Elwood Reid owes his television career in part to a magazine article that infuriated University of Michigan football fans. If your goal is to turn words into paychecks, you probably can’t replicate that.
Writing faithfully, though? Reading analytically? Accepting criticism enthusiastically? Tackling head-on the challenge of getting better, every day?
Anyone can do those things, Reid said, and he remains convinced that “work makes its own luck. If you have a scrap of talent, eventually it will choose you.”
Reid, 59, is a novelist, screenwriter and the executive producer and showrunner for CBS’ “Tracker,” which stars Justin Hartley from “This Is Us” and has been renewed for a fourth season.
Before that he was the showrunner for ABC’S “Big Sky,” and decades ahead of “Big Sky” he spent two years in the Big 10, as a 6-foot-6, 285-pound U-M lineman whose career was throttled by neck injuries before he could play in an official game.
He and “Tracker” writer Jai Franklin Sarki will talk about the path from script to screen Thursday, May 21, as part of the National Writers Series in Traverse City.
In-house and virtual tickets for the 7 p.m. discussion at City Opera House remain available at nationalwritersseries.org, and in case it helps bolster anyone’s confidence, “I was a horrendous writer,” Reid said, before hard work and tough love started to shape his future.
“A few young professors were relentless. They hammered me,” he said. “They were brutally honest.”
Sort of like football coaches, but the English department couldn’t make him run laps.
Roots of a writer
Reid is deep enough into his writing career that the football references should probably be retired.
The reality is, though, he came to Ann Arbor from suburban Cleveland to flatten people, and he was still in that world when he realized he’d rather be reading “Portnoy’s Complaint” than listening to his coaches actually grouse and grumble.
Post-football, he’s been a graduate student, carpenter, bartender, bouncer and author from Alaska to New York. He met his wife, writer Nina Reid, when she was a waitress at the Blind Pig in Ann Arbor and noticed him picking up books when he wasn’t busy pouring beers or showing unruly students to the sidewalk.
They mostly live in Livingston, Montana, and have five children, from 30-year-old singer-songwriter Alaska Reid to a 17-year-old only son who plays classical piano. Several of the kids are tall, their dad said, all of them are creative, and none of them are particularly inclined toward traditional sports.
A few inches shorter than he used to be, Reid does CrossFit and yoga these days to keep himself from falling apart, and overall is “manageably sore.”
Football left him with aches in spots he doesn’t even remember damaging — but it also provided inspiration and opportunity.
Novels on the TV screen
“If I Don’t Six,” his 1998 first novel, was biographical to the point that it included a molestation masquerading as a physical from a “Dr. A,” 23 years before Dr. Robert Anderson’s abuse was outlined in an official report.
The book led to an assignment from GQ in 1999 to write about Matt Schembechler, son of legendary Michigan coach Bo Schembechler, who was suing his dad and the university over issues with a memorabilia company.
The piece was titled “Bully Bo,” and people with closets full of maize and blue sportswear were not pleased with it. To some extent, Reid said back then, they missed the point; Schembechler was good at his job, which centered around winning football games, but the power coaches wield over young athletes is outsized and onerous.
The article prompted a call from a Hollywood producer, followed by a screenplay adaptation of the book. Then the dominoes began to topple: Steven Bochco’s “Blind Justice,” more series, more credibility.
“The preciousness gets beat out of you, and you learn to tell a story,” Reid said.
The great shows like “The Wire” and “The Sopranos” “are one big novel,” as he sees it, and he knows how to write those. His latest, a violent Western called “The Kettle,” is due out next year.
As for “Tracker,” the fourth season starts shooting in a month or so, with new surroundings.
Step by step, page by page
After three years in Vancouver, British Columbia, where filming is relatively inexpensive, the show has relocated to Los Angeles, where the industry has been undercut by cheaper locations and the state has finally responded with incentives.
“We were very lucky to get one of the allocations,” Reid said from his new office, and he was on his way to a meeting with the show’s production engineers, who will build the next generation of sets.
Hartley plays Colter Shaw, a finder of lost persons, and the wilderness he often finds himself tramping through might have a different look.
Fresh opportunities abound, Reid said, but everything depends on the stories, which come from writers, who at some point started the way he did, feeling his way across a keyboard.
“Write a page a day,” he said, “and eventually, you’re going to have a book.”
Or write a page of a TV screenplay, and you’ll be done in two months. Then show the finished product to someone who can tell you where the holes are.
People like Ernest Hemingway and Elmore Leonard are also available for consultation, even if they’re dead. Reid has introduced his son to Hemingway’s work, and he’s staggered by how clean it is. Leonard’s books are a study in pace and clarity.
“If you are relentless,” Reid said, and if there’s a glimmer of talent at your core, “eventually, you will get good at it.”
Your neck might start to ache before you’re done, but unless you’ve played a lot of football, that should go away — and the satisfaction will be permanent.
Neal Rubin hasn’t been moved yet to write a book, but he’s been asked to edit a few, and it’s noble work. Reach him at NARubin@freepress.com.
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Former Michigan lineman finds TV success with CBS’ ‘Tracker’
Reporting by Neal Rubin, Detroit Free Press / Detroit Free Press
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
