A lot has happened in the last week. 

I put my two weeks notice in at work. The beverage manager role at Delbar was consuming my life. I love the restaurant, I love the team, and I’m proud of what I built there, but the management side of things had taken over everything. My time wasn’t my own anymore. So I decided to step back down to serving or bartending somewhere else and get my life back.

I put in a few applications and by the next day I had two interviews lined up. The first was at Live! at Battery Park — a massive sports bar run by a former coworker. The second was at Koshu Club, a new Japanese concept opening next week. Ultra fine dining. Literally across the street from Delbar. Both good options. I felt good about the direction things were heading.

Then I made a phone call that changed everything.


The Call

My old boss from my oil and gas days had been wanting to make a large donation to Legacy. He asked me to call him so we could talk about it. So I did. We talked about the film for a while, and then he hit me with something I didn’t see coming. He asked me to come back and work for him.

I wasn’t expecting that. At all.


Why I Said Yes

I thought about it and the positives were hard to ignore.

I’ll be back at my old salary. That changes a lot of things. It means I can fund my own film projects out of pocket. It means I can help produce other projects I believe in without scrambling for every dollar. It means Legacy and whatever comes after it have a real financial foundation behind them.

My time off will actually be mine. The way the rotation works, I’ll have solid blocks of time off where I can shoot.

I can write and plan and prep everything while I’m at work, and then have everything ready to go when my time off comes around. I’m already in talks with a small independent production company about making my feature film, The Session. This schedule makes that possible in a way that restaurant hours never did.

And then there’s the obvious stuff. Financial stress goes down. Retirement gets back on track.


The Trade-Off

There’s really only one downside and I’m not going to pretend it doesn’t matter. Going back to a rotation schedule means my availability for acting projects drops. I’ll only be available about a third of the year. That’s a real limitation for an actor.

Once I get my schedule, I’m going to email my agent and my manager and lay it all out. If they drop me, they drop me. I understand how representation works. They need clients who can be available.

Either way, I’m not leaving the film industry. The plan was always to build a career as a filmmaker and an actor. This move lets me do the filmmaker part with real resources behind it. The acting part gets harder to schedule, but it doesn’t go away. I’m still writing. I’m still producing. I’ll be acting in my own projects.


The Bigger Picture

Now I’m going back to the career I left, but this time with a different purpose. I’m not going back because I gave up on film. I’m going back because it’s the best way to fund the films I want to make. That’s a big difference.

Sometimes the path forward doesn’t look the way you thought it would. This wasn’t my plan a week ago. But it’s the right move.