from talking to Wilt’s sexual partners and platonic friends, to a psychological exploration of his relationship with women, to why he said such a thing at the age when he (Magic Johnson declared he said it) contracted HIV months after Chamberlain’s book came out .) Ford asked the Wilt sisters, who are in their 80s and keep their brother in check, for comment. His younger sister Lois said in the film: “You have six sisters. You can’t talk that stupid talk.”
“It was a very interesting hot potato,” Ford said. “For us, it wasn’t the most magnetic thing or the sexiest thing. But we knew we had to explore it. We know the non-basketball person who just appears with a very distant sort of understanding for Wilt, That’s the thing they’ll probably be looking for. So how far, from what angle, and at what point in the story do we decide to introduce that?”
No sports documentary released in 2023 will pull in the kind of viewer numbers we saw from ESPN’s “The Last Dance,” but Showtime Sports believes this documentary has a chance of finding viewers long after its initial run. On a personal note, he’s the best sports doctor I’ve seen so far in 2023. Ford said Chamberlain’s family thought he was a fair scout and thanked him. For him, this is success in itself.
“Showing it to the family gave me the most anxiety and anxiety,” said Ford. “I kind of feel like the public release is money for the house. I hope people love it and get great reviews, but I feel like the validation has already been done.”
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(Photo: Bettmann/Contributor/Getty Images)