Hollywood Ending

In August of 1997, before my high school friend and then-roommate Brent Boyd moved from Minneapolis to LA to make it big as a screenwriter, I threw him a Hollywood–themed party and asked each guest to bring a treasured movie scene to screen. Brent, appropriately, chose one from Barton Fink, the Coen brothers’ film about a tormented writer.

In the scene, Barton meets with a demented studio boss, who tells him, “We’re expecting great things.” At the end of the evening, I presented Brent with a director’s chair with his name silk-screened on the back.

Cut to December of 2003. Brent and I are each eating a mountain of a sandwich at the Corned Beef House in Toronto when he peers through the window and says, “Hey, look, there goes my movie.”

Sure enough, production vehicles for Aurora Borealis wheel by as a road scene is filmed with the two leads, Joshua Jackson of Dawson’s Creek and Oscar–nominee Juliette Lewis. Brent wrote the script, and I’m visiting him while the film is being shot.

The film follows a twenty-five-year-old Minneapolitan, played by Jackson, whose father’s death upturns his life and leaves him adrift. He reconnects with his Alzheimer’s–ridden grandfather, played by Donald Sutherland, and gains a fresh outlook in the form of free spirit Lewis. The movie is filled with local references, including shots of the Mall of America and the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden, music by Bob Dylan and Paul Westerberg, and possibly the world’s first utterance of the phrase “Holy Hrbek.”

The poignant, wry indie was one of the breakout films at TriBeCa in 2005 and won a slew of awards on the festival circuit. It opened on the coasts in mid-September and began screening in the Twin Cities on September 22 at Edina Cinema.

“A big part of my writing this script came from missing Minneapolis,” says Brent. “There’s a line in the movie about going away and [Lewis’s character] says, ‘You can always come back. You have to go other places to find out what a great place this is.’ I wanted the script to have a lot of Minneapolis in it—scenes at the 400 Bar, the skyways, Matt’s—because I was very much thinking of home when I wrote it.”

In high school in Forest Lake, Brent was the dreamy drama guy—intense, charismatic, and able to get girls with a Fonzie snap. He had a gaudy GPA and a natural presence onstage, acting in school productions of The Rainmaker, Arsenic and Old Lace, and Once Upon a Mattress. In college, he became interested in playwriting and, after graduation, was awarded an assistantship to the University of Georgia’s master of fine arts program. He relocated to Athens, but left after a year. “I just felt I could be more productive writing plays on my own than taking costume classes,” he says. “It wasn’t a good fit.”

Returning to the Twin Cities in 1994, he worked a day job at the downtown Barnes & Noble and had some success in the local theater scene. A couple of his plays were given professional readings at The Playwrights’ Center, but he soon realized he’d rather be Quentin Tarantino than August Wilson. “The problem with playwriting is you pour your life into something for a year and you think when it opens western civilization will never be the same, and then ten people show up,” he says. “I just thought it would be nice to have an audience.

“Plus, this was around the time of Pulp Fiction, Fargo, and The Usual Suspects. Those movies got me excited about film.”