Manual Cinema Silhouettes the Legendary Wilt Chamberlain in ‘Goliath’

In November 1998, seven-foot-one NBA basketball legend Wilt Chamberlain signed a deal with Northern Cinema House Entertainment to produce his own biopic. He hoped to tell his life story his way, after decades of being both praised for his athletic achievements – such as the only player to score 100 points in a single game, holding 72 NBA records – while also ridiculed for his bachelor lifestyle and “disappointing” championship and playoff performances. Chamberlain often said, “Nobody roots for Goliath,” referencing one of his many nicknames. 

But, the following year, the “larger than life” Chamberlain tragically died at age 63 from congestive heart failure. He had been working on the biopic screenplay notes for over a year by then; now the film would never be made. But Village Roadshow Television and Gotham Chopra’s Religion of Sports, in association with Kevin Garnett’s Content Cartel, Happy Madison Productions and Heeltap! Entertainment, utilizing groundbreaking artificial intelligence technology, have recreated Chamberlain’s voice to narrate his own story, in his own words, in the three-part SHOWTIME documentary series, Goliath, now streaming on Paramount+.

With archival footage provided by the Wilt Chamberlain Estate – along with the insightful voices of Garnett, Pat Riley, Rick Barry, Jackie MacMullan, Bob Ryan, Tom Meschery, Dr. Todd Boyd, Jemele Hill, Jerry West, Couples Therapy clinical psychologist Orna Guralnik and others to place Chamberlain’s life in both historical and contemporary contexts – Goliath examines Chamberlain’s historic life, career and impact on American history as one of the greatest and most misunderstood athletes of all time. 

Beginning with his emergence on the national scene as a high schooler in the 1950’s, then following the arc of his life through his death in 1999, each episode, directed by The Cost of Winning’s Rob Ford, explores a specific element of Chamberlain’s cultural impact, focusing on the areas of power, money, race, sex, politics, and celebrity status.

The series also includes impressive paper puppetry from the Emmy Award-winning production company, Manual Cinema. Known for their work on The Forger, a documentary short film created for The New York Times in 2016 about the man who saved the lives of over 14,000 Jews during WWII, as well as their animation for the 2021 film remake of Candyman, Manual Cinema uses vintage overhead projectors, multiple screens, puppets, actors, live feed cameras, multi-channel sound design, and a live music ensemble to transform the experience of attending the cinema, adding to it liveness, ingenuity, and theatricality.

We chatted with Manual Cinema about their choice to invest in such an old animation art form during a prominently digital 3DCG age, as well as how their silhouetted puppets added to the emotional moments the team recreated from Chamberlain’s life in Goliath.

Victoria Davis: With Wilt’s legacy spanning roughly 50 years, and it being 15 years since his passing, how long had this project been in the works? When did Manual Cinema get involved?

Manual Cinema: We’re not sure when it first began, but we came on board fairly late in the process, when the team was just beginning to assemble all the interview footage into what became the three episodes. We were creating and revising storyboards as the edits were coming together, so it was a pretty fluid process with a lot of back-and-forth. Because paper puppetry is so flexible, we were revising and adding scenes all the way up to, and even during, some of the shoots to help support the narrative arc.

VD: There’s some pretty incredible paper puppetry animation and light work in this documentary. What were the main design goals with this style in regard to Wilt’s story? And how, in your team’s opinion, did this style help inform the narration and emotion of the documentary?

MC: The Religion of Sports production had a wealth of really compelling archival visuals of Wilt as a public figure, but the whole objective of the documentary was to show a side of Wilt that the public didn't know. From the beginning, we knew our job was to represent some of the more personal and emotional moments from Wilt's life, the times when there wasn't a camera present. Rob and the team had the inspired idea to depict these scenes stylistically, which is when they approached us.

The goal was never to naturalistically recreate scenes from Wilt's life. With puppetry, you're not striving for realism, you're trying to capture emotional truth in form and gesture. Silhouettes were a good fit for this because they allow you to see the emotional outline of an idea without getting lost in the details. 

VD: Puppetry and shadow work is a signature style for Manual Cinema. Why this form of animation? What attracts you guys to this?

MC: Shadow puppetry is one of the oldest forms of visual storytelling, and one of the creative gambits of our company has been to find ways of mashing up this very ancient art form with modern cinematography. Like our name implies, we try to make movies by hand, drawing on old optical tricks and updating them for present audiences.

We got our start over 10 years ago, making these very little shadow puppet shows on old school overhead projectors, performing them in bars, storefront windows, and little DIY spaces around Chicago. Since then, we've added more sophisticated elements and collaborators, but we always try to maintain that spirit of DIY wonder and discovery that inspired that early work.

VD: That said, even though this is a familiar style from other projects, what made working on Wilt’s documentary unique from other animations you all have done?

MC: It is one thing to create animation for narrative fiction, it is a whole other thing to depict the lives of real people. Even though we're working with these light, playful objects, we felt a lot of responsibility to depict Wilt's life story with respect and seriousness.

VD: What are some lesser-known challenges to this kind of animation that most people don’t know about?

MC: The process requires a massive quantity of paper objects to fabricate. For every shot, we build a new Wilt puppet that is specific to that scenario, as each puppet is designed to express a different gesture or emotion. By the end of the process, we've fabricated a couple hundred different paper puppets. Each one needs to be rigged with sticks and wires and, sometimes, when you get it in front of the camera, you realize it needs to be completely rebuilt. 

It's not quite the labor of hand-drawn animation, but it's a similarly quixotic process. For this project, because the production schedule was so tight, we collaborated with another production house, Chicago Puppet Studio, to help get us over the finish line.

VD: What other unique challenges came up in particular regarding the animation? How did your team overcome them?

MC: There are a few times when we needed to depict a moment in a crucial basketball game, and those were the scenes where it's hardest for puppets to compete with the real archival footage of Wilt playing basketball, because you're never going to achieve that level of grace, agility, and speed in the puppets. 

Instead, we studied these still photographs of basketball games, and were inspired by these frozen moments in time when the figures of the players seemed to be artfully composed, almost like a renaissance painting. So, we fabricated and composed these still silhouettes of each basketball player and moved the camera through our miniature "court." The results were these really beautiful balletic tableaus, and it came out of approaching the task from a sideways angle.

VD: What were some sequences that were especially rewarding to work on?

MC: The scenes with Wilt and his family members. Those were the scenes when the puppets had an opportunity to express a lot of emotion with a very small gesture. I am particularly fond of the scene where Wilt is taking care of his dying mother. That's a scene with a lot of emotional gravity, and a scene that will be really familiar to viewers who have gone through similar experiences with a parent. You don't always get to express those kinds of scenes in puppetry, and it was a privilege to get to visualize it.

VD: Any new tools you developed with rigging, lighting, texturing, etc., that were specific to this project?

MC: We've collaborated for almost a decade with our cinematographer, Andrew Morgan, of Little Cabin Films, and he's always bringing us new lighting toys to play with. It's his responsibility to create the lighting look for every scene and, unlike most DPs, he's not lighting a three-dimensional set but a two-dimensional canvas. He really has to use his lighting instruments like a painter or illustrator. 

Because of the short timeline, we didn't always have time to create elaborate sets or backgrounds for these puppets, so Andrew got very creative with designing lighting looks that structured the space around the puppets in an abstract or expressive way.

VD: How do you hope your work on this project goes on to inspire other animators and artists, especially with your style of drawing on manual art in a digital age?

MC: CGI animation has made such amazing technological advances in the last three decades, but it's also so omnipresent now in the visual culture that I think people are rediscovering these old forms of practical filmmaking and animation. Like in stop-motion, there's a magic and charm when you can feel the human hand behind the animation. I'm hopeful that we'll start seeing more innovation around these older forms, because it's as much fun to create as it is to watch.

Victoria Davis is a full-time, freelance journalist and part-time Otaku with an affinity for all things anime. She's reported on numerous stories from activist news to entertainment. Find more about her work at victoriadavisdepiction.com.