The Making of
Full Measure
Director’s Statement
I didn’t set out to make a film about rowing—I set out to tell a story about impact.
Steve Gladstone’s name was already etched into the history of collegiate sports, but it’s the way he’s shaped people, not just athletes, that drew me in. As I followed Steve through his final season at Yale, I realized I was witnessing more than a farewell tour; I was watching a master teacher finish his greatest lesson.
Full Measure is about the silent moments of growth that happen in the shadows of competition. It’s about the father figures we don’t always recognize until much later. And it’s about the universal truth that our greatest legacies are not trophies, but the people we’ve inspired along the way.
This film is, above all, about the rare power of a coach to help young people see more in themselves than they thought possible. Telling Steve’s story has been one of the great privileges of my career.
I hope Full Measure resonates with anyone who has ever been helped by a coach, a mentor, or a teacher—and with those who strive to become one.
— Jean Strauss
Full Measure began in 2019, when Yale’s boatwright, Joel Furtek, invited former teammate Tom Lee to join Steve Gladstone in his launch. Impressed by Steve’s leadership style, Lee believed it deserved to be preserved on film. The idea stalled during the pandemic, but in 2022 documentarian Jean Strauss revived the project. What initially began as a book quickly evolved into a feature film.
Strauss brought both her background as a rower and her experience as a filmmaker to the project. To tell the story fully, contemporary footage of Steve coaching the 2023 Yale team was vital. Capturing what set him apart meant navigating his own reluctance: while supportive, he often asked cameras to be set aside to protect his athletes. Some of the most powerful moments were artfully filmed in secret—Steve alone on a dock, framed by a trailer, or sitting apart from the crowd to watch a final—images made more poignant by the fact that 2023 marked his final season after half a century of coaching.
But Gladstone, the winningest coach in American collegiate rowing history, had guided not just one, but six programs to success. From the start, a treasure hunt for archival footage and photographs ran alongside the new filming. Strauss spent months trying to track down a long-lost 1962 newspaper article with the headline “Son to Row at IRA - Dying Mother's Wish” spotlighting a young Syracuse rower: Steve Gladstone. Unearthed in a scrapbook at the bottom of a cabinet in Cal’s boathouse, the article appears in the film for just seconds, but its presence anchors the story of Steve and his mother.
Other discoveries came thanks to passionate rowing historians. Syracuse alum Paul Dudzick had preserved rare 16mm footage of Steve rowing in the early 1960s. Archivist Lenville O’Donnell safeguarded reels of 8mm film showing Steve coaching at Cal in the 1970s—footage thought lost forever. Each lend added layers of authenticity to the film.
Some finds came by sheer luck: a marked-up photograph of Gladstone and Princeton’s 1966 Freshman stroke Bill Tytus surfaced on eBay, leading Strauss to the Princeton archives, where she uncovered the original negative. That image, unseen for decades, is critical to the story of Steve’s first year as a collegiate coach.
The searches were not without peril. Strauss hand-carried 42 reels of Gladstone family film and and dozens of photographs in her flight home from San Diego. Stopping briefly near the Oakland Airport, her rental car was broken into and everything—including her rollerbag containing the Gladstone reels—was stolen from the trunk. Hours later, after offering a reward, a bounty hunter recovered the bag in a nearby field. Among the salvaged reels were irreplaceable home movies that became central to telling Steve’s childhood story. A clip entitled “What Would Have Been Lost” in the Gallery offers a glimpse of just how essential that footage was.
While that footage was saved, other footage was lost. During Steve’s final Yale–Harvard race, Strauss’s phone—with the only close-up footage of him and his daughter Sonya in the launch—slipped into the Thames River. Two separate scuba searches failed to retrieve it. Some moments, like that one, survive only in memory.
What ultimately gives Full Measure its heart is Steve’s steadfast dedication to the athletes themselves. Their daily grind on the water, their reflections on his influence, and their bond with each other reveal the essence of his coaching. For them, he was more than a coach; he was family. His demand for full measure in their work became the secret ingredient in their own commitment to one another.
Full Measure also owes its existence to Tom Lee, whose insight on that day in the launch recognized the extraordinary nature of Gladstone’s leadership. In honoring Steve Gladstone, the film also honors Tom Lee, whose vision – and Jean Strauss’s determination to tell the story–ensured Steve’s story will survive for generations to come.
The first footage Strauss captured was on December 6, 2022, when Steve told his Yale team he would step down after the 2023 season. The next week, Strauss and Gladstone visited Kent School, where his own rowing journey began under coach Tote Walker. Walking its chapel, boathouse, and hillside graveyard, the arc of Gladstone’s life came into focus.
Full Measure is not just about winning races—it is about how sports transform lives, and how rare leaders inspire others to reach beyond what they thought possible.