While I’ve always been aware that my parents gifted me with a taste for creative adventure, I’ve never really considered our movie-making sojourn in Florida from my mom’s perspective. 

Did my father sit her down one winter morning in 1974 at their rental house in Marin County, California, and say “Patty, we’re going to live in Florida for six months so my brother and I can make a movie”? 

Knowing my parents’ relationship, I imagine that it was more of a conversation and less of a declaration since theirs was an uncommonly equitable partnership. Because I was only four at the time I didn’t have much of a say.

All I knew was that my dad flew ahead to Florida with my uncle John to “scout locations.” A few weeks later my mom packed up our red VW Beetle and settled me into the backseat (single seat belt buckled across my lap–maybe) with a stack of books and my portable cassette player. And we were off…driving across the U.S. headed to Cocoa Beach, Florida where we would live for the next six months.

In early 1975 my uncle John Holmstrom was coming off a successful career as a globetrotting Producer/Director for Ford Motor Company in Dearborn, MI. After landing back in his native Hollywood John got to work generating new projects. One of the first to come his way was the chance to film a PBS documentary about the rapid development in Florida’s Brevard County during the “space boom.”

“In the Shadow of the Moon” was funded by an educational grant from the State of Florida (I could say something snarky here about the good old days when Florida willingly invested in education) and WMFE-TV in Orlando and John was the Producer/Director. The plan was to tell the story of how the Space Coast came to be. The area had hurtled through historic growth beginning in the 1950s and at that point (1975) was dealing with the fallout in terms of unchecked urban development, mental health issues for space workers, and (interestingly), divorce rates among the highest in the U.S. at that time.

John had hired Dave (my dad) onto the project as Associate Producer/Writer. Close in age, interests, and creative temperament, the two brothers worked together on smaller creative projects in Los Angeles, but this was their first real shared professional gig.

Our time in Florida was the stuff of childhood dreams. My mom and I arrived just in time to move into our rented apartment in a high-rise positioned directly on the warm sands of Cocoa Beach. The waves crashed, the sun rose over the water and the pelicans soared. I celebrated my fourth birthday poolside, saw orcas at Seaworld, and my mama and I spent our days playing in the Atlantic Ocean with new friends. Meanwhile, my dad and John lived and breathed film shoots, interviews, script writing, and editing.

As often happens in documentary filmmaking, there were hiccups and setbacks. The budget (100K) was stretched, massaged, and ultimately, met. While I remember a few intense discussions around the dinner table on our oceanfront patio, and phone calls ending in frustrated tones, John and David were completely in their element, tracking down sources, connecting mysterious civil service dots, and wading through reams of research. They were never happier than when they were creating, together.

A TV executive interviewed about the brothers’ filmmaking prowess said “John and Dave are unbelievable. I’ve never worked with movie people like them, who neither smoked, drank, cursed or womanized. And it’s the first film like that that’s totally objective, done by someone with no axe to grind.”

What John and Dave didn’t know at the time was that this “little” Florida film would eventually lead them to the successful co-development of a feature-length film, STOCKCAR!, which in 1978 would go on to be the first documentary released nationally into U.S. theatres. I’ll share the story of STOCKCAR! soon, and hopefully some footage as well. 

Six months after our VW Beetle chugged across ten states John and Dave wrapped their film and our Florida adventure came to a close. The documentary ran widely on PBS later that year and even won awards. 

Only in retrospect has it become clear that my family’s cultivation and prioritization of creative expression was a rare and valuable gift, one that will inspire and remain with me forever.