Genre: Biopic
Premise: (from Black List) The true story of Richard Williams, the hard-nosed and uncompromising father of tennis prodigies turned superstars, Venus and Serena Williams.
About: This script finished number 2 on the 2018 Black List with 36 votes. The writer, Zach Baylin, is no stranger to the Black List. Last year he made the list with “Come As You Are,” about a young woman who becomes undone while moderating X-rated content on a social media platform. Before that, Baylin worked in the art department on Stephen Soderbergh’s, “Side Effects.”
Writer: Zach Baylin
Details: 122 pages
Ah, biopics and the Black List. They go together like peanut butter and fried bananas. Why is it that we groan loud enough to trigger the Richter Scale every time we see a biopic on the Black List? Why does the genre inspire such negativity?
Because we operate in an industry that’s becoming less imaginative every year, that’s why. Two decades ago, Hollywood was open to any weird idea you could come up with. In 1998, one of the biggest script successes was a story about a guy who was trapped inside actor John Malkovich’s head. As writers, we celebrate ingenuity. We celebrate imagination and fresh ideas. Biopics are the opposite of that. They take zero brain power to come up with. You find a person and say, “I’m going to write about them.”
Snore.
It’s sort of like a musician covering a famous song. It’s an easy way to get air play. But in the end, it’s something that already existed. All you did was repackage it. This is not to say I bemoan writers who write biopics. You give the customer what he wants. And Hollywood wants biopics. Not to mention, a great character journey can be a transformative experience, which is exactly what I’m hoping for from today’s script, King Richard.
The year is 1988. The setting is Compton, Los Angeles. It’s here where 45 year old Richard Williams is teaching a form of tennis to his two athletic young daughters, Venus (8) and Serena (7). I say a “form” of tennis because Richard’s never actually played tennis before and therefore doesn’t know what he’s doing. He routinely calls out “nice shot” when Venus or Serena launches a ball ten feet over the fence.
But Richard has a plan. How extensive is this plan? Try this on for size: He specifically conceived Venus and Serena so that he could turn them into tennis champions. It isn’t long, however, before Richard realizes that his unique brand of coaching isn’t going to be enough. These girls need professional training, and so Richard starts sending awkward video tapes of himself touting his girls out to every big tennis coach in the country. Three years later, he gets one to bite, Rick Macci, the Florida coach best known for training Jennifer Capriati.
Richard, his daughters, and the rest of the family move to Florida to enlist Venus and Serena in Macci’s program. But then Richard drops a bomb on Macci. “I don’t want them to play any tournaments until they turn pro.” For the uninitiated, every ranked tennis player in history played junior tournaments first. The experience that comes from competition is what allows young players to prepare for the big dogs on the pro tour. But Richard is skeptical of how this pressure will affect his daughters, and opts instead to put them in school for three years while they train. Macci is furious. He’s now being asked to spend the next three years of his life getting paid nothing to train these girls, with the hope that they’ll be ready for the pro tour when they debut.
To Macci’s credit, however, he takes a chance on the sisters. Meanwhile, paradoxically, Richard begins a three year media campaign preparing the sports world for the second and third coming of Jesus. The girls become mysterious legends due to New York Times and Sports Illustrated articles about their practices in Compton, which include dodging drive-by bullets while hitting balls. By the time Venus enters her first tournament, it can be argued that there wasn’t a more hyped sports debut in history. With the world watching, a 14 year old Venus walks out to play the number 58 player in the world. Will Richard’s decades-plus plan pay off? Or will the Williams sisters be yet another product of unsubstantiated hype?
The nice thing about biopics is that they teach screenwriters how to write characters. Because in a biopic, the movie is the character. Richard the Great is a perfect example of how to do this well. I can give you two qualities right off the bat that make him someone you want to root for.
The first is obvious. He’s an underdog. I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again. Underdog characters are some of the best characters to write because they’re impossible to dislike. And the cool thing about Richard the Great is that we get two different levels of underdog. The first is the environment. Tennis stars aren’t made on the streets of the ghetto. So that alone makes you root for him. Also, there aren’t a lot of black tennis players. It’s a predominately white sport. So the Williams family is trying to break into a sport that doesn’t recognize their culture as applicable to its own.
The second quality is that Richard is a fighter. Literally. One of the early storylines is that the gangs don’t like Richard and his daughters practicing on the court. So he gets in fights with them every night so his daughters can keep playing. And after they beat the shit out of him, he fights back. At one point, he takes a shotgun to the park and starts shooting at them. I don’t know if that really happened. But the main note here is that we like characters who fight. We don’t, conversely, respond well to wimps. If you’re ever writing a movie where you have a geeky character who gets bullied, it’s much better to have that character fight back (even if they get beat up) than curl up into a ball and let it happen.
Another thing I liked about this script is that it never went backwards and it never stagnated. Every ten pages, the stakes felt higher than the previous ten pages. The story wasn’t just moving forward. It was getting more exciting as it moved forward. That may seem like an obvious observation but the vast majority of scripts I read do the opposite. They get less interesting as they move on, not more. You really felt the rise of Venus and Serena, and the pressure, in the end, to live up to the hype that Richard had built for them. I mean, when that first tournament – the climax of the script – comes around, I was genuinely nervous for Venus. And you’re talking to someone who watched all five of her Wimbledon title matches. I know the story ends well for her.
The only place where the script falters is in its central conflict. Baylin focuses on Richard’s decision to delay his girls turning pro so that they can get educated and learn to be girls first. He was particularly afraid of them meeting the same fate as Jennifer Capriati (a famous tennis phenom at 12 years old who turned pro too early and subsequently became a drug addict). The three problems with this were that, one, we never saw the girls in school. So we never believed that was truly a priority. Two, during this whole time, Richard was barking to the world that his girls were superstars. If he didn’t want his daughters to experience the pressures of early superstardom, why was he putting more pressure on them than any junior tournament could? And finally, Venus didn’t wait until she was 18 to become a professional. She waited until she was 14. So how much education did she really get?
Despite these issues, this is too good of an underdog story not to like. Biopic or not, King Richard is worth a read.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[xx] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Remind the audience early on how impossible the plan is. An easy way to do this is to have another character tell your character how insane the odds are. We get that here, when tennis coach Vic Braden tells Richard that what he’s hoping to do is ridiculous: “It’s like the violin. It takes hours and hours a day, year after year, tens of thousands of dollars in precise, expert instruction just to hold the racket right, and then, even then, even for a family with unlimited financial resources, the chances of achieving the kind of mastery and success you’re talking about — with one kid, let alone two — well, it’s like asking someone to believe you got the next two Mozarts in your house. It’s just very, very unlikely. I’m sorry. That’s just my two cents. Maybe you’ll prove me wrong.”
What I learned 2: An “I’ll Show You” Screenplay. An I’ll Show You Screenplay is when you tell the early years of a real life success story. It’s one big dramatic irony narrative. We all know that Venus and Serena go on to become superstars. So every step of the way, when naysayers are trying to stop them, we’re raising our fists joyfully saying, “I’ll show you!” We can’t wait for the moment when they’re proven wrong since we know for a fact it’s coming.
