Immortalized

In early November 2023, this text arrived out of the blue from someone I didn't know. It was the day after I returned home from over five months of travel overseas. I'd just come from a week-long Minneapolis stopover, and I was disoriented at home.

A short film had been dedicated to my brother, over three years after his death. The note was proof positive that my brother Pete's spirit was still alive in a strong, vibrant, resonant way. His passion for film and storytelling had expanded in his years working in the movie industry, and now he'd influenced the making of a short film. A current shot across my heart thinking about it.

In a split second, I'd decided the film’s premiere was not to be missed, either by me or my mother.

I wasn’t ready to travel again, and I booked a ticket to go back to Minneapolis in a few weeks for the film's screening anyway.

The small premiere was held in the Main Theater at St. Anthony. That setting was very nostalgic for this Minneapolis expat. When I was growing up in the late 1970s, St. Anthony Main was a new prototype for historic district redevelopment in the form of restored tavern buildings from the late 19th century, very old for Minneapolis. The reuse was a new and exciting place to a young architect-wannabe, over forty years ago.

The premiere

On a very dark, blustery, early December night, a winter wind carried us across the Mississippi on the concrete-arched Third Avenue bridge, one of a collection of bridges in that part of town. My mother was in the passenger seat, and I drove my mother's 2010 tan Corolla. The little masonry riverfront buildings emerged into view, after moving through a sea of recent downtown towers that had challenged my orientation. We parked curbside a block from the theater, wrestled with the meter app, and I helped my mother navigate from the passenger seat to her walker. The walk down cobblestone sidewalks made her miserable, and it didn't help that she was there to see a film dedicated to the memory of her son.

As we entered the theater, we were able to connect briefly with producer/actor Matt Olson, half of the creative pair that brought the film to life, and then found our way to some seats. Tristan Allen, the other half, was not able to travel there from New York, having just emerged on the other side of the recent writers' strike. The audience was filled with parkas and knit scarves, colleagues, friends and families that had contributed to the two movies being screened. The house lights came down, and the film rolled.

Love, flawed communication, grief, and family are at the core of "Turkey", a 12-minute story that observes a family at Thanksgiving for a half-day. The family is missing their heart center: the mother of two adult sons, who was also the wife of a disabled father, had recently died. The three men are navigating new territory together, the first holiday without her.

The characters, dialogue, behaviors, and imagery on screen looked very Minnesotan. Tristan told me that the idiosyncrasies of Minnesota culture were an important thread of the visuals and content. The atmosphere packed into those 12 minutes included: the visual bleakness of a Minnesota winter; dirty snow piles at the side of the road; a vast, brown, wind-swept farm field with a frosty topping under a gray sky; nostalgic things and places coated with patina; people covered in messy layers upon layers and sporting hat head; hours of daily darkness and faces reflecting amber artificial light; and, conversations of few words fleshed out with gestalt – adding up to a setting for a moving film about grief and family secrets.

When the credits rolled, at the end, there was the dedication to Pete. My breath caught in my throat as my lungs felt paralyzed. It was an important credit for him, posthumously.

Talking with Matt afterward, I learned he'd worked with Pete on a couple of films when he was starting out. Matt didn't know him well, but Pete stood out as memorably kind in a "you're-on-your-own" film-set environment. It was Tristan's push to dedicate the film to Pete, he said; I should talk with him. And also to his mother-in-law Christine, who'd also screened a wonderful film that night; turns out she'd recently moved back to the Twin Cities after seven years in the small New England fishing village and beach vacation haven where I live. Small world.

Virtual acquaintance

I'd already broached the idea to Tristan via text that I'd like to interview him, and he was very encouraging. Still, I used the holidays as an excuse to delay scheduling the call. Traveling the path of telling Pete's story is a constant struggle to consistently plow forward and face what will be learned next. Even the good news is hard. The arrival of January forced the issue. I texted again, and we scheduled a video call for later that day.

When my computer screen lit up with Tristan's face, I was surprised at how young he looked, given that he'd met Pete 18 years ago, putting him in his late 30s at best; he must be one of those people with perennially youthful features. His eyelids hung low above unfocused eyes.

As our conversation progressed, I quickly realized Tristan is an unusually thoughtful storyteller. He communicates with vulnerability, often speaking in film metaphors. Years of movie work have not diminished his sincerity; it pours out of him.

Tied together

He'd met Pete on the set of Older than America, a film shot in Cloquet, MN in 2006. Tristan was "as green as they come" on the grip crew and Pete took him under his wing. Some twenty-plus years separated these two men in age; Pete was a 48-year-old working in a younger man's industry. Pete taught Tristan to tie a bowline knot, a critical tool of grip work. He taught a method more akin to The Force than the bunny-round-the-tree method, telling Tristan to:

...roll the rope to keep it falling to the right side. Pete taught me about rope, how to feel the weight of it, to always have the rope fall to the right. I was sure I wasn't going to be able to learn to tie the knot, and I did. Pete taught me something about rope AND how to tie the knot. I still tie the knot that way.

No doubt that Pete’s intuitive relationship with rope was a legacy of his years of rock climbing, and he loved to teach.

They next worked together on the movie A Serious Man in 2008. I remember Pete talking with me about his work on the film; the conversation would have been well after it wrapped and he'd recovered, because the time during filming was all-consuming: temporally, physically, emotionally. He'd mentioned the art of the shots, the choices of the cinematographer; that the neighborhood location in our hometown of Bloomington was a visually distinctive one, very much like the one we grew up in; that this movie was "of our time", as were the Coen Brothers.

Tristan and Pete worked together every day for months on that film, starting in early September 2008. Matt was there, too. The film wrapped on November 8, 2008, about two weeks before our father died, coincidentally.

Mentorship

The time working on A Serious Man was hard for Tristan, as he found himself in a complex life transition and struggling for direction. Before then, he'd moved to LA hoping to find a place in the film community but instead "was more isolated. There was too much driving. I was misanthropic and workaholic." Returning to MN to work on A Serious Man, he wondered whether he'd fit back into a social slot he'd left vacant, but quickly realized that wasn't the case. He grew depressed and didn't know whether Minnesota or LA was the best next step for him, for his career, once the film was complete.

Depression is a sign of life transition. He was on the threshold of something new.

Meanwhile, a friend wanted him to come to New York, and was pressuring him to sign a lease for what felt like big money; it was overwhelming. He leaned on Pete, and Pete was there to support him. "I wasn't doing anything because I was depressed, totally beaten down. Pete was building me back up." Pete invited him to his farmhouse near Wisconsin's Lake Superior shore to hang, for a break from small-town Cloquet and the remote film location world:

Pete treated me like family. He was a very warm person. When I was at his house, I was 26 years old. Pete was a nurturing, caring guy.

Pete looked for something to get us out of the house. 'I know what we can do, let's dig potatoes in the cold, white field!' It's an odd memory but one I loved. The potato field was like the one in the movie, it was in my mind [while he was blocking out the film] …

We … screwed around with [Pete's and his wife's many sled] dogs. He listened to me. It was an open dialog, no judging.

Pete was, for Tristan, a trustworthy sounding board. In the end, Pete encouraged him to go to New York, where Tristan has since made his life:

Pete got a bead on me. I wasn't going to stick around in Minnesota, it was a very small community and I was gonna go find a bigger pond. I was 25, and not working much in Minnesota. I was traveling around.

I wasn't driven in my career but very determined. I had an appetite to learn, not climb the ladder. I liked the notion of feeling expert. ["The craftsmanship," I offered and he concurred.]

Would I go back to LA or not? A friend in New York wanted me to sign a lease quickly, to pay what seemed like a lot of money for a bedroom and [for the two of them] to share common space with three other people. That didn't seem right.

Pete said that it was the right thing for a person like me, when everyone around me said the opposite. That I was exactly the person to do this. He respected my approach to filmmaking, and told me, 'You definitely need to go to New York.’

He told me, ‘I'll buy your car’ when I was asking $7000. That money got me started in New York. I sold it to him and left and I hadn't paid the lien on the car. Pete called like a year later; he’d found out about the lien. I'd been paying it down over time and had like $2300 left. I told him, 'I can't believe you're finding out.’ I could have gotten into real trouble. I told him I'd intended to pay it off that month, and he said OK.

It was hard to put space between my brother and a tenner, so for $7000 to change hands was remarkable.

Tristan continued, “We stayed in touch when I was in NY. I sent two care packages from NY. The last one he was really over the moon about. [It] must have been 15 pounds, all items from the Asian market.” I'd seen them, Pete had shown them off on a visit to his house. They were very dear items to Pete, a devoted and creative chef.

Pete often called on a drink and dial. People in MN only call me as a drink and dial. He wasn't despairing on the phone. Darin [a mutual friend] was someone [with whom] Pete shared the darker stuff.

He knew what was going on in my life. I'd fallen in love with a girl from Taiwan.

The last time I talked to him was from an Asian market, with my wife and my new baby. Flushing Meadows, The Great Wall Supermarket. Pete called and we chatted for a while. My daughter was born on Christmas Day 2018, and she was still very young. [Pete died June 2, 2019, likely from complications of alcoholism.]

Pete called me 10 times the day he died. I only answered the phone when Pete called when I knew I could give him a decent amount of time. I

didn't answer that day. If I didn't answer, he would leave hysterical[ly funny] voice messages, so it wasn't a big deal.

[Was it the same day he died?] I heard he died within like 24 hours of that.

I remembered there was something about Pete, he was in pain. Pete would help me hold pain. I didn't ask him about his. [Tristan choked up a bit.] Life is hard.

I had a very hard childhood and Pete might have sensed that.

I think he did. I think Pete recognized a younger version of himself in Tristan, dealing with a burden from childhood that resembled his own. He wanted to give the help and support he wished he’d received.

We talked about how Pete died. People knew for years he was in trouble with his drinking; it was common knowledge. When Pete died, mutual friends told Tristan, "It's the drinking, Tristan." Or, "Huge bummer, but he was drinking all the time." Tristan emphasized that he was really sad.

Pain led my brother to drink, and drinking took him away from so much: from friends who loved him, from film.

Artistic Expression

Fast forward a few years, and as the short film project began to take off in 2023, Tristan was again in a place of transition and the pain returned.

When I knew I had to file for divorce, I took a step back from work. I'd never done that; I've been working since I was 14. I set down my radio in the middle of a movie set and I knew I wasn't coming back. I took a six-month hiatus to take my daughter to school. [He and Matt had been talking about making a short film of Matt's play.] I told Matt to give me everything and I'll write something I can make. Pete came to mind and I cried about Peter.

The film is about misunderstood men, needing the feminine counterpart, missing it, the mother. In the heartbreak of my marriage, I'd not been a good friend to Pete. He was a friend who really touched my life. I hadn't thought about him for a while. I finally dealt with the pain of the phone messages.

Also, Pete was a real Minnesotan. Big hands. [Those hands were grown and developed at the piano in his youth.] He was virtuosic, he had hidden skills like a Minnesotan. [His] physicality. He was the only super-warm, super-kind Minnesotan I'd known.

Tristan had remembered the loving care and attention Pete had given him, and it inspired the way he thought about and developed this story. In the last scene of the movie, "a man grieves in a field," Tristan told me at the end of our conversation; a vast, winter-white Minnesota field. "That's the field where Pete and I dug potatoes."

Teamwork

To say that Matt Olson (producer, actor) and Tristan Allen (writer, director) made the short film "Turkey" on a shoestring diminishes their effort: they pulled this thing together out of thin air, shooting in a ten-day timeframe, relying on savvy, skills and relationships built in their years in the film industry. As Tristan described the process:

Making the movie was an obsession, it took determination and inspiration to make the film.

All of the feelings in the movie are real. Matt was worried about gaps in the story…the holes are where people put in their own life, and fill the mysterious gaps. I know about world-building and creating a lived-in feeling.

It [the movie] was an exercise of faith and love and friendship. Matt had confidence in me in a way I didn't deserve. People don't deserve confidence.

It was all from [Matt's] play, and I was moving the blocks around. I was on a precipice, and getting a divorce. I [was] sending up a flare, because I'm going down! It was execution and heart. I had such fear when I left Brooklyn [to go to Minnesota to make the film]. I am difficult to work with, though people will tell you I'm easy because I work hard at being professional.

To execute something like this…people have lots of blind spots. You have to have each other's backs. Accountability.

Tristan and Matt’s relationship of trust, and the other relationships they drew on for support, birthed this short film, a moving story of a family in transition.

Tribute

When I’d first heard that a short film was dedicated to Pete, I could not have imagined this story behind it. Tristan told me in so many ways that the spirit of Pete is in this movie, and that, in part, he mourned him by creating this piece of art. He and Pete recognized each other's hearts, passions, injuries and scars. Both craved knowledge, craft, and competence and then achieved them. Pete had confidence in Tristan when he was still looking for it in himself, perhaps like Matt did.

Some of the grief Tristan feels is the ambiguous grief that loved ones of alcoholics often feel, tinged with various shades of guilt. Tristan, don't doubt that you were a good friend to him. You didn't see him as a drinker, as others did; you saw him as a friend you respected. You sent him precious Asian cooking ingredients to his far-distant north woods outpost, a thoughtful gift he treasured in part because they came from you. You two gave each other time and attention and meaningful exchange. You mattered to each other. Then, you made a short film laced with his spirit and dedicated it to him.

I can think of no tribute that would honor Pete more, in his own eyes.