For the second year running Ben Proudfoot is in the frame for Best Short Documentary Oscar following his nomination for The Queen of Basketball, about the pioneering Lusia “Lucy” Harris, the first female to score a basket in the Olympic Games, and one of the only women to be drafted into the NBA. The director talks hoop dreams with Business Doc Europe.
In archive we see the extraordinary sports woman that Lusia Harris was – six foot three, athletic, fast and a demon points scorer, also humble, softly-spoken and articulate. Years years later, we see and hear her reflect on that life of almost a half century before, now from a wheelchair.
In measured terms, sometimes playful, always engaging, she tells a story of triumph both as a player within the national champion Delta State female basketball team and as an Olympian. She explains her decision not to play for the all-male New Orleans Jazz basketball team, deciding instead to start a family. She talks of her bipolar disorder and the nervous breakdown she suffered in later life, but also of the four gifted and very successful kids she raised, as well as on the sporting plaudits that later came her way.
Director Ben Proudfoot was also Oscar-nominated in 2021 for A Concerto is a Conversation, co-directed with virtuoso pianist/composer Kris Bowers, which distils the remarkable life of Bowers’ grandad Horace into 13 minutes. The Queen of Basketball has its similarities, structured around moving and engaging reflection to camera that is brought alive with meticulously sourced archive, and all the time telling a story that is personal, poignant, entertaining and educational in equal measure.
That said, Lusia’s was a story that Proudfoot had no initial inkling of. “And I certainly did not know anything about basketball,” he adds. “I actually think that was, to some degree, a certain superpower because I wasn’t really placing her in any kind of context other than this superlative resumé that she had. I came in really knowing nothing about basketball or its history – everything I’ve learned has been through the process of making this film.”
Proudfoot wasn’t alone in his ignorance of Lusia’s extraordinary story. Even the basketball great Shaquille O’Neal, an authority on the sport’s history, had never heard of her, to his consternation. Which is why he came on board the film as executive producer to help spread the word.
The interview with Lusia was shot over two days, and totaled eleven hours. “The story is amazing enough, I didn’t feel like it needed a huge amount of fancy filmmaking to jazz it up,” Proudfoot says of his technical approach to the doc. “In making the film, I tried to just let her be front row and centre…And I think it works well because it is such a fantastic story. It has such a clear development. It has real highs, it has real lows and she tells it so well. So we intentionally told it in a simple way without overpowering it with any fancy graphics or cinematography or anything like that.”
He adds that the pair got to know one another very well over the course of the interview, during subsequent shooting periods and throughout numerous discussions up to the premiere of the film. “But it was never in terms of basketball. It was sort of like fate that these two people from very different backgrounds – I’m from Nova Scotia – were in Mississippi making this film.” The experience was, he says, both “special” and “unexpected.”
The Queen of Basketball is not a film ostensibly about race, says Proudfoot, pointing out that gender bias was as great a hindrance to progress within the world of basketball. But he nevertheless points out how racial inequity was a factor that Lusia encountered on a daily, sometimes hourly basis growing up. She was born to sharecroppers in the Mississippi Delta in 1955.
“A very famous tragedy in American history is the murder of Emmett Till, and that happened when Lucy was six months old, a 10-minute drive away from where she was born,” says Proudfoot of the horrendous event that opened Americans’ eyes to the violent reality of the country’s racial divide.
What’s more (and this is reminiscent of the story behind Questlove’s Summer of Soul, also nominated for an Oscar) while Lusia’s story was recorded on camera, it was never retold or reshown to a wide public, at least not until now. “Having been to that area and knowing the sort of history and legacy of the Mississippi Delta, I do think that has a big reason as to why she hasn’t been celebrated as the icon that she is over the last 45 years.”
For somebody who has bagged two Oscar nominations in as many years, Proudfoot is refreshingly modest about his role in the docmaking process. “You know, the documentary category is really an interesting one because your job as the director is to help someone else tell their story,” he says. “So I feel happy because I thought that Chris and Horace’s was a great story [as told in A Concerto is a Conversation]. I thought the world should see it and appreciate it. I thought the same thing for Lucy.”
“So the Oscar nominations to me are less of, ‘Ben, you’re doing a good job,’ and more of, ‘those are good stories.’ You know, I think the film is good, but I think people are really lifting up Lucy and her story, and that’s really my goal,” Proudfoot continues.
“I think part of our job, part of what achievement looks like in documentary, is identifying a story that ought to be told, that resonates with society in the moment of its release and that captures something true. So I feel good that the story that we have identified now two years in a row is something that people resonate with, but I see it more as a vindication for Horace Bowers and Lucy Harris, and less as one for Ben Proudfoot.”
There is a very sad footnote to the story. Three days before the Oscar nominations were announced, Lusia passed away, at the very young age of 66.
“It took the wind right out of everybody’s sails,” explains Proudfoot. “It was a big surprise. No-one was expecting it and we were well on our journey of waving the Lucy Harris banner and getting people to recognize her for her accomplishments. We had premiered the film at Tribeca in the summer. It was really picking up steam online and she was getting a lot of letters and notes from people that she hadn’t heard from for many years… and then I got a phone call in January and the world kind of came to a screeching halt there.”
“But, you know, as the dust settled, it became clear, especially from the family’s perspective, that our purpose is now more galvanized than ever, which is to make sure people know her story and make sure that the gap between her significance and how many people recognize her is closed forever.”
