Glen Evelyn Proves The Most Powerful Creative Chapters Can Begin Later In Life

There is a moment in many lives when success stops being measured by what has already been accomplished and starts being defined by what still feels unfinished. For Glen Evelyn, that moment arrived after decades in corporate leadership, profound personal loss, and a medical crisis that nearly ended his life. At 56, he left the career he knew and pursued the creative life he had imagined since childhood.

Today, Evelyn is the founder and CEO of GunnerMAX Productions, the creative force behind the LGBTQ+ drama Our Family Pride and the feature film StartUp Love. His emergence as a filmmaker is more than a career change. It is a second act shaped by decades of experience and a conviction that stories about identity, family, and resilience deserve to be told with emotional honesty.

The Dream That Never Really Disappeared

Growing up in West Palm Beach, Florida, Evelyn was drawn to creativity early. He painted, drew, wrote stories, and imagined himself performing in front of a camera. Yet coming of age as a gay man during the 1970s and 1980s complicated both his personal identity and his creative ambitions.

Rather than enter entertainment, Evelyn pursued a more conventional professional path. After studying Communications and Business at Florida State University, he spent approximately 35 years in healthcare. He became an executive, consultant, and speaker, advising senior leaders on performance, leadership, and innovation.

It was a successful career by conventional standards. Still, the desire to tell stories remained.

Life eventually forced Evelyn to reconsider what he wanted from the years ahead. After coming out and building a life with the man who became his husband, Evelyn experienced the devastating consequences of his husband's severe drug addiction. Years of treatment attempts and hope eventually ended in loss when his husband died.

Then Evelyn nearly lost his own life.

A catastrophic internal bleed resulted in seven cardiac arrests over three days. He survived, beginning a long period of physical and emotional recovery that included losing approximately 90 pounds.

Survival gave an old question new urgency. What would he do with the life he still had?

His answer was storytelling.

Glen Evelyn Finds His Voice Through Our Family Pride

Evelyn created, wrote, directed, and produced Our Family Pride, a six episode scripted LGBTQ+ television drama through GunnerMAX Productions. The story follows a husband and father who comes out later in life, forcing his family to confront hidden pain, unexpected truths, and the consequences of years spent withholding parts of himself. The project's emotional tone and central relationships can be seen in the Our Family Pride official trailer.

Coming out provides the catalyst, but family is the emotional center.

The series examines marriage, addiction, grief, identity, forgiveness, resilience, and the difficult work of rebuilding trust. Instead of treating identity as an isolated issue, Evelyn places it within the complicated reality of family relationships. More about the story, characters, and production can be found on the official Our Family Pride website.

Filmed entirely in South Florida, Our Family Pride features Garrett Clayton, Rachel Alig, Jake Holley, and Evelyn. The production's growing festival presence has also given audiences outside Florida an opportunity to encounter Evelyn's work.

The pilot has earned 19 awards, including the Grand Prize for TV Pilot and Series at the Indiewood Film Festival on September 19, 2026. The recognition carried particular significance for Evelyn because the festival took place at the historic TCL Chinese Theatre on Hollywood's Walk of Fame.

“It was always my dream to premiere a film at the Chinese Theatre at the Hollywood Walk of Fame. To screen it and actually win the Grand Prize is such an honor, almost too hard to believe,” Evelyn said.

For Evelyn, the moment connected two very different periods of his life. The boy who once imagined himself working in entertainment had become a filmmaker watching his own project receive recognition in Hollywood. Audiences interested in the production and its cast can also explore the series through its Our Family Pride IMDb page.

StartUp Love Takes The Storytelling In A New Direction

Evelyn's next project shows that GunnerMAX Productions is not interested in repeating the same story.

The feature film StartUp Love, directed by Rene Lavan and Evelyn and written by Dominic Giannetti and Evelyn, moves into the competitive world of technology. Set inside a high pressure technology incubator, the film follows ambitious young coders attempting to create a major artificial intelligence breakthrough.

Their professional ambitions become increasingly complicated as friendship, attraction, betrayal, and a bisexual love triangle collide. A preview of StartUp Love offers an early look at the younger ensemble and the different world Evelyn is exploring in his second major production.

The cast includes Gabriell Salgado, Gaby Borges, Brian Drolet, Coby Oram, Sofia Lauren Giannetti, Imran Hylton, and Evelyn.

StartUp Love held its world premiere at Cinema Diverse: The Palm Springs LGBTQ+ Film Festival on September 25, 2026. Following its premiere, the feature received the Festival Favorite award, adding another milestone to GunnerMAX Productions' growing festival recognition. The following day, Our Family Pride received a special screening at the same festival, giving GunnerMAX Productions two projects on the Cinema Diverse program.

StartUp Love held its world premiere at Cinema Diverse: The Palm Springs LGBTQ+ Film Festival on September 25, 2026. The following day, Our Family Pride received a special screening at the same festival, giving GunnerMAX Productions two projects on the Cinema Diverse program.

Together, the productions reveal an expanding creative ambition. One examines the consequences of truth inside a family. The other explores identity and relationships amid the pressures of youth, technology, and professional competition. What connects them is Evelyn's interest in people confronting who they are while deciding what they want their lives to become.

Why Starting Later Can Become A Creative Advantage

Entertainment often celebrates people who discover their calling early. Evelyn's story presents another possibility.

He did not arrive at filmmaking without a past. He brought decades of leadership experience, love, grief, survival, and the perspective that comes from rebuilding a life after circumstances change it completely.

That history now gives him something he could not have possessed when he first dreamed of entertainment as a child: lived experience.

His work is continuing to expand beyond Our Family Pride and StartUp Love. Evelyn is completing his book, Why the F Not, while developing another film project. For those following the festival journey of his work, Indiewood Film Festival ticket information provides another connection to the festival platform that recognized Our Family Pride.

Evelyn's second act suggests that beginning later does not necessarily mean arriving late. Sometimes the decades before a creative breakthrough provide the material, perspective, and conviction that make the work possible in the first place.

The Story Is No Longer Waiting

For much of his life, Glen Evelyn carried a creative ambition alongside another career. Today, that ambition has become GunnerMAX Productions, Our Family Pride, StartUp Love, and a growing body of work centered on people navigating identity, relationships, difficult choices, and new beginnings.

His path from healthcare executive to filmmaker does not erase what came before it. Instead, those experiences have become part of what he brings to the screen.

For audiences encountering his work for the first time, the best introduction may be simply to watch the stories themselves. The Our Family Pride trailer, its official website, Evelyn's latest StartUp Love preview, and the projects' continuing festival journey offer a closer look at what can happen when a dream deferred for decades finally gets its turn.