Myles Reid is working tirelessly to rise through the ranks in Hollywood. While the 32-year-old moved to Los Angeles in 2011 to follow his dream of becoming a showrunner, he didn’t fully realize his dream was a viable option. Reid grew up in Salisbury, Maryland, a coastal town about two hours southeast of Baltimore, where the biggest job supplier is the Perdue Farms meat processing factory.

“I always wanted to write for movies, but I grew up in a small town,” Reid says.  “I didn’t know anyone who worked in entertainment.”

So, he did what he thought could get him closer to his dream. Reid attended the University of Maryland where he first majored in journalism, then English. “I couldn’t jump straight into entertainment because it didn’t seem feasible,” Reid explains. “Bit by bit, I moved towards film and TV.”

After graduating from the University of Maryland in 2011, Reid moved to Los Angeles to complete his masters in screenwriting at Loyola Marymount University. He was there for three years.

“Immediately after graduation, I worked in video games as a day job while I wrote TV scripts on the side,” Reid says. His work at Naughty Dog, a video game developer subsidiary of Sony, allowed him to experience a new narrative art form while continuing to improve as a television writer. In 2016, Reid left to find a job in talent management.

“I’ve dipped my toes in a few spots in the entertainment industry while I was writing,” Reid says. “I wanted to see how that side of the industry worked; how management worked with actors and writers behind the scenes.”

Eventually, Reid’s writing got him noticed and his life began to change. Seven months after landing the job at the talent management company, Reid won Final Draft’s Big Break contest. Out of over 7,000 applicants, his was the winning script in the contest’s television category.

“I was fortunate,” Reid says. “With odds like that, you never think it's guaranteed or something to be taken for granted.”

Around the same time, he signed with Jewerl Ross of Silent “R” Management and was offered a job as a showrunner’s assistant on The Lost Boys, a pilot based on the popular 1987 vampire movie of the same name. While the pilot didn’t get picked up, Reid says it was a fantastic opportunity to learn even more about the industry.

“It was an incredible experience to go from script to screen and to see all the editing, changes,” Reid says.

“I was in charge of reading submission scripts to put the room together if the show did get picked up, so I got to read all of the samples submitted from writers.”

Since then, Reid has been working with his manager on his next steps while he continues to write. He’s thankful for his plethora of experiences, learning various sides of the industry and how they contribute to his own writing.

“There are a million sides of this business, and I think it helps to see more than one or two,” Reid concludes.