CHINESE COFFEE (2000)

In the dead of a freezing New York night, down and almost out novelist Harry (Al Pacino) comes pounding on the apartment door of his best friend, photographer Jake (Jerry Orbach). Harry is flat broke and begs his friend to repay $500. But all Jake has is a jar of pennies. Worse, he has not, he declares, read the draft of Harry's latest novel, a work on which Harry's last hope is pitched. A long, sometimes funny, mostly intensely dramatic dialogue ensues. Relentlessly, obsessively, the desperate Harry probes his sardonic, world-weary friend until it’s revealed that not only has Jake read the work and found it to be a thinly disguised account of their lives, loves and failures - which enrages him - but he suspects it to have true commercial promise and perhaps genuine artistic merit. Fiercely jealous, believing himself to have potentially been the writer Harry has indeed become, Jake attempts to destroy Harry’s confidence and his one chance to succeed. In the end, Harry loses a friend but gains the courage to finish his book – for while Jake wants to be a writer, Harry has to be one. Pacino also directed CHINESE COFFEE, and the screenplay is by Ira Lewis, who based it on his own play, which in turn is based on his own life. Talky, but great