In 1973, a sun-bleached St. Pete Beach kid named Steve Lamb helped bring nine tons of marijuana ashore from Jamaica in a borrowed shrimp boat — at the time the largest drug bust in American history. He was 20 years old. That arrest, and everything that followed, made him a counterculture legend up and down this stretch of Gulf Coast. Steve spent decades running, hiding, building a life in Venezuela, returning, getting caught again, and finally — in his final years — becoming the subject of a documentary that would capture everything.
The documentary, simply titled The Green Flash, premiered at the 2024 Sunscreen Film Festival in St. Petersburg. It's named for the meteorological phenomenon locals know well — that vivid emerald flash right as the sun disappears into the Gulf. Steve described it from a hospital bed in one of his last interviews. He passed away on February 28, 2024 at the age of 71, just before the film's debut — but not before he got to see it.
"Just as the late-afternoon sun is disappearing into the western Gulf of Mexico, as the last sliver of orange light slides beneath the horizon, there's a bright green light. It's there and it's gone."
— Steve Lamb, from The Green Flash documentary
The film screened at independent theaters throughout St. Pete Beach and the Gulf Coast in 2025. It's a love letter to this coast — messy, funny, tragic and deeply human. The kind of story that could only come from this stretch of water. Steve Lamb was not a hero in any conventional sense. But he was undeniably, completely, Gulf Coast.
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