Reid, Timothy Lee Sr.

Impact on the world

Co-created, executive produced, and starred in 'Frank's Place' in 1987, a critically acclaimed CBS series following a college professor who inherits a New Orleans restaurant, earning Reid two Emmy nominations and an NAACP Image Award before its cancellation after a single 22-episode season despite strong critical reception; a decade later he and his wife, actress Daphne Maxwell Reid, co-founded New Millennium Studios in Petersburg, Virginia in 1997, a 57-acre, nearly 15,000-square-foot production facility that became the first Black-owned film studio in the United States since the 1930s and hosted productions including portions of Steven Spielberg's 'Lincoln.'

Life & background

Born Timothy Lee Reid in Norfolk, Virginia in 1944, Reid grew up in the segregated South before earning a business administration degree from Norfolk State College in 1968 and working three years for DuPont Corporation; that same year he met insurance salesman Tom Dreesen at a Junior Chamber of Commerce event, and the two formed 'Tim and Tom,' generally credited as the first interracial comedy duo in American show business, later co-authoring a memoir about the experience. He moved to Los Angeles in 1974, supporting himself through stand-up comedy and commercial work before landing his breakout role as disc jockey Venus Flytrap on 'WKRP in Cincinnati' in 1978; recognizing the character as written reflected a shallow racial stereotype, Reid directly challenged the show's white Southern director, won the right to shape the role himself, and went on to write several episodes, including one addressing gang life that was later adapted into educational comic-book form for Scholastic magazine. After a successful run as a detective on 'Simon & Simon,' he used his growing industry standing to develop 'Frank's Place,' a series deliberately built around realistic, fully dimensional Black characters rather than comic stereotypes, a goal that continued through his 1994 feature directorial debut, 'Once Upon a Time... When We Were Colored,' adapted from Clifton Taulbert's memoir of rural Black Southern family life and funded partly with support from Black Entertainment Television founder Robert Johnson. He went on to found New Millennium Studios with his wife in 1997, building one of the largest independent film studios outside Hollywood and producing numerous television projects and documentaries through it before selling the property in 2015; Reid has received more than half a dozen honorary doctorates from historically Black colleges and universities and continues acting and producing.

Sources

1. The HistoryMakers; Encyclopedia.com; African American Registry; AllAmericanSpeakers.com; Weemagine