“At a certain point,” says *Where Is Wendy Williams?* producer Mark Ford, “we were more worried about what would happen if we stopped filming than if we continued.”
So, for the better part of a year, his cameras kept rolling, documenting the increasingly fragile state that the former talk show host had found herself in, as she alternately craved family, her former TV platform, and an excessive amount of alcohol, all while struggling to remain coherent.
What ultimately came of that footage is a raw, devastating, four-plus hour documentary, which aired on Lifetime over two nights last weekend. Williams, her son, Kevin Hunter Jr., and her jeweler-turned-manager, William Selby, are all credited as executive producers.
Nevertheless, the eOne and Creature Films project asks more questions than it answers, including what, exactly, was going on with Williams, and why a court-ordered guardian has largely cut her off from her family.
Though the latter remains a mystery to the project’s producers to this day, a press release on behalf of Williams and her current care team was sent out just ahead of the documentary, revealing that the former shock jock and TV host of 12 years had been diagnosed with primary progressive aphasia and frontotemporal dementia, which impacts language, communication behavior, and cognitive function.
Then, two days before *Where Is Wendy Williams?* was set to debut, Williams’ guardian, whose identity is redacted throughout the doc, filed a lawsuit against Lifetime’s parent company trying to block the network from airing the two-night documentary event.
A judge dismissed the request, however, citing the First Amendment.
So it aired as planned, with Selby and key members of Williams’ family screening all four hours with producers beforehand.
To their knowledge, Williams, who’s said to be in an undisclosed facility where her cognitive issues are allegedly being treated, has yet to see it herself.
Now that the doc has aired in its entirety, Ford along with executive producer Erica Hanson and Lifetime’s Brie Miranda Bryant agreed to hop on a Zoom to discuss its rocky road to completion, including the times they felt were neither appropriate nor safe to keep filming, and the larger purpose they hope that the film serves, even if it wasn’t their intention going in.
**Take me back to the beginning of how, exactly, this documentary came to be.**
**MARK FORD:** It really began as a conversation between Wendy’s manager, Will Selby, and our head of development, Pat Lambert. I think Pat reached out to Will about doing another documentary with Wendy — because we were the producers of [Lifetime’s 2021 doc] *Wendy Williams: What a Mess!*, along with Brie and Lifetime. It was supposed to be a documentary that would follow her journey back into her career doing a podcast.
We thought it was a great idea, and we were hopeful that Wendy’s story would be redeeming and we’d be able to document this journey. But as we filmed, it became evident that this wasn’t really going to be a career comeback story, that this was going to be a deeper story, and that there was something ultimately disturbing going on in Wendy’s life.
**Were you questioning whether she was ready for this?**
**FORD:** One hundred percent. I mean, you can hear my voice in the first 10 minutes of the film asking every question that you would ask about this situation.
The beginning of the film was really the development shoot, where we went out and just wanted to sit with Wendy and see how she was doing.
Basically, the story that was given to us after that day is that it was a bad day for Wendy and that alcohol had been involved, and now she was going away [to a treatment facility] and she was going to get that under control, but this should in no way inhibit us from moving forward. And when we did come back, she was better.
She was sober and on a better trajectory. And there were conversations and plans for the podcast, and there were people being put in place to produce that podcast, and that was a storyline that we were following. But it was derailed because of what we now know was the state of Wendy’s dementia.
**Brie, at what point did Lifetime get involved and what did those early conversations entail?**
**BRIE MIRANDA BRYANT:** At Lifetime, we’ve been involved with Wendy for a long time. I don’t want to say that Wendy was a mentor to me, but I was one of her biggest fans growing up, listening to her on the radio as a little girl. So, I’d reached out to her with her first management team, which was [her now ex-husband] Kevin [Hunter] Sr., on many occasions, to do things for NBCUniversal, when I was there, and then at Lifetime. And I’d said, “I want to be the one to do your docu,” and they laughed at the time. Then, when she was going through the divorce and it became very public, I went and sat with her and her manager at the time [Bernie Young], and I said, “We want to do your biopic. We want to do your documentary. We want to make it a big Wendy Williams weekend.” So, we struck a deal and we reached out to Mark, and we started the journey with Wendy. And she’s the one who insisted on the title of that documentary being, *What a Mess!*, which is just so her. So, for us, we’ve always wanted to be in business with Wendy. And so we were talking to Mark, like, “Do we think we’ll ever do this again?” And with her management team, too.
**I keep reading that this was the third and final installment of a development deal she had with Lifetime. Is that accurate?**
**BRYANT:** This was not part of that, no.
**Your cameras began rolling in August 2022. Earlier that spring, Wendy had given a series of erratic interviews teasing her next act — there was one with TMZ, and another with Fat Joe on Instagram Live. Presumably, you watched those? I guess I’m just trying to determine the calculation you make that this woman could be ready for a comeback.**
**FORD:** It was tough every single day, and there were conversations that we had, all of us, throughout the documentary. And there was no guarantee we would air this documentary if we weren’t happy with the content that we ultimately got and the editorial direction that we landed upon, which was the family’s point of view and illustrating what can happen when one of your family members is put into a guardianship outside of your control. We just happened to be there every day seeing the reality of this situation, and we just put the camera on it and captured it. There was no intention. And Brie was very supportive throughout, because we needed to just let this documentary unfold and see where it went. And you literally see that in the film.
**I think we’re very transparent about our producers’ confusion. We’re asking all of these questions that everyone has all the way through. We don’t know this manager. It’s a new manager. We don’t know this publicist. It’s a new publicist.
