by Mike Sula
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But it wasn’t until ten years ago, when he was down and out in sandlocked Scottsdale, Arizona, that Gumbinger realized there was an untapped market in people thirsty for tales of submerged vessels. He’d recently left his home in Kenosha, scuttling a chain of video stores, a lucrative career as a financial planner, and a sunken relationship, to try the “starving artist thing,” he says. “I remember watching a sales tape and thinking I should be making that tape, not watching it.” A job shooting medical films fell through when the company went belly-up, so he formed his own production company, advertising his services to corporations and law firms in the yellow pages. No one bit.
On a trip back home that summer, Gumbinger met some divers who had explored the wreckage of the ship. He spent three weeks taping interviews and doing research. His father provided narration. Over the next seven months Gumbinger rented out an editing studio in Phoenix and put a 50-minute video together for under $10,000. “I had been getting some PR and taking out some ads–I had a little PO box–but it really was a labor of love,” he says. “I had nearly tapped out my Visa card, and I was really broke. I made this automotive-leasing video with this one guy and we thought that thing was going to make a fortune. We made a deal with a cable company to get a bunch of 60-second spots on it, but they ended up going bankrupt after we gave them our money. Then I started getting these checks in the mail for the SS Wisconsin video–three, four, five, six a day, and I thought, ‘Hey, this is sort of cool.’” Gumbinger formed another company, Southport Video, and returned to Kenosha to make more shipwreck documentaries.
