The Last Summer

On August 23, 1981, my friend Mark McAllister died in my arms on a small island in Stamford Harbor. He was twenty years old. A ricochet bullet from one of our rifles—we were drunk, shooting at seagulls from boats—struck him in the chest. I held him while we waited for help that arrived too late. That night changed everything.

For forty-three years, I've carried that memory. The weight of it. The randomness of it. The guilt that comes from surviving something that could have just as easily taken me instead. I've told the story countless times—at bars, at reunions, in therapy—always trying to make sense of senselessness, always searching for meaning in tragedy that has no meaning.

THE LAST SUMMER is my attempt to finally tell that story properly, not as a cautionary tale or a tragedy, but as what it really was: the summer when childhood ended and adulthood began, when invincibility died and responsibility was born, when I had to choose between running from Mark's death or learning to live with it.

This isn't a story about Mark's death. It's a story about what happened the summer after—the summer of 1982, when I was eighteen years old and caught between two futures. One future was the endless adolescence of Shippan Point: parties at the Rock Fort, window-washing jobs blown off for perfect beach days, boats "borrowed" without permission, and the constant, nagging feeling that I owed Mark something. The other future was the one I glimpsed with a girl who refused to let me hide in guilt and nostalgia, who challenged me to grow up without forgetting, to honor Mark's memory by living fully rather than recklessly.

I chose growing up. Eventually. Imperfectly. With plenty of mistakes along the way.

But that choice—the moment when I finally understood that the best way to honor someone who died young is not to tempt the same fate but to embrace the gift of continued life—became the defining moment of my young adulthood. It's the moment I want to share with audiences, because I believe everyone experiences some version of it. Maybe not with death, but with loss. With the end of something that felt eternal. With the realization that time moves forward whether we're ready or not.

I wrote this screenplay because the stories we tell about grief are often so heavy, so focused on the weight of loss, that we forget something important: life continues. The sun still rises. Friends still gather. Love still happens. And there's grace in that continuation, not betrayal.

I wrote it because I wanted to capture what it felt like to be eighteen in 1982, before cell phones and social media, when your mistakes stayed local and growing up meant consciously choosing to change, not having change forced upon you by permanent digital footprints. There was a particular freedom in that era—dangerous, yes, but also precious. We had room to fail, to be stupid, to learn without the whole world watching.

I wrote it because Shippan Point was real, and the people I grew up with were real, and the way we lived—with all its privilege and recklessness and beauty and waste—deserves to be documented honestly, without nostalgia-washing but also without judgment. These were good kids making terrible decisions, loving each other fiercely, and trying to figure out how to be adults when no one had prepared them for mortality.

Most importantly, I wrote it because Mark, Jimmy, and Rusty—three friends I lost too young—deserved to be remembered not just as cautionary tales but as people who lived fully in the time they had. Their deaths shaped us, yes, but their lives shaped us more. The way Mark could make everyone laugh. The way he dove headfirst into every experience. The way he trusted that tomorrow would come.

When tomorrow didn't come for Mark, I had a choice: I could spend the rest of my life asking "why him and not me?" or I could spend it asking "what am I going to do with this extra time I've been given?" THE LAST SUMMER is about learning to ask the second question.

This story is also a love letter to a specific place and time—to Shippan Point in the early 1980s, to Long Island Sound stretching toward Manhattan's skyline, to the Rock Fort parties lit by bonfire and moonlight, to the VANDU (our converted mail truck), to the Grateful Dead playing from tinny speakers, to the phone chains that coordinated our nights, to the Getty gas station where Foot would cash our checks and dispense wisdom, to the officer who knew all our names and gave us more chances than we deserved.

That world is gone now. The houses are bigger, the parties more supervised, the stakes somehow both higher and lower. But the emotions are eternal: the first real love, the loss of a friend, the terror and excitement of becoming whoever you're going to be, the moment when you realize your parents won't always be there to catch you, the choice between who you've been and who you could become.

I hope audiences see themselves in Connor's journey, regardless of when or where they grew up. I hope they remember their own last summers—the season when everything changed, when childhood finally ended, when they made the choice to step into the future despite not knowing what it held.

And I hope they understand what it took me decades to learn: that guilt is not the same as grief, that survival is not betrayal, that moving forward doesn't mean forgetting, and that the best way to honor those who died young is to live purposefully, joyfully, and without wasting the time we've been given.

This is Mark's story as much as it's mine. He lived twenty years. I've lived sixty-one. The gift of those extra forty-one years—to sail around the world with my family, to write stories, to build businesses, to love and lose and love again—is something I don't take for granted. Not anymore.

THE LAST SUMMER is me finally saying thank you for that gift, and paying it forward to anyone who needs to hear that it's okay to let go of guilt, to choose life over endless mourning, to grow up without forgetting who you were.

In memory of Mark McAllister, James "Jimmy" Kennedy, and Russell "Rusty" Collins. You're still with us every time we gather, every time we remember, every time we choose to live fully.

— Colin Rath