Is ‘Suncoast’ Based on a True Story? What to Know About Max Kenneth Chinn and The Infamous Terri Schiavo Case

Looking for a movie that will make you cry? Watch Suncoast on Hulu. It’s guaranteed to give you that cathartic, teary-eyed feeling. It hits all the harder when you know that Suncoast is based on a true story, and tells a deeply personal tale.

Written and directed by Laura Chinn in her feature debut, this coming-of-age drama began streaming on Hulu on Friday, following its premiere at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival in January. Nico Parker stars in the movie as a teen girl named Doris, who has spent most of her life caring for brother Max, who has a terminal brain cancer diagnosis. Max—who cannot move, speak, or feed himself—has finally reached the end of his life, and will live out his remaining days in hospice care.

Doris wants to be a normal teenager, but Doris’s mother (played by an Oscar-worthy Laura Linney) only has eyes for her son. To further complicate matters, the hospice care facility where Max is staying has become a hotbed of political and moral debate. Read on to learn more about the Suncoast true story and Terri Schiavo.

Is Suncoast based on a true story?

The movie Suncoast is based on the true story of writer/director Laura Chinn’s childhood. Just like the character played Nico Park in the movie, Chinn was a teenager when her brother, Max Kenneth Chinn, was moved to a Florida hospice care facility to live out the end of his life in 2005, following a long battle with cancer. Unfortunately, that hospice facility turned out to be the very same facility housing a woman named Terri Schiavo, who was the subject of a real-life, landmark right-to-die court case in the early 2000s.

In a director’s statement for the film, Chinn recalled that “my mother’s plan was for [my brother] to spend his last few months on Earth in a peaceful, quiet place, but her plan was thwarted by a storm of protesters, religious zealots, photographers, journalists, and news cameras.”

Chinn went on to say in that same statement that quite a few of the events you see play out in Suncoast did not happen to her in real life. “Saying goodbye to my brother was quite a unique journey for my mother and I,” Chinn wrote. “Although most of the details in Suncoast are invented, all the emotions are autobiographical: the grief, the guilt, the love, the jealousy, the desire to just be normal. All the myriad feelings I experienced during that time, all the pain and all the laughter.”

Chinn clarified in an interview for the Suncoast press notes that at least one detail is true, though: “The detail of my brother being at hospice with Terri Schiavo is something I share with Doris,” she said, adding that, “Much of the details of her story were invented and it took me a long time to get it right, so I could get across all the emotions I was trying to recreate from my own experience of being a teenager dealing with loss.”

Chinn dedicated her movie “in loving memory of Max Kenneth Chinn,” in a touching dedication to her brother at the end of the film.

Who is Terri Schiavo from the Suncoast movie?

Terri Schiavo was a woman who was in an irreversible vegetive coma, who became a national sensation and hot-button issue when her husband, Michael Schiavo, and her parents, Robert and Mary Schindler, clashed over whether to end her life support or not.

In 1990, when Terri was 26 years old, she went into cardiac arrest, suffered brain damage, and slipped into a coma. After eight years of caring for his wife in a coma—including many different forms of physical therapy—Michael Schiavo petitioned the Sixth Circuit Court of Florida to remove her feeding tube and end her life, believing she would not want to exist in a vegetive coma for the rest of her life. He was opposed by Terri’s parents, who wanted her feeding tube to remain. A complicated legal battle played out for the next six years, including 14 legal appeals and five federal lawsuits. Eventually, the original decision to remove Schiavo’s feeding tube was upheld. Terri Schiavo died on March 31, 2005.

It became a landmark case for several activist groups, including the Christian-based anti-abortion movement, the right-to-die movement, and the disability rights movement. As we see in the movie, protestors gathered outside Schiavo’s hospice care facility following the verdict. The facility really was named Suncoast and still exists today.

Though he is not based on one particular person, Woody Harrelson’s character in the movie, Paul, represents these protestors who disrupted Chinn’s brother’s peace. In an interview for the Suncoast press notes, Chinn reflected on coming up with Paul’s character and casting Woody Harrelson.

“Woody showed interest in the film first, which was such a dream come true because he was my inspiration for the character, Paul,” Chinn said. “When I was writing Paul, I watched many of Woody’s films and interviews and used Woody as my way into Paul’s likeability. That Southern charm was something I wanted to infuse Paul with, so when Woody showed interest, it felt like fate.”