BEST OF TASTY CLIPS: Tim Reid is at ease mentoring in the African tradition

By Bill Vaughan

Entertainment Writer

Over the last decade, you could always rely on seeing TIM REID in a holiday film. Not bucking the tradition, he has “A Christmas Prayer” with Eric Roberts on the way later this year.

When we last spoke, he was touting Lifetime’s “A Welcome Home Christmas,” one of the first movies to be shot under COVID-19 guidelines. The cast and crew were really what he referred to as “the guinea pigs of production.”

“I had to be under quarantine for a full week in a hotel in the middle of a place I think people go to live in the witness protection program,” Reid said. “We weren’t in a bubble; we were in a vault!”

Until this, the veteran comic, actor, producer and director was locked down between his media center and home in Virginia creating a new network streaming content around the world.

LGCY of a People Network was born out of Reid’s travels doing master documentary classes in Nigeria, Ethiopia, South Africa, Cape Verde, England and Trinidad, which he calls literally the mecca for animation by people of African descent.

Young filmmakers, some of whom Reid mentored, implored him to put some of their product up and so the service has arrived with original weekly content, and a South African based talk show on the horizon.

“That’s the kind of thing I’m trying to do. Not reinvent the wheel but just put on the wheel from a different garage,” he said before citing incredible little-known stories such as the Ethiopians who won the first battle in the war of 1776 and centuries later, were the major battle force behind South Korea maintaining its independence.

“We need other cultural points of views if we are going to grow and prosper as people,” he said.

Reid learned that lesson the hard way when he followed a string of successful supporting roles on hit 1970s and 80s TV series “WKRP in Cincinnati” and “Simon and Simon,” with the self-produced CBS show “Frank’s Place” in which he starred.

Though critically acclaimed, the New Orleans-based dramedy was quickly canceled and he “was pissed.”

“How it went out was ugly business, but it was business,” he said. “You’ve got to be able to have complete control of your propaganda, and I was told that by William Paley who created the Columbia Broadcasting System in the early 50s. He brought me to his office to say he would have been proud to have the show on the network when he was running it. I took that to heart.

“You got to realize until recently the majority of the sitcoms were written primarily by white writers,” Reid added. “You weren’t getting a true depiction of culture. ‘Frank’s Place’ was one of the first sitcoms in the history of television to delve into the culture of Black America in a way that was so rich and so unique that it frightened people.

“If that show stayed on for six or seven years, race relations in America would be different because when you expose people to a certain amount of cultural truth, they have to be sociopathic to walk away from that and not alter their lives.”

Reid was enjoying new recognition with his 90s series “Sister, Sister,” co-starring Jackée Harry and twins Tia and Tamera Mowry, achieving the largest response of any show taken to Netflix since its inception.

“The Z generation, who were not even born when we were doing ‘Sister, Sister’ have discovered the show and what’s interesting, I discovered the show,” he said admitting that he’d only seen about five episodes and almost left during the third year due to being in the midst of building New Millennium Studios in Petersburg, Virginia with his wife, actress Daphne Maxwell-Reid.

“Tyler Perry used to come to my studio and hang out,” Reid recalled. “I tried to work with him on something back in the day when he was thinking about converting his plays into film, but we had a falling out. I didn’t know he’d be a billionaire, or I wouldn’t have cursed him out. I’m sure I put him in shock.”

The Virginia native attributes his tenacity to having been raised by tough women including a grandmother who owned a boarding house selling whiskey and the numbers illegally; and an aunt who owned the largest whorehouse at the time.

“I come out of segregation,” he added. “I didn’t speak socially to white people until I was in college during the civil rights movement. I am of a different breed. A dying breed. I never saw myself as a victim but as a warrior.”

When he decided he wanted to direct, he shadowed the greats including John Frankenheimer (“The Manchurian Candidate,” “Ronin”) who took him under his wing.

Reid’s own films “Once Upon A Time When We Were Colored” and “Asunder” followed, as well as a documentary on unheralded heroine Elizabeth Keckley.

The 75-year-old, working on a treatment about the gentleman who left America and helped Emperor Haile Selassie defeat the Italians in the first blow of World War II, says he gets on young people a lot about wanting to be stars or successful without studying the masters.

“I didn’t think that just because I owned an iPhone, I could direct,” Reid said. “Get into their world, their mind, their concept. It’s not stealing. It’s looking at composition. Then you go and do your thing and pretty soon, you will develop and become that master. Before all these elders die, go sit down with them. Get a feeling for what life was like.”

For 12 years, Bill Vaughan has kept Wave readers up to date with the latest news in entertainment. Now, we are collecting some of those past columns into what we call the Best of Tasty Clips. To contact Vaughan, visit his social media pages on Facebook and Instagram or @tasty_clips, on X @tastyclips, and on LinkedIn to William Vaughan.