New Navratilova documentary will tell parallel tale

In the wake of tennis taking over TV and film, Martina Navratilova herself will get the documentary treatment soon enough. Hers will feature a far different format, layered with dual biographical treatments.

Glenn Greenwald, a Pulitzer Prize winner, will work alongside Reese Witherspoon and Suzanne Gilbert on the docu-film.

"Twenty-five to thirty years ago," Greenwald told Jon Wertheim in the latest SI Beyond the Baseline podcast, "she was looked at much more differently." Greenwald notes that Navratilova, in her so-called hey day as a defiant "out" lesbian in a solitary sport, was considered "radioactive" by sponsors, a perspective that likely cost her millions of dollars in endorsement income.

Witherspoon's Hello Sunshine production company will put out the as-yet-untitled project, with the Oscar-winning actress herself terming Navratilova an "incredible trailblazer" in a tweet in the past week.

Greenwald's storytelling will encapsulate not just Navratilova's life story but also his own, as a gay youth coming of age in "Reagan-era" Florida. "This lesbian tennis player who had defected from Czechoslovakia" was a muse for Greenwald's experience. And what a difference the decades make: He now lives in Brazil with his husband and children, and – far different from Navratilova's 1980s experience – sports stars such as Gus Kenworthy and Adam Rippon are praised for LGBTQ-centric activism and public statements that sprang out of their 2018 Olympic fame.

Greenwald previously worked with Edward Snowden, out of which sprang both the Oscar-winning 2015 documentary Citizenfour and a feature film, Snowden, one year later.

The documentary will take up to nine to 12 months to finish, per Greenwald. "[We are using] the ways in which she influenced people around the world as a springboard to understand things like marginalization, how we experience being ostracized as children and adolescents, what we search for in role models, the sense of possibility that people can create."

Bated breath, tennis world – and world at large. Says Greenwald, "I don't see it as a tennis film or even a sports film, but as a broad, mainstream cultural film."

Follow Jon on Twitter @jonscott9.

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