Photo by Jay Paul
Jerry Williams, one way or another, has always been in the business of show.
Around age 10, he wrote and directed for his own “Gold Seal Theater,” he chuckles.
“I just thought this meant it was somehow better if I named it ‘Gold Seal.’ ” He’s the son of a Baptist minister who traveled around Florida. Williams wasn’t sure if his father’s sermonizing made him in-demand for multiple pulpits — or if his preaching couldn’t hold a permanent congregation. Regardless, wherever Williams ended up, he performed puppet shows and magic acts, and in high school he started a radio program. He skipped his senior prom to see Michelangelo Antonioni’s mod film “Blow-Up” at the Five Points Theater in Jacksonville.
The beckoning of a theater education brought him in 1967 to the-then Richmond Professional Institute (after 1969, Virginia Commonwealth University). He worked as a DJ for oddball radio programs such as his “Veronica Lake,” introduced with the signature opening line, “Quack, quack.”
“This was on WEZS 103.7; by day it was just the usual fluff and then at night went experimental crazy,” Williams says. He also started directing theater at the old Barn Dinner Theater on Patterson Avenue just inside Goochland County.
He ultimately made his living, for 45 years, making videos for Richmond companies such as Heilig-Meyers Furniture and also Richmond Public Schools.
He got into that profession, in part, because in 1974, a WTVR-CBS 6 reporter, Fred Whiting, asked Williams if he’d like to begin on-air movie reviews. “Because I was on TV,” he says drily, “people thought I knew something about video.”
Williams became a television mainstay of 15 years and 3,000 movies. His concise, two-minute-or-less reviews appeared at noon and at 7 p.m. He received billing as “The Man in the Dark.” He also contributed bullet-size reviews for Style Weekly, which meant he watched everything. Neither Rotten Tomatoes nor A/V Club reviews — nor the Internet — existed. His first written piece was a guest column for Richmond Times-Dispatch film critic Carole Kass. “It was about the artistic merits of Russ Meyer, because of a festival at the Biograph Theatre,” he recalls.
Williams changed with the technology. In 1998, he launched TVJerry.com with “Tales from the Grips,” covering regional film activity (mothballed in 2016 due to the prevalence of social media), and in 2013 started SIFTER. He doubled up on theater and film reviews and attends some 50 productions a year. When Williams started, Richmond didn’t boast of much theater; it was essentially three main stages, community theaters and occasional outbursts of the unusual. “Now we have this wonderful variety of work going on,” he says.
His quick overviews stick to the “Three P’s:” plot, production and point. When he and Mark Reed married, David and Holly Timberline — David was a longtime Style Weekly theater critic — participated in a congratulatory video co-created by Williams’ daughter, “and they did it as one of my reviews.”
This month, Williams begins contributing theater reviews to Richmond magazine; look for his columns at richmondmag.com/TVJerry. Besides his new role, he’s directed the occasional play, officiated for the Richmond International Film Festival and participated in the annual Richmond Theatre Critics Circle awards. Williams also recently returned to a documentary he began 15 years ago concerning Richmond’s notorious “Dirt Woman.” “It’s amazing to me that there’s not really been one,” he says, “so I want to finish this in 2018.”
