Shepard & Dark: A Friendship Tested by Time

This post was written by DOC NYC blogger Megan Scanlon

Film director Treva Wurmfeld with producer Amy Hobby at DOC NYC.

When it comes to writing, Johnny Dark likes to go off on a tangent, saying that “the tangent is sometimes more interesting than the body you started off with.” And so it is with SHEPARD & DARK a film that became director Treva Wurmfeld’s tangent to what was originally going to be a documentary about playwright and actor Sam Shepard.  The film examines the nuanced relationship between Shepard and his longtime friend Dark, whose friendship formed back in the 1960s in Greenwich Village. Over the span of forty years, the two men wrote to each other about their “lives, fears, hopes, and problems in letters.”

Wurmfeld spent two years chronicling the friends as they pored through the old letters to compile them for a book about their exchanges. We learn that Shepard, self-described as a peripatetic and rootless in nature, prefers the power of photography over words. Yet, it’s the rehashing of these pages of letters, so carefully and lovingly organized by Dark, that seems to transport Shepard to a place of guilt and pain.

Dark, who doesn’t like people and hates live theater, ironically met Shepard after seeing one of his plays in New York City. Dark recalls that in their first conversation they told stories about their fathers. (The intergenerational transmission of behavior from father to son is a theme that permeates the film.) From there on out, the connection rooted itself even deeper when Dark married Scarlett Johnson and Shepard married her daughter, O-Lan Jones. Living together under one roof was a strangely joyous fit, and as Shepard said, “everything was us.” The dynamic changed when Shepard left his family for actress Jessica Lange, leaving his son Jesse under Dark’s care. Dark saw Shepard’s departure as inevitable, and encouraged the torn playwright to go. The separation strikingly illuminated Dark’s capacity for love; he embraced the change and considered it the “new reality.”

Tender in its delivery of the friends’ views on aging, truth, relationships, individuality, and coping mechanisms, SHEPARD & DARK shows the audience two diametrically opposed views of self-awareness.  Shepard believes in destiny and fate, and says, “We have this illusion that we can change ourselves–it’s all horseshit. Nothing fundamental changes.” In contrast, Dark believes that “life can change with self-awareness.”

In the Q&A after the screening at the IFC Center, Dark was asked if his friendship with Shepard often changed throughout the years, to which he replied, “The friendship only changed once, and she filmed it.”