Today we’d like to introduce you to Eric Toms.
So, before we jump into specific questions, why don’t you give us some details about you and your story.
I’m the least cool guy who grew up in the least cool place. Nearly every conversation I have with a stranger starts:
I was raised in the Bay Area.
“Oh! San Francisco?”
Nope.
“Oooo! Oakland?”
No. San Jose.
“Oh… well… that’s nice.”
Nobody knows much about San Jose other than it’s close to two really cool towns. Oakland is notorious for its political uprising and birth of many of hip hop’s biggest artists and San Francisco has been a mecca for equal rights and the crown jewel of the Silicon Valley. San Jose… used to be a farm. Growing up there was difficult at times. There was a constant clash between the burgeoning engineering start-ups and the long-time established farmers. That duality I carry with me everywhere I go. The side of me that holds the blue-collar ideals that were instilled in me by my mother, (“an honest days work for an honest day’s pay,” “you don’t know a man until you walk a mile in his shoes,” honesty is the best quality.”) And the constant search for new innovation taught to me by my father, (“fail fast, fail hard,” “good enough is never good enough,” “change is the only constant.”)
I went to school in middle to low-income neighborhoods and as a short, goofy white kid I was picked on a lot. I had never been good at fight or flight so I chose the third defense: funny. I learned that if I could make bully’s laugh I’d spare myself a beating. That, coupled with the fact I was the youngest of three, was all I needed to find a career in the entertainment business. My first stage was in my parent’s hallway. With a bedsheet pinned to the doorway my sisters and I performed songs, magic, and skits for our parents. They’re still some of the best performers I have ever worked with. My parents were divorced when I was eight years old and my sisters were old enough to get out of the house, so that left me alone with the TV. A lack of parental supervision and a cable subscription meant that I watched a wide birth of films and TV shows. I watched classics like The Maltese Falcon, Jason and The Argonauts, and The Seven Voyages of Sinbad. I watched modern blockbusters like Jaws, Goonies, and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. I watched tear-jerking dramas like Fried Green Tomatoes, Terms of Endearment, and Postcards From the Edge. But, without a doubt, my favorites were the comedies.
I found SNL, Steve Martin, The Kids in the Hall, Mr. Show, Saved By The Bell. I poured over comedians like Brian Regan, Jerry Seinfeld, Bill Hicks, Steven Wright, Robert Lewis, Elayne Boosler, Robin Williams. I studied their timing, their set-ups, their punchlines. How they held the microphone, how the paced the stage, how they ran around the stage, how they stood completely still. I learned the language of comedy. Sitting around the dinner table in 1994, I announced that I was going to be a comedian. I think it worried my parents more than anything. Worried them that I was going to spend the rest of my life borrowing money from them.
Like everyone else from my generation, I began shooting videos in my backyard with my friend’s camcorder. From there I starred in school plays and eventually moved on to a theater in San Jose named Big Lill’s Cabaret. There I joined a sketch group, started writing shows and producing videos. Our group was picked up by a local NBC affiliate. We did over 60 shows, but the show ran its course and finally closed in 2002.
Having outgrown the Bay, I moved with my then girlfriend (now wife) to Los Angeles. For everyone who moves to LA the first year is the hardest. Getting used to high prices, getting lost and rude waiters are just some of the pitfalls you find along the way. I was performing stand up and doing my best to get auditions, but the thing that helped me the most was creating my own content. In 2005, it’s always Sunny in Philadelphia premiered and I was an early fan. At the end of the first season, FX launched a contest. The Sunny people got their show on their air by shooting a 5 minute short. The cable company was looking for other filmmakers to do the same and they would chose a winner and put their show on the air. So I grabbed some friends, shot my short and… lost. I decided to share my short anyway so I put it up on Myspace Comedy.
A few years later, when I was working as a graphic designer for a breast implant advertisement company (not a joke), I was contacted by a production company that had seen my short. They brought me in for an audition as the host for a comedy clip show called Reality Binge. I auditioned and got the part! We shot the pilot and a few months later discovered that we had been picked up by Fox.
I shot the show for two seasons and had some of the best times of my professional life on that set. It was a great group of writers, directors, and people. Unfortunately this was 2008, the year that financial bottom fell out from the entire world’s economy. The show went under, the channel went under, and everything stopped. The following year I scrambled to find another job, but nothing worked.
In 2010 my first son, Nicholas was born. Although my wife had a great job and we were doing pretty well financially, I was in a horrible depression. I couldn’t find work to save my life. I’m thankful that my son can’t remember the long bouts of time I spent sulking by myself. Things turned around when a cameraman from Reality Binge contacted me to start a production company. It was a long shot, but the two of us, along with two other men, created Electric Milk Creative. We shot commercials for Netflix, Cholula Hot Sauce, and 7-11 Coffee. We shot two seasons of a TV show for Playboy called Badass, a Jackass ripoff, but staring attractive models. The show took us around the world – Miami, Hawaii, and Panama. It was a ton of work, but I really learned how to be a producer and lead a team.
In 2012 my second son, Fletcher was born and I made a decision. No more production companies, no more hosting, no more excuses. I moved to LA to make films and so help me I was gonna make them! I began putting together shoots for small short films and slowly learned everything I could. Currently, I’m shooting my first feature film that, if everything goes according to plan, will be released next year.
Overall, has it been relatively smooth? If not, what were some of the struggles along the way?
The path has been fun AND simple. Often times I don’t know where one orgasm ends and the next begins!
Yeah… no.
Everyone who enters the entertainment field has a hard road. Most people never find lasting success and more often than not have a side job that keeps the lights on. The biggest problems I’ve faced over the years has been that I’m too sensitive. Learning that I’d been passed over for a job felt like a personal loss. I’d like to say that over the decades that I’ve been working that things have gotten better and I’ve learned to deal with the rejection, but it honestly still hurts.
I also suffer from anxiety, which means I spend an incredible amount of time worrying about the future. I know that worrying about things you have no control over is ridiculous, but it doesn’t stop me from staring at the ceiling in the dark, thinking about terrible outcomes that may or may not happen. Luckily my wife and kids are a constant stream of joy in my life. I don’t know what I’d do without them.
We’d love to hear more about your work and what you are currently focused on. What else should we know?
I’m a comedian and writer, and it takes a long time to find what we call, “your voice.” That’s a fancy way of saying “what you write about.” Over the years, I’ve discovered that I am endlessly interested in the wannabe thugs that I grew up around. A large number of men and women I went to school with were raised in homes where education was not a priority and their parents were bitter because the agricultural their families had relied on were disappearing in the Bay Area and being replaced by highly educated foreigners.
That kind of household often produced men and women who weren’t well read and had a very big chip on their shoulders. More often than not they would get into fights, deal drugs on a very low level. And pick on guys like me. Sadly, these people were often targeted by the authorities and often had very difficult lives. This isn’t a phenomenon that only occurs in the Bay Area and many news stories have been published regarding people like this. They are often dismissed by the public and thrown to the wayside.
Even though these were people who used to give me a hard time, I still find them very interesting and do believe that they deserve a voice. My current feature centers around a man in a blue collar town who did not have the proper educational foundation needed for a life that has any options, and as a result he is pigeonholed into a life of crime.
If you had to go back in time and start over, would you have done anything differently?
Oh man! If I had to start all over, I would have done two things very differently. To start, I would have asked a lot more questions. I often was self-conscious about not knowing enough and wanted to appear as though I knew the answer to all situations. If you’ve ever done this before then you know that ends in mistake after mistake. In fact, you get further faster if you ask MORE questions.
The second thing I would have done differently would have been to learn more about my industry in the first place. Only now in my career (and we’re talking 20 years in) am I really learning how deals are made, what agents want, and whose opinion really matters. Anyone reading this, please take this advice from me: never stop educating yourself on your profession, craft or business!
Contact Info:
- Website: www.erictoms.com
- Instagram: @tomsfunny
- Facebook: @tomsfunny
- Twitter: @tomsfunny
Getting in touch: VoyageLA is built on recommendations from the community; it’s how we uncover hidden gems, so if you know someone who deserves recognition please let us know here.
