Tim Reid and Daphne Maxwell Reid were already established television actors — Reid from WKRP in Cincinnati and Frank’s Place, Maxwell Reid as “Aunt Viv” on The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air — when they decided to build something Hollywood hadn’t: a full-service, Black-owned production studio, not in Los Angeles, but in Petersburg, Virginia. Founded in 1997, New Millennium Studios sat on a 57-to-60-acre site with a 14,850-square-foot soundstage. It was, at the time, the only Black-owned film studio in the United States since the 1930s, and one of the largest independent studios outside Hollywood.
The studio’s first production was Linc’s, a Showtime series starring Reid. Over the next fifteen years, New Millennium hosted dozens of film and television productions, including scenes from Hearts in Atlantis (2001) and The Contender (2000), and elements of Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln (2012) — alongside the Reids’ own independent films, Asunder (1999) and For Real (2003). By the couple’s own account, the studio brought roughly $15 million into the city of Petersburg in its first year alone.
What the Reids could not overcome was state policy. Virginia offered none of the tax credits that Georgia, Louisiana, and other states used to actively compete for film production business, and the studio accumulated real financial strain — including over $60,000 in delinquent property taxes dating to 2007, later paid in full. In March 2015, the Reids sold the 60-acre property for $1.475 million to a company that intended to use it for storage. “We couldn’t get the legislature to understand the incredible potential,” Tim Reid said. The Reids went on to open a smaller creative space in Richmond, adapting to an industry that had shifted toward location shooting over large studio lots — the same shift that, ironically, had made a permanent Virginia-based Black-owned soundstage a harder business case to sustain, even as the demand for Black-owned production infrastructure elsewhere in the industry was about to grow substantially.