Behind the Men Who Make the Champions: Super Bowl XLVII by Brian S. Ellis
The lights are out for an impossible thirty-four minutes. For Reed-Strauss it’s a creative risk
Nicholas D.J. Strauss can breathe easy again.
It’s February 4th and he’s survived another Super Bowl.
“I go into total black-out mode the day of,” he tells me, over the phone from his home in Orlando. “I can’t watch it. I turn off the computer, unplug the phone. I have a nice dinner and go to bed early. Then, in the morning, I deal with the deluge.”
His partner Tristifer Reed, is just the opposite. I ask Mr. Reed if he gets jealous that Strauss is hidden in his bunker when the big game goes down. Reed just chuckles, “Well Nick is in the office the previous three hundred and sixty four days before that.”
Reed lives just a handful of blocks from NFL headquarters off of E 52nd Ave. and spends game day glued to his array of monitors. Reed takes meticulous notes, a habit he says he started as an undergrad at Emerson College in Boston. Reed copies his notes and organizes them into huge three ring binders for the entire staff. “The Prophecy According to Reed,” Strauss calls them.
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Mr. Strauss and Mr. Reed have been partners for almost twenty years. They both grew up on the east coast but didn’t meet until they were living in California. Mr. Strauss is from Baltimore and Mr. Reed is from just outside of Philadelphia. They went to school a scant forty-five minutes apart (Strauss went to Brown). But they were living in Long Beach when they finally met, writing treatments for cable.
“I sent in dozens. Hundreds. Hundreds of hundreds. They were all crap.” Reed tells me, bluntly.
When I ask Strauss about the same period he gets wistful.
“I was working as a fishmonger part-time. I didn’t know what I was doing with my life. I was thinking about going back to school…I hadn’t found my voice yet. But the night I met Tris, well, the lightning struck.”
“It was my ex’s birthday party. I didn’t want to talk to anyone I knew. There’s this dreamy-looking kid in the corner.” Reed explains, “We ended up talking all night. We talked about everything: storytelling, television, the human spirit.”
Strauss agrees, “We started writing that first night. Together, we had found our voice.”
“When you break it down, when you get down to it, Nick is a poet.” Reed tells me.
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The duo’s very first project gets picked up by HBO. The show is a lofty concept with an unlikely premise: a modernization of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, simply called, Karamazov. Seven seasons and a shelf full of Emmy awards later, no one doubts the Reed/Strauss ability to bring cerebral material to the masses.
“All that sex and tension is in the book,” says Reed.
“HBO gave us a great gift,” says Strauss. “Given the format of television, we could really dig in there and tell the whole story.”
The last episode of Karamazov, with its now infamous escape scene, was the most watched series finale of all time; edging out the “Goodbye, Farewell, and Amen” episode of M.A.S.H. which reached 51.21 million households.
After that Reed/Strauss were the hottest show runners on television.
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What happened to them next is not as well known as their hit run with Karamazov.
Both Mr. Strauss and Mr. Reed have been notoriously tight-lipped about their post-K years. In initial e-mails with both Mr. Strauss and Mr. Reed it was requested that I not ask any questions about this period. What is known is this: their next project, an adaptation of Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past was written but never picked up. Their follow up was the team’s first purely original series. Again with HBO, it was a drama about a 1960’s live sketch comedy show called Gag-In. Six episodes aired but the audience found the drama show about a comedy show format too confusing.
Friends close to Strauss have said in interviews that Gag-In’s true intent was to slowly drive towards Strauss’ feelings about the Kennedy assassinations. To add insult to injury, a May 2002 Saturday Night Live sketch gained brief popularity poking fun at Gag-In’s nonsensical tagline: “That’s an expensive buffet!”
After the second failed show, Reed and Strauss’, for the first time, personal as well as professional relationship was strained. Rumors of Mr. Reed’s heavy pill use persist to this day. It was also during this time that Mr. Strauss re-located to Orlando. I ventured to ask Strauss what attracted him to Florida.
“This might sound strange, but I go to Disney World fairly often. You’ve heard me talk about what a hero Walt is to me.”
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Strauss had never heard the name Paul Tagliabue.
“Kathleen kept repeating his name. I was on the other side of the house,” Strauss recalls, “I kept saying who? And then she’d yell his name again. It was a very Lynch-ian moment. But finally Kathleen yelled, He’s the Commissioner of the NFL and I was like, Oh.”
“I didn’t understand why he was calling,” Reed admits. “I mean, I knew the genre. And I think, even before I got involved, I had more of an appreciation of sports entertainment than most of my writer friends. I think it’s because of its similarities to noir. With the over-the-top masculinity of it. But even so, I says to Paul, I’m the last guy who should be scriptwriting for the NFL, and he says to me, That’s exactly why I want you.”
“For me its all just narrative and archetype,” Strauss explains. “In the writers’ room, I have up on the whiteboard ‘What would Joseph Campbell do?’”
“A lot of the commentators were pissed,” Reed says. “What are these egg-head drama guys doing scripting sports? What is Tagliabue thinking? That’s what they were all saying. But Paul had his own ideas about things. When he took a stand, he stuck to it. He did a lot of stuff that improved the name of Football.”
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The lights went out in the Superdome.
It happened just as things went from bad to worse for the 49ers. After a severe trouncing in the first half, we return from halftime with a stunning 109-yard touchdown return from first-year Raven, Jacoby Jones, crossing the field in 11 seconds. It was a demoralizing blow for San Francisco.
“His name is supposed to be like a comic book character,” says Strauss. “You know, Peter Parker, Clark Kent.”
“I wanted the audience to think that the 49ers were going to come out swinging after halftime. Halftime is the natural spot for the momentum to change. It was a Colts-Patriots reference,” explains Reed.
“Tris gets in trouble for his Colts-Patriots obsession. Roger [Goodell] actually asked him to stop.
“Yeah, Roger said something to me. But I was like, I’ve been here longer, dude!”
The Ravens up 28-6, all hope of a 49ers rally seems lost. But one hundred and twenty five minutes into the game, the stadium loses power.
“We had to give the 49ers a moment. They needed to have a break to stop the Ravens from steamrolling them. Otherwise it wouldn’t be an exciting game,” Reed tells me.
I ask both Mr. Strauss and Mr. Reed about believability.
“If the adage ‘Truth is stranger than fiction’ is true, then, that gives you full creative license, doesn’t it?” Strauss says.
Reed is a little more hawkish in his answer, “We lead people were they want to go. We walk them out on to thin air, but we do it a step at a time. If you’ll believe this, then what about this? And so on.”
The lights are out for an impossible thirty-four minutes. For Reed-Strauss it’s a creative risk: would the attention of the audience hold? But after such stunning plays by the Ravens, and with such a perilous position for the 49ers, America holds its breath.
When the third quarter resumes, San Francisco finds its rally. The game ends with Baltimore on top, but with the 49ers recovering a hard earned seventeen points. In classic Reed-Strauss style, they keep us guessing until the end.
I ask the television gurus if the Brother vs. Brother theme of the game is an echo of their days working on Karamazov.
“There’s a lot of Alyosha in the character John Harbaugh,” Strauss admits.
“If you’re asking me if this game is a metaphor for ‘The Grand Inquisitor’ well, I’d be lying if I said that it wasn’t,” Reed says.
I also ask Mr. Strauss if putting a black-out in the middle of the Super Bowl is commentary on our society hurdling towards environmental disaster.
“Someone else put that to me recently. But listen, I want to make this clear; it is forever my goal to write stories that could exist in any time and any place. Timeless stories, human stories. Contemporary or political themes just don’t come into it.”
I ask Mr. Reed if he had any say in tapping Beyonce for the halftime show.
“No…we’re not part of that…but I couldn’t have picked any better! Am I right?”
Now that the big game is over, I ask Mr. Strauss when he goes back to work.
“I only take a few days off…we’ve got another seventeen weeks to imagine.”
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* This is (mostly) a work of fiction.
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Brian Stephen Ellis was born in Manchester, NH and currently lives in Portland, OR. He is the author of three collections of poetry; Uncontrolled Experiments In Freedom, Yesterday Won't Goodbye, and American Dust Revisited.