Does A House Make A Family Or A Family Make A House? Loss Of Chatham Home Focus Of Documentary Film

by Tim Wood, CAPE COD CHRONICLE

CHATHAM — Two years ago, the Fitzhugh family was faced with a decision not unfamiliar to many long-time Cape Cod families: How to save a multi-generational home whose monetary value has outstripped the family’s means.

Ultimately, the four siblings who inherited the antique home on the shores of Stage Harbor could not find a way to keep the property in the family. After 85 years as the central gathering location for the Fitzhugh clan, Starboard Light, as the home was known, was sold.

For 33-year-old Nick Fitzhugh, the fourth generation of his family to enjoy the summer home, the dilemma and subsequent resolution brought up questions that he felt compelled to explore and which have become the central theme in “Starboard Light,” a documentary film that asked the central question: Does a house make a family, or does a family make a house?

The theme coalesced about six months before Fitzhugh started working on the film, after he read George Colt’s “The Big House.” While the circumstances detailed in the book were different, “there was a surprising number of parallels,” Fitzhugh said.

“It made me think even more that this is not just a singular experience. It’s not just our family, not just our house, but to some extent all of Cape Cod,” he said.

Fitzhugh has started a Kickstarter campaign to raise the money he needs to complete post-production on the film. He has until May 4 to raise $50,000 through the philanthropic website.

Starboard Light, overlooking one of the town’s most scenic vistas where Champlain Road bends away from Stage Harbor, was never a showcase summer home. Fit- zhugh describes it as having warped floors, “impractically small beds full of bumpy springs,” a permanent smell of moth balls, yellowed, peeling wallpaper and a workshop “crammed with tools for a hundred years of projects.” But it was a constant in his life and the lives of everyone else in his family, the place where they learned to swim and sail. Old home movies from the 1930s through the 1950s that he discovered show generations of his family frolicking on the beach, digging in the sand, at family cookouts or just walking along the Stage Harbor shore. Those images helped bring alive past generations – Fit- zhugh’s grandparents and great-grandparents – and expose the family’s deep roots in the Stage Harbor sand.

“It really was more than anything my grandparents and great-grandparents’ house,” Fitzhugh said. “Its identity, what it looked like, was largely because of them and wasn’t changed by following generations.” While his grandparents, like the rest of his family, lived elsewhere most of the year – Norwich, Vt., in their case – “Chatham was the constant.” He said. “That was their place.”

Fitzhugh’s great-grandfather, William Fitzhugh, bought the property in 1925. The home was one of three built in the area by a Chatham sea captain for his sons in about 1860. In 1925, Chatham was just being discovered as a vacation destination, and there were only a handful of houses within sight of Starboard Light.

Fitzhugh said his great-grandfather paid about $2,000 for the property, which is bisected by Champlain Road and includes frontage on the harbor. By the new century, however, both its value and the surrounding neighborhood had grown. The low, rambling home was overshadowed by McMansions and the waterfront property was worth millions. Fitzhugh’s father and his three siblings had discussed the future of the Starboard Light but decided to do nothing as long as their parents were alive. “Nobody wanted to deal with it,” Fitzhugh said. “No- body wanted to basically be the one to say we have to sell it.”

His grandfather died in 2005 and his grandmother in 2009, just shy of her 93rd birthday. The siblings tried to work out a way for the house to stay in the family by selling a scenic easement, establishing a trust, or renting it out. Fitzhugh’s father and uncle thought about buying out their siblings. “None of that was possible. It was just too much money,” he said. They were also concerned that if one family member ended up owning the house, it could create division.

“It’s primary value was creating unity in the family,” Fitzhugh said, “creating strong bonds and bringing fam- ily closer. But they felt, rightly or wrongly, that holding on to it would cause strife, or arguments, or other bad things.”

He’s since talked to others in similar situations and found the dilemma his family faced is not uncommon.

“Many families that have been in a place like Cape Cod for so long, had property for so long, for the most part aren’t rich families. We certainly aren’t. But suddenly you have this home that because of its value, only rich people would own.”

The home ended up being sold to a neighboring property owner for $3.4 million in October 2010.

Before the sale was executed, the family had one last summer in the house.

“I tried to spend as much time here as I could, with as much family as I could,” Fitzhugh said. The sale came quicker than many in the family anticipated, and Fitzhugh had to rely on his instincts as a budding filmmaker and storyteller to capture the essence of the situation in a short time. The circumstances, however, helped focus the story and its emotional impact.

“It’s even more true to form in the sense of being a documentary which is about the last summer, as opposed to something that’s intellectualized,” he said. “You’re just kind of experiencing it. Everybody is.”

Family members who stayed at Starboard Light that summer “literally said goodbye to the house on camera, and it was evident from what they said and did around the house, knowing it would be the last time there.” While it was painful for some – there were a lot of tears, Fitzhugh noted – it allowed him to capture the emotion, rather than the memory of the house.

Fitzhugh, who lives in Washington, D.C., returned to town last summer and stayed at a guest cottage next door to Starboard Light, which has remained vacant since the sale, and shot additional film and interviews.

For Fitzhugh, “Starboard Light” is a very personal story and approaching it as a filmmaker definitely gave the experience a sense of catharsis. “There was a kind of overlap between the struggle of how to deal with [the house] and the convergence between that and my moving into filmmaking,” he said. The process of participating in the film also became a way for members of his family to deal with and make sense of the situation.

“Illustrating and contextualizing [the situation] within the film increasingly seemed like the best thing to do, and a great thing to do,” he said.

When he began filming “Starboard Light,” Fitzhugh had just completed his first film, “Soccer City,” a documentary about soccer in the townships of South Africa, which he shot at the same time the World Cup was being held in

Johannesburg. Although he originally planned to make the film for National Geographic, he ended up financing it himself, and later licensed it to the National Geographic Channel and ESPN Classics; it’s also available for view- ing on iTunes and Amazon.com.

“It was a great project, fulfilling and interesting, and I learned a huge amount from doing it, which of course I have applied to ‘Starboard Light,’” Fitzhugh said. He’s also been able to call on a number of professional film- makers who have served as advisers, including Chatham homeowner and movie producer Sam Weisman and award-winning Orleans documentary filmmaker Allison Argo.

Although he spent all of his summers growing up in Chatham, Fitzhugh lived year-round in Montpelier, Vt. After high school, he traveled in Europe before attending Brown University, where he started Glimpse, a non-profit magazine and website for young people traveling and studying abroad. He also spent a summer as an intern at The Chronicle.

He continued to run Glimpse for three years after it was acquired by National Geographic, leaving after the company was spun off to a California travel company. National Geographic continues to be an important con- tact for him, sponsoring a small fundraiser to help get “Starboard Light” off the ground in 2010.

Fitzhugh also did a smaller fundraising campaign on Kickstarter to help with initial financing of the film. He chose the platform for completion funds because it’s simpler than trying to find investors and provides a single venue to give people a sense of what the project is all about. Kickstarter allows individuals to contribute to a project and qualify for rewards – Fitzhugh is offering different reward levels, from a download of the completed film for a $15 donation to producer credit for big donors – and the money is only collected if the goal is reached. As of Tuesday, Fitzhugh had raised $12,846 toward his $50,000 goal.

With all the footage shot, the funds will pay for editing and other post-production work. He expects much of the emotional quotient of the film to come out of that process. “Hopefully I can crack open that compartment during editing so it can be infused with the right emotions,” he said. He hopes to have the film completed by the end of the summer and plans to enter the Sundance Film Festival in September.

It will also represent a final closure for him, although his connection to Chatham will probably never been completely severed. With the proceeds from the sale of Starboard Light, his parents bought a home in town. It will never be the same sort of family home that Starboard Light was. “You can’t snap your fingers and get 100 years of history,” he noted.

“For me, Chatham is the place,” said Fitzhugh. “I’m getting at in the film the question of and exploring whether a house makes a family or a family makes a house. I don’t know without family how much longer that can be the place. As much as I love Chatham, the most important thing was having a place where family gets together, that draw everyone together.”

To learn more about “Starboard Light” and see a trailer for the film visit thestarboardlight.com. Click on the Kickstarter button to contribute to the fundraising effort.

To read the article on thestarboardlight.com, click here.