“Where in LA do you live? You have a 310 area code,” Martin Landau says.
“I moved — to Orlando,” I say. “Strange, but I’m flying to LA tomorrow. A producer friend is helping me fund scholarships for film students.”
I explain that a lot of my students are not wealthy, but they’re amazing. I tell him about one student who pitched a short film about her mother in Ghana, who suffers from schizophrenia. The only time the voices are quiet is when she sings. We raised money for her to film in Ghana. A Venezuelan student pitched a story about posting pictures of her cousin, who was lost to trafficking.
This all resonates with Landau. Despite a storied career in stage and cinema, he is most excited about his current students. He teaches at the Actor’s Studio West in Los Angeles.
“You should see these kids act,” he says with immense pride. “They are wonderful.”
His students have made him feel hopeful for the future of arts — storytelling. The importance of narrative.
“I would love for you to see them perform. They’re doing a reading in September,” he says.
I ask if I can take him to dinner when I arrive in LA the next day.
“I would really enjoy that. You know, Eric Fleming, I don’t know how this happened… But I think it was meant to be. For some reason, we were supposed to talk to each other, today.”
“I think so, too. I’ll call you.”
“You have my number,” he jokes.
Martin Landau passed away that night.
My phone rang one more time from his number a few weeks later. I grabbed it quickly, hoping it might have been a family member. I could tell them about our conversation. Our unusual connection.
“Hello?”
No one responded.
A few years have passed. I traveled to LA — to 310 — several more times. I worked on the script for Piragua and cast the film with Michael Keaton. We were scheduled to go into production in June 2020. A global pandemic shut the production down.
I still don’t understand how Martin Landau and I ended up talking to each other. A quiet call without applause and golden confetti. Synchronicity.
Perhaps he needed to talk with someone with the same name as an old friend before he passed. And maybe I needed to realize that regardless of the area code I was in, I was finally where I belonged.
Eric Fleming has spent nearly 30 years writing, directing and developing film and television projects, collaborating with major studios including Paramount, United Artists, Warner Bros., NBC, MTV and Fox. As an educator, he redesigned Valencia College’s film production curriculum and Florida’s statewide framework to center narrative as the foundation of technical craft. He has secured over $2 million in grant-funded film equipment, established endowed scholarships, championed diverse voices, and helped lead the design of a $15M production facility. Fleming is currently in post-production on a TV pilot, “American Kindness.”
This article originally appeared on HuffPost in May 2026.