Rain City Cinema announces that its film, "Ride The Sky", about trail blazing skydiver Joan Carson, has secured a distribution deal with DocsNow Plus, an online Roku channel specializing in documentary films. Additionally, Gorman's book, "Running Down A Dream: The making of a film", is available now through Amazon Books and other retailers. It tells the remarkable story behind making the film, as Gorman searches for the meaning of a dream he had about skydiver Joan Carson's fatal skydiving accident.Gorman, who met Carson at Redmond High School spent time with her while she was living in San Francisco during the early 70s. "That's when I had the dream," said Gorman. "She had gone skydiving and didn't come home that night; In my dream she was fatally injured."
Eight years later, Gorman's dream came true when Carson perished in a skydiving accident in Lost Prairie, Montana when both of her parachutes failed to open.
Fast forward nearly thirty years and Gorman began having dreams again about Carson's death. It was then that he decided to make a documentary film about her in the hope it would unlock the mystery of his dream. "I just had a gut feeling that she wanted me to tell her story," says Gorman. "It was a gamble, but a risk I felt worth taking."
His gamble paid off. Gorman's book tells how he retraced Carson's nomadic life from the time of her death in 1981 back to her childhood. With wanderlust in her blood and skydiving the love of her life, she pursued her skydiving passion at dropzones across three western states. Finally settling in Montana, she built her own dropzone in the wilderness. Ironically, she died there a year after it opened. She was 30 years old.
Prior to filming, Gorman managed to track down family members of Carson and skydivers who at one time or another had jumped with her. "I was amazed that people still remembered her," said Gorman, after all, it had been almost thirty years since her death.
Revered and loved at her dropzone in Lost Prairie, Montana, she was tormented by a painful event from her teenage years. "Skydiving is what kept her going," says Gorman. "It eased her pain. When she was in the air, she didn't care about anything else."
During the course of interviewing Carson's brother, her secret was finally revealed, and for Gorman it was the answer to the meaning of his dream. He finally understood what drove her to jump out of airplanes and keep doing it after suffering two serious accidents. "The essence of Joan had been found and her spirit was alive in that room when her brother so eloquently explained her past," says Gorman in his book.
Returning to do more filming in Montana, Gorman learned of possible nefariousness as to the cause of Carson's double parachute malfunction, encountered hostility, and finally received recognition with the film winning awards and appearing at film festivals in North America and Europe.
Newspaper articles about the film appeared online, and not long afterwards he received a most uncanny email reconnecting the past with the present in a most surprising and emotional way. "That call convinced me that I had met Joan for a reason,” says Gorman in his book, "and that was to someday tell her story. I merely opened the bottle and her story gushed out."
As to Gorman's decision to write the book, he said, “As great as the film is, I wrote it because I thought my experience making the film might be even more interesting."
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