NEDERLAND -- Brent Warren could be considered a modern-day Renaissance man. He’s a singer-songwriter, an author, an illustrator, a magician, a comedian, and a filmmaker.

One of his projects spawned from a dual love – the shared love between two locals of a historical aircraft. That dual love culminated in Warren’s major undertaking as a filmmaker, the hour-long documentary Marvin’s Fly’n Boat.

Warren and Nederland local Marvin Lewis, owner of the restaurant Marvins Gardens, both loved the history and spectacle of the Hughes H-4 Hercules flying boat, colloquially known as the “Spruce Goose.” Designed by Howard Hughes, the plane, built from birch wood, is the largest flying boat, or seaplane with a hull, ever built.

Warren frequented Marvins Gardens, admiring a 12-foot model of the plane that Lewis worked to build in the restaurant. Warren also went to Long Beach, California, a few times between 1980 and 1992 to see the original plane, which was displayed to the public there.

Warren didn’t know Lewis very well by the time Lewis sold Marvins Gardens and moved to Nebraska, where he lived until he passed away. Warren later joined the Boulder Aeromodeling Society, and other members asked him what happened to Lewis’s model plane.

When the club learned that Lewis had taken the plane with him to Nebraska, they reached out to his family to bring the model’s pieces back to Colorado. Over the next year, a handful of locals, including retired United Airlines pilot Steve Croft, finished building Marvin’s model in Croft’s basement.

Warren, having invested in one of the first non-linear editing systems, realized that three great obsessions - Hughes’s obsession with the original plane, Lewis’s obsession with his model, and the club’s obsession with finishing the model – motivated an entire three-act story.

Warren realized this story could make a great film. He and production assistant Jessica Eischens spent the next year filming over 15 hours of the model’s construction.

Lewis intended for the model to fly, but never saw that goal come to fruition. After the model’s completion, on May 22, 1999, 2,400 people gathered around the Boulder Reservoir in an attempt to fly it. His family placed some of Marvin’s ashes in the plane.

Warren loved the puzzle of putting the final edit together, and he says that many small miracles throughout the course of the film’s production elevated it further than he could have imagined. While he filmed as much as he could, he knew the film could get boring relying only on film from one or two cameras and static shots of the family.

During production, however, he and others involved with the film secured footage from the original flight of the “Spruce Goose” that had fallen into the public domain. Lewis’s family also provided home videos of Lewis and his plane, including videos in his Nebraska home.

During his lifetime, Lewis had a mutual connection with someone who had flown in the original “Spruce Goose.” As a result, the filmmaking team even secured footage of Lewis in the cockpit of the original plane in Long Beach. Lewis’s connection invited him to see the plane just before its relocation to the Evergreen Aviation and Space Museum in McMinnville, Oregon, where it resides today.

Unable to pitch the film to stations such as PBS, the film premiered at The Backdoor Theater in 2000, screened in places including the Denver Public Library soon after, and has not been seen on a big screen since.

Through its lifespan, the film has been converted multiple times to different storage formats, from VHS copies to DVD copies, before YouTube made its upload length long enough for Warren to upload the film in full.

26 years after the film’s premiere, Warren wants to bring attention back to the film. Along with promoting its YouTube upload, Warren, in collaboration with the Nederland Area Seniors, is bringing the film back to The Backdoor Theater to show it on the big screen for the first time since its premiere.

Warren is still immensely proud of the film today and fondly remembers the experience of making it. With the accessibility of editing software, the development of filmmaking technology, and increased availability of mass storage over the last 26 years, he knew then and knows now he made the best film he could with the resources he had then.

Seeing the film on the big screen again has brought immense joy to Warren, and he can’t wait for audience members to see the final sequence at the Boulder Reservoir when the plane –  well, you’ll have to watch the film to find out.

To see Marvin’s Fly’n Boat on the big screen again, head to The Backdoor Theater, located at 750 North Highway 72 in Nederland, on Thursday, September 18, 2025, starting at 7 p.m. Admission is free, but donations are accepted for the Nederland Area Seniors.

If you can’t wait until then to see the movie, miss the screening, or want to see it again at any time, the film is available on YouTube. You can find the film, along with Brent Warren’s other artistic endeavors, on his website at imagelust.com.