The 2006 Memorial Holiday Boat Parade organized by the Island Estates Yacht Club is scheduled to be part of a full-length feature movie targeted for released in 2008.
Fleet Captain Bill Blum was contacted a few days before the parade by a Sarasota public relations and advertising firm working for New York City film producer, Kimberly Wetherell. The request was for the best location to film the water-parade. After checking out Coachman Park the decision was made to bring the film crew to the water-front home and annual boat parade party hosted by Dianne and Chuck Stebbins on Island Estates. Filming took place right from their dock as the parade passed within 30 yards of the camera.
The movie producer, writer, and director, Kimberly Wetherell has solid roots in Clearwater. She attended Clearwater High School and Gibbs High School's Artistically Talented Program now known as the Pinellas County Center for the Arts. Ms. Wetherell graduated from DePaul University Theatre School and began an 11 year career as stage director and stage manager for over 15 international and U.S. regional opera companies. Her work took her from San Diego to New York, Sarasota to Seattle, Philadelphia to Taipei, and from Boston to Paris with countless cities in-between.
Ms. Wetherell, who is fluent in French and Italian, launched a major career change into film making during a sabbatical from opera directing. Her first production was updating and turning a one-act opera into a short-subject film "Ménage à Trois" a romantic triangle between a man, a woman, and her cellular phone that was released in 2005
Her current project is a full-length film is called "A Pretty Girl" and Wetherell plans to shoot nearly one-third of the story in Clearwater in 2007. "It's about a young woman who discovers her grandmother isn't Irish-Catholic, but a Polish Holocaust survivor who has lived her entire life in secret," Wetherell said. "At the same time, the young woman is a young, well-to-do Manhattan socialite who always ignored her blue-collar upbringing in Clearwater. The film is really all about reconciling; these women reconciling their past with the present." The boat parade will be part of the shared memories, as part of a montage that capitalizes on all that is special and unique about Christmastime in Clearwater.
Wetherell, a New York City resident, still has close ties to Clearwater. Her family still lives in Clearwater and and her grandmother, lives at Royal Palms of Largo, whose residents will be participating in the filming as extras! For more information about the project, visit www.sheshootstoconquer.com.