Stars In Her Eyes

By the late 1960's North Miami was on the map in both music recording and movie making. Just about every major rock group was cutting tracks at Criteria Recording Studio. The sound stage in Ivan Tors studio was headquarters for television series like Flipper and Gentle Ben, more recently Miami Vice, and dozens of movies. Other movie and recording studios dotted the city's "industrial" districts, along with Capitol Film Labs to process all those miles and miles of movie film. Ivan Tors Studios is now called The Studios at Greenwich.

Several agencies represented talent, the talent needed photographs to pass around, and I used to get a few calls a month to photograph the people who hoped to make it big. Holly Burke was one of those. She was represented by Ruth Foreman, who also had a theater and acting school for children here in town.

The only local girl that ever seemed to make it big was Saundra Santiago, who first became Miss North Miami, then caught the eye of the casting director for the Miami Vice TV series. She played Detective Gina Navarro Calabrese for 105 episodes from 1984 to 1989. Holly Burke wasn't that fortunate.