CHICAGO — In “Top Gun: Maverick” starring Tom Cruise back in the cockpit as a fighter pilot, Bashir Salahuddin plays a chief warrant officer named Hondo. “In layman’s terms, he’s a super expert in multiple fields,” Salahuddin said. “And he’s kind of Mav’s right-hand man — he’s the guy who, whenever Mav looks around the room, he’s the guy who is always in his corner.”
He’s also a character who brings moments of levity. And Salahuddin has plenty of experience with that. The Chicago native is the co-creator and star of two TV comedies: The Chicago-set “South Side” on HBO Max (the third season begins filming this summer) and the “Soul Train” homage “Sherman’s Showcase” on IFC.
“One of the things that was really surprising about Tom Cruise is that he’s a big fan of Chicago,” said Salahuddin. “It’s where he shot ‘The Color of Money’ and he was telling me stories about Paul Newman and the places they would go. So we were talking on set one day and he asked about what else I do, and I told him I have a show about the South Side, and he was like, ‘Aw, you gotta send me that show.’ And I’m like, OK, whatever, this is just Hollywoodspeak — that thing where they say stuff but it doesn’t mean anything. And lo and behold, a couple weeks later he emailed me and was like, ‘Yo, what’s up with that show? I thought you were going to send it!’ So I sent him the first season and he watched it and he called me a month or so later and I happened to be in the writers room with the show’s writers and he was telling me his favorite jokes and how much he liked the writing.”
Talk about professional validation. When asked to share an experience from the opposite end of the spectrum, Salahuddin talked a crushing career disappointment that happened not once but twice.
My worst moment …
“Let me paint the picture. I had just left the Jimmy Fallon show (Salahuddin and his writing partner Diallo Riddle wrote for ‘Late Night with Jimmy Fallon’). This is after Lorne Michaels (the show’s executive producer) had chatted with Diallo and me and said, ‘I feel like you guys are ready to do your own show.’ This is around 2012.
“Things were going well and we didn’t really want to leave Fallon, but we also have our own voice and we wanted to serve that. So we left and we ended up at HBO on a four-year journey.
“I didn’t do anything else with my life for this period. I usually have a bunch of projects going, but this was the first time I was making my own TV show, so Diallo and I cut everything else out of our schedule. No acting, no nothing. And we were living off of this, which wasn’t very much.
“So we created a show called ‘The Reporters,’ and it was about these two Black reporters who hunt down conspiracy theories that Black people are obsessed with and they turn out to be true. We made a pilot, showed it to HBO — and they didn’t want to do it.
“So that was heartbreaking.
“There were new people who took over at the network and they were like, do you want to roll the dice and do it again? Let’s make another pilot. And in my heart I was like, no, I don’t — I’d rather just move on. But also I wasn’t going to shrink away from a challenge. So that was another two years of my life. Back to the drawing board. Totally different show, different idea, different concept. It was called ‘Brothers in Atlanta’ and I played a backup singer who was tired of being a backup singer, so I move to Atlanta because it was the burgeoning musical capital of America. Maya Rudolph was in it, Tim Story (whose directing credits include “Barbershop” and “Fantastic Four”) directed it. There’s a whole musical ecosystem in Atlanta that operates differently from anywhere else in the world and we want to get ahead of that, and among the difficulties we had with HBO at that time was that we had to prove to them that Atlanta was a music capital.
“So anyway, we shot the pilot. It was wonderful. And it got picked up to series. An article came out in (the industry news publication) Deadline. We called our grandmothers, our mothers — we called family members who weren’t even alive anymore. We were like: ‘That was three years of our lives, we’re not making this stuff up. We made it!’
“And then as we started writing it, slowly but surely — and I still don’t know exactly what happened — but at some point, somewhere along the way, tastes began to change and the project began to fall out of favor. Which we didn’t know about. We were in the dark. We would turn in scripts or drafts and wouldn’t hear anything for two or three weeks. And we would be like, what’s going on? We were in agony and that lasted for more than a year until finally after we did all this writing, the show went away. They just quietly got rid of it.
“That was just devastating. I mean, I just wept. I went home and my wife (Chandra Russell, who co-stars on ‘South Side’ as his police partner Officer Turner), she’s such a supporter and she knows I love Reese’s (laughs) so she had Reese’s cups all over the house. Anywhere I went, there was a Reese’s cup, no matter what room I was in. My dog was there, she licked my tears. But it was awful.”
Did these back-to-back disappointments shake Salahuddin’s confidence?
“It’s so complicated. In that moment I was more just sad, because I had never in my life worked so hard for something that I didn’t get. I mean, I went to Harvard, right? I went to Whitney Young (high school). I went to places where the high achievers are. So I don’t expect anything to be handed to me, certainly. But I am used to there being a simple equation of: If you work this number of hours, you can expect these results. It was really very straightforward. But then when you get into Hollywood, that’s over with — it doesn’t matter how hard you work or even how good the stuff is. It’s really a much more complicated confluence of who’s involved with the project, who’s protecting the project, who likes the project, who’s the talent attached. All these different things come into play.
“So it’s not just about the fact that I’m putting in 12 hours a day every day for four years. That is one component of it. I put in all this time, all this energy, all this effort — and the money wasn’t good, we were living in this small apartment — and then they said no after they had already said yes! So I was devastated. I had never worked so hard for something that I got — and then had taken away from me.
“I describe it to people as if you had worked your (butt) off in college for four years, and then at the end of four years you’re like, hey, I’ll take my diploma now, and they’re like, no, there’s no diploma for you, you can just leave. I was demoralized. I was angry.
“I’m going to give my agent Nancy Jones some credit: When this kind of thing happens, somebody from the network will call you and say, ‘I know this didn’t work out and you gave a lot, we’re going to cut you a check for X amount of dollars.’ It’s not a severance but an acknowledgment that you were living on very little during this period of time and it didn’t work out and that’s not good. And I told my agent that they could take that check and burn it, I didn’t want (crap) from these people. I was furious. I was heartbroken. I had my integrity. I’m from the South Side of Chicago, everything has been a challenge and I’m not somebody who’s placated with a check. I’m not amused by the bread and circuses. I believe in actual, tangible, specific things.
“And she did not do that (laughs). She kept it and about eight months later she was like, ‘Hey, do you want that check?’ And I was like, ‘Actually, yes! I need it.’ (Laughs) She’d seen this before, she knows how the emotions work. It wasn’t very much money, but by that point I was like, take that money and use it to go forward to your next venture.
“I knew what our next idea for a TV show was going to be, and by this point I was not going to let any entity alter the DNA of it. And the next show that we got picked up was ‘South Side.’
“I try not to get bitter. Another writer told me, ‘Whatever you do, I know it’s going to be hard, but try not to get bitter. It’s not going to help you in the long run. And it’s going to be hard not to get bitter, because they’re going to (mess) with you. But you don’t need that baggage.’ So I’ve really tried to remember that. It’s OK to be bitter right in the second, but ultimately you have to let it go because it’s not going to help you get what you want. It’s hard!”
The takeaway …
“What really came out of that is now, more than ever, I have to honor and respect my art.
“The reason it’s complicated to have my job is because you always have people around you who are giving you advice and notes and opinions on your work. But what I learned from the HBO experience is that you have to be the person who knows what your work is better than anybody else. If you compromise and compromise and compromise — which I had done — you still might not get what you want. You have to be the one to fight for your work, but also sift through all the advice and take the stuff that’s helpful, discard what’s not, and go forward.
“Also: This world is tough as hell. And in order to thrive, I think you have to be tough as hell too. You have to be tougher than you think you need to be.”
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