When Eric Haywood left Milwaukee in 1994 to pursue a career as a music video director, Atlanta made perfect sense as a destination. Several Milwaukee rappers and hip-hoppers made the trek to Atlanta in wake of Speech, who was enjoying the peak of his success with Arrested Development.
Deciding he’d rather write and direct for feature films, Haywood moved on to Los Angeles in 1999. It’s a hard town but he enjoyed some successes as part of the writing team for Showtime’s “Soul Food” and NBC’s “Hawaii.”
On Saturday, March 14, Relative Stranger, his first produced movie screenplay, airs on the Hallmark Channel.
“I started working on the rough draft of Relative Stranger back in 1996, while I was still living in Atlanta,” Haywood says. “After several years of trying to get the script produced as an independent feature, it finally landed at the Hallmark Channel. They embraced the script and were very excited about bringing it to the screen.”
Relative Stranger is the story of an African-American family divided by conflict and disappointment. The cast was well chosen. After his NFL career ended in injury, Walter Clemens (Golden Globe nominee Eriq La Salle) drifted away from his wife Charlotte (Michael Michele) and two children as he searched for work and purpose. When his long-estranged father dies, Walter returns home after many years. Charlotte and his teenage daughter are bitter, his grade school-age son is curious, his brother James (Michael Beach) is angry (and engaged to Charlotte). Only his mother (Emmy winner Cicely Tyson) has a spirit generous enough to try to understand.
As with most Hallmark movies, the moral is the meaning of the story.
