Free By Some Miracle I Made It Out of There: A Memoir by Tom Sizemore Page A

remarkable man.
    This is around when I signed with a manager named Suzan Bymel. She was friends with a filmmaker named Jill Goldman, who was putting together her first movie, a romantic drama titled Love Is Like That (later changed to Bad Love ). I was basically told, “Hey, Jill Goldman’s really rich, and if you go through the rehearsal process for the movie, she’ll foot the bill for you to live at the Chateau Marmont while you shoot it.” So I went through the rehearsal process, she did end up putting me up at the Chateau, and the movie became one of my favorite roles of all time. I played this passionate loser named Lenny who falls for this girl when she comes into the gas station where he’s working.They have money problems, as well as relationship problems, and they end up scheming to rob a fading movie star the woman works for. It was a small movie, but I loved playing a romantic lead—especially opposite Pamela Gidley, who was a big model at the time. While I was shooting Love Is Like That I landed a recurring role in the CBS drama China Beach— which starred Dana Delaney and was about a U.S. military hospital during the Vietnam War, and in which Dana Delaney played the head nurse—as Sergeant Vinnie Ventresca, a wounded sergeant from Brooklyn who handles the mine-sniffing dogs.
    Around then, Bryan Lourd basically said to me, “I need you to be in L.A. now for work.” And my attitude was “Great—I’ll be there next week.” The way I looked at it was this: I had worked my ass off for ten years to get opportunities, and now that I was going to be getting some, I didn’t want to miss a single one. I think Edie was miffed by how easily I made the decision to leave New York, but a real decision is when you weigh one possibility against another and this was no decision: I just said yes, knowing it was the right thing to do. Even though Edie and I had a huge fight about the whole thing, she helped me pack and even agreed to ship the stuff I couldn’t take with me. (However, I realized I’d be leaving her with literally nothing if I took the bed and the couch and all the rest of the furniture, so I ended up just taking my books.)
    First I went to Chicago to make a movie called Watch It, and then, on May 1, 1991, I moved to L.A., into an apartment on Harratt Street in West Hollywood. I really liked my driver on Watch It, a guy named Scott Silver, and he was always talking about how he wanted to be a screenwriter. So I told him that if he wanted to move out to L.A., he could live with me. On set, I also became better friends with John McGinley. The two of us would joke about how I lived in a Hollywood mansion. I think Scott really believed that that was what he wasgoing to be moving into when he decided to come out, but it was just a two-bedroom condo. Scott enrolled in the American Film Institute and lived with me the whole time. He ended up making it as a screenwriter, too; in 2011, he was nominated for an Oscar for his script for The Fighter .
    I didn’t like L.A. all that much but L.A. was liking me. I suddenly had a million dollars to burn. But I was pretty careful with it. I wanted to get a Porsche, for example, but instead I got a Mustang—though I did end up later getting a Porsche. I have never cared all that much about things—possessions—although sometimes I get a little superstitious. For instance, I had this certain pair of jeans that I was wearing when I got my first job, and so I started to believe that I had to wear them on every audition or job meeting I went to or else I wouldn’t get the part. This pair of jeans got to be disgusting—completely ripped up and tattered—and I seriously looked like some kind of a grunge kid in them. But I kept wearing them.
    It was getting to the point that before I’d even finish a job, I had another one, and in a way I never had time to really sit down and think about what was happening. I did a small comedic role in Point Break and played a bank