Sam and I made plans to meet up two days after the New Year’s Eve party.
The guy I met on vacation at Two Bunch Palms who wanted to know more about my pilot was true to his word. He hunted me down just before Lou and I left on Christmas day, and he gave me his card. He requested an opportunity to read my pilot, and when I told Sam about the whole thing, Sam felt like I should go for it.
That’s how things get done in Hollywood — you create a feeding frenzy, and that was a “good thing,” Sam told me. So I checked up on the guy and found out that he was actually who he said he was, and after I gave Sam the run-down of this guy’s credentials, Sam told me I should take this guy’s interest very seriously.
I wasn’t so sure.
I felt loyalty to Roy, and for me, relationships seemed like the most valuable currency I had in my pocket. I didn’t want to burn any bridges — especially since Roy was the one who got things rolling for me in the first place — and, I knew that Roy’s group had connections to HBO, too. Plus, the other guy didn’t take brush-offs badly at all — in fact, it seemed to work in my favor to withhold my pilot from him.
But Sam said you have to be smarter about how you play the game in Hollywood. A guy like this agent would only pursue me for so long before he’d forget I ever existed. (Ouch.)
I remember feeling really funny about how flippant Sam was being about everything. However, I also believed that Sam knew a lot more than me about the way things work in the entertainment industry, and, I knew I needed to try to grow up and look at things like a business person — not like a naive little storyteller. So made up a way to compromise:
I’d set up a series summary document, and I’d just send that document to the new guy instead of the completed pilot.
Sam didn’t agree with my plan, but he said it was my pilot, so I should do whatever I wanted to do. Of course, that left me feeling really insecure inside. But I really did trust Sam’s perspective, so I reasoned with him that sending this guy the summary could build up some potential interest in the series without giving away the pilot so Roy could pitch it to his people first. Ultimately, I’d need a summary for Roy anyway, so the plan was for Sam and me to meet up so he could show me how to write a professional series summary.
As was often the case with Sam, he was almost an hour late to our meeting to discuss the summary. I was frustrated by how he always kept me waiting like this pathetic and needy version of myself. It confused me to feel so attached to Sam because my whole world was upside-down, and I didn’t know who I was most of the time.
But for this particular meeting, I purposely picked the clean coffee shop as our meeting place because I felt like the closest version of the “real me” when I was in a clean environment, and, I felt like I needed to find any way to keep myself grounded to reality.
When Sam finally showed up, he seemed distant and like he didn’t want to be there. I always worried that I was taking advantage of Sam, which further complicated how I felt about who I was becoming in my life. But once I could draw Sam back into the world of Eloise, he usually followed me into a place where it felt like we could both be present.
That day was no exception. Once we moved past our awkward re-entry process, we started by reviewing the pilot — which we hadn’t done since I finished it. I read the whole script out loud to Sam while he quietly sipped on his dirty chai latte.
When I finished, he looked at me and said, “It’s really good. I forgot how good it is.”
I remember feeling incredibly humbled, but also hopeful — which wasn’t a feeling I had all that often in those days. Sam said he felt like we needed to do a review of the remaining scripts one more time before I sent the package off to Roy. It was important for us to consider them all in one cohesive read like Roy and his team would — and, there was the added benefit that a complete review would make it easier for Sam to teach me how to write the summary.
So we decided to meet up a couple of times the following week to quickly knock out the review of all of the other episodes. In the meantime, we decided that I should look up formatting information on how to write a series summary. Sam said he’d also try to find some samples of a summary from the series he worked on, and between those two efforts, my summary should be “simple” to write.
It seemed like a good plan, and by the time Sam and I were parting ways, we had found somewhat of a connection that felt safe and appropriate to me. But I remember Sam was parked right next to me in the parking lot, and as he was getting into his car, he hesitated.
Then he said, “A bunch of us are going to check out a band tonight — you wanna come?”
I did want to… I think.
But it seemed wrong to want to spend time with Sam outside of working together. Lou was still out of town, so I could go… But I remember feeling like I was taking too long to answer. So I asked Sam a few qualifying questions — like where and what time… Just the basics.
I remember how Sam leaned on his car door while I stammered around. He just looked at me with an awkward expression on his face; then he gave me one of his classic lines:
“I’m not sure — why don’t I just text you in a bit?”
I already knew that was code for: Sorry I asked.
As I drove away from the clean coffee shop and headed back to our bitterly depressing apartment, I remember that I felt sad and confused. But I also felt relieved that Sam had smothered my emotions. I’m sure I’ll never know what was going on in Sam’s mind at any given time during our friendship, but I was profoundly thankful that he usually found a way to save me from ever finding out what would happen if my fiction shifted into something real.
Looking back, Sam always seemed to do something thoughtless or shifty at the perfect time to remind me it wasn’t worth the risk to chase my tricky feelings into a place that would finally lift the veil of my imaginations. When Sam would do something dismissive or evasive, I would suddenly have a startling moment of clarity where I could appreciate Sam for all of his true colors, but also see him as a person who would never be able to shoulder the unrealistic beliefs, expectations, and character traits that I had infused into him in my mind.
Sometimes I feel like I was awful to Sam.
I worry that my words and my actions were just as flakey and confusing as his words and actions were for me. I never wanted to use Sam in any way, yet whether or not I intended for that to be the case, I see now how one-sided my relationship was with him… I believed that Sam was so important to my process, but I clearly understood that we weren’t meant to share any real life experiences.
