Bill not talking to me directly wasn't that uncommon, especially for someone with any level of actual celebrity. You have to understand how small-time we were, we literally only aired in Texas, Louisiana and Indianna and even then it was only in a few markets within each of those states. I was amazed when I heard back from his people at all, and the only reason I'm a little upset is that I felt like they jerked us around for awhile knowing all along it would never happen. I could be wrong, maybe there were other factors I just don't understand, but it really feels like that's what happened given my other experiences.

But yeah, it was a hell of a time. It was one of the craziest years of my life. I had to keep a bartending job to make ends meat and I was still finishing up some classes for school at the time. I barely slept that year, my hair started falling out, I had a few nervous breakdowns but I was lucky that I had a good support system with friends and family in place. I basically got pulled into this show as a producer with barely any experience in the TV/film industry, I had a co-producer who had worked on some very small indie film sets but not a lot, our executive producer barely talked with us or checked in cause he was trying to start his own company, and the host of our show was a musician who had some degree of success there and had toured internationally a few times and had some connections. But this also meant the show was on the bottom of his priorities list. There were many shooting days where I'd have to sleep on the floor next to his bed, so I could wake him up by 4:30 so we could be on set and ready to shoot by 6. Our production company also cared very little about us, we were extremely small potatoes even to them, a relatively small production company to begin with.

It was nice in the sense that we had almost complete creative control, we just had to make sure everything would be kosher for broadcast TV, but it also meant that we pretty much had no actual support from people that knew the business. One of the few "advisors" at the time was our editor, a really nice guy but he was pretty much bottom of the rung, most of his editing was done for local car commercials. He was nice enough to let me sit in on all the editing sessions though, and show me step by step how he did what he did, even though it meant he was working a lot of extra unpaid hours too.