Today we’d like to introduce you to Michael Pantozzi.
Hi Michael, it’s an honor to have you on the platform. Thanks for taking the time to share your story with us – to start maybe you can share some of your backstory with our readers?
There’s a book by the mathematician Leonard Mlodinow called “The Drunkard’s Walk,” and that about sums it up. It’s been a bit of a rambling, peripatetic go of it. Or at least it’s felt that way.
I attended Binghamton University thinking I was going to be a novelist, as I had for most of my childhood and adolescence, but by the time I graduated, I found I was obsessed with movies and acting in a way I had never been with literature. So I stopped writing as much fiction, started writing more screenplays and plays, and enrolled in Atlantic Theater Company’s acting school in Manhattan.
This brought me back closer to home, just over the Queens border in Long Island where I grew up. I studied at Atlantic for two years and then got a scholarship to do their LA program. I had also gotten a scholarship to do their Vermont program the previous summer for the same reason, which was that my background qualified me for its need-based eligibility requirements.
My initial impression of LA was that I hated it for all the typical reasons New Yorkers tend to hate it at first blush. I hated all the driving. I hated what felt like the uniformity of the seasons. I hated the way everyone seemed to be moving in slow motion.
I got an agent out of school and started working mostly in commercials (back when commercials were still a reasonable way to expect to make a living), but then I went home for the holidays, went on a date with someone who still lived in New York, and didn’t leave her side for 15 years. I still haven’t, though I’m glad that as I’ve gotten older and wearier she’s joined me in warming up to LA as a less punishing, less intense place to live.
I moved back here with her about six years ago now, where after many years of cushioning my intermittent work as an actor for hire in indie films, regional theater, and a little TV with editing assignments for (mostly) digital publications, I started to get a little bit of my own work off the ground as a writer and director.
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
I wouldn’t say it’s been a smooth road at all, relatively speaking. I mean, I managed to never be homeless or sleep in my car, but that’s certainly where the bar was in earlier days.
More difficult: As soon as I was out in the world trying to do this, it was like I jumped right onto a breakneck nonstop hamster wheel of having to spend nearly all my time and energy doing whatever would most immediately allow me to satisfy my obligations to the creditors who had financed everything partial scholarships hadn’t covered. I didn’t understand how anybody managed to both cultivate their talent and “be in the right place at the right time” in terms of seizing opportunities to demonstrate said talent. How could you be in the right place at the right time if you were almost always at your day job? How could you compete with those who didn’t have this problem?
I can only speak for myself in saying: I didn’t, really. I couldn’t. I am still very much in the hamster wheel. Though I’ll also say I’m more hopeful than ever these days that I might still yet escape it. Meanwhile, everything I’ve managed to accomplish from within it has been purely a matter of endurance and persistence and saving enough money over an enormous amount of time to be making my own work in a meaningful capacity. I haven’t managed to carve out the time one needs in order to do this as much as I slowly chiseled it out. Arriving at a place in my life where I finally have a somewhat expansive amount of time every day to work on writing, producing, etc. has felt like tunneling my way out of prison with a toothbrush at times, but I’m here. I did it.
The other big challenge was the journey of completely extricating my fundamental sense of self-worth from any of this. For years I lived in a state of constant anxiety about where the next acting job was coming from or if instead I was going to have to just submit to a life that revolved purely around making money. Failure jail, forever. But once I managed to fully dispense with that binary way of thinking about it, everything got much easier. It’s unfortunately just one of those annoying things about life that the faster you’re able to truly let go of something, the faster it starts to come to you, though never in exactly the way you expected.
Thanks – so what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
This year has been something of a turning point for my work.
I just released a short film I wrote called “Off the Face of the Earth.” It’s my first film as a director, and I also appear in it. It stars Kimmy Robertson, who played Lucy on “Twin Peaks.” It took me a very long time to make it happen, and now it’s up on Omeleto — one of the largest online platforms for short films in the world, with about 4 million subscribers. I have been very pleased with the volume of thoughtful response.
I’m also proud of having appeared in (“The Nanny” star) Renée Taylor’s new play “Dying Is No Excuse” at Berkshire Theatre Group this past summer. Its earlier development had been guided directly by Elaine May, so to get the chance to also work with her on this was rather terrific to say the least.
As for what sets me apart from others, one thing I think I’m really known for is how reliably I show up for people. I will say that if nothing else, I’m dependable. If I’ve decided I want you to be able to count on me, then letting you down is going to take an act of God. I am also pretty consistent about showing up for myself in this way. I sit down every day and try as best I can with the time that I have to keep everything moving along.
Is there anyone you’d like to thank or give credit to?
My wife, my wife, and my wife. (That’s the same wife three times for emphasis. I do not have three wives.)
Her name is Kathleen Littlefield, and though I can’t say I’ve ever really had a mentor, she’s probably also the closest thing I’ve ever had to one by virtue of how deeply I trust her judgment about so many things. I learned how to always keep trying to be the best human being I can be from her, and every micro-step I manage toward anything resembling success ultimately comes from that. I’m also very fortunate to have had the unwavering encouragement of family, both mine and my in-laws, as well as various concentric circles of extremely supportive friends and colleagues in arms, though I won’t start naming them because of my abject terror that I will somehow forget someone.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://michaelpantozzi.net
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXebEoSc6ag
Image Credits
J.J. Geiger
Caelan Carlough
Elizabeth Littlefield
