The Writer's Dilemma

When we drew “Buddy Film” as our 48 Hour Film Project assigned genre, screenwriter (and executive producer) William R. Coughlan and I discussed how many buddy films include “buddies” who don’t get along — at least not initially. We also both share a love of film noir, so Bill proposed a gangland variant of The Prisoner’s Dilemma, that favorite problem of game theorists wherein two isolated prisoners decide whether to cooperate with or betray each other. We loved it, but in trying to break out the beats of the story, we found that we had too much telling and not enough showing within the constraints of a seven-minute short. By switching the framing device to one of writers at a similar impasse, we were still able to touch on the whole gangster story, but were not weighed down by it. And we added a whole other story in Libby Daricek’s drama. The resulting script was a delight to shoot, as was working with so many great actors. In a sense, we got to make multiple movies.