It would have been a tough sell in Hollywood: An eccentric father with no tennis background somehow plotting and predicting that his two youngest daughters, African-American sisters just 15 months apart, would rise from the Southern California ghetto and sit atop the once lily-white tennis world.
Perhaps Venus and Serena Williams have been so good for so long we forget how they got here.
But what is arguably the greatest story in modern sports will soon be retold for a mass audience.
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The film follows the sisters during their turbulent 2011 season in which Serena returned from an 11-month absence from blood clots and surgery for a hematoma and Venus discovered she suffers from the autoimmune disease Sjogren's syndrome.
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Though it was one of only three years since 1999 that neither sister won a major in singles, Serena called it "great timing."
"You get to see me when I really wasn't doing great, struggling, giving myself my medicine," she said by phone from Charleston, S.C., where she is competing this week. "You can really see the story of how far I'm able to come."
Both have rebounded. Serena, 31, is again atop the rankings at No. 1, and Venus, 32, captured a third gold medal in doubles at last year's London Olympics.
The filmmakers, ABC news veterans Michelle Major and Maiken Baird, became fascinated with the sisters when they broke onto the national stage in the 1990s.
"It's an obvious topic because they are two incredible women who changed a sport," said Major, who with Baird recorded 450 hours of footage.
"They broke just about every barrier as African-American sisters when they became number one and number two in the world in tennis," wrote Baird in an email. "It's the great American story rich with sisterhood, family, race, hard work and tenaciousness."
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