“I don't like knowing people.” Perched in front of a bookshelf, writer, archivist and habitual pot-smoker Johnny Dark delivers the first of many memorable lines in Treva Wurmfeld's documentary Shepard & Dark. Oddly, it's almost easier to imagine the same words spoken by his close friend, Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright and actor Sam Shepard. The two met at a bookstore in Greenwich Village in the late 1960s and later cohabited in Mill Valley, California with Dark married to an older woman, Scarlett, and Shepard to her daughter, actress O-Lan Jones. For men with such an avowed commitment to solitude, the bond between Shepard and Dark remains curiously strong; at nearly fifty years their friendship has outlasted movements, marriages and sometimes even memories. Shepard's fear of flying, by now a handicap of mythological proportions, has begotten a lifestyle of roadside solitude, and Dark, now a grocery clerk, spends his time at home, building what he calls “books of people”-documentation of his epistolary relationships with friends seldom seen, Shepard amongst them. A lull in Shepard's personal life prompts an offer to publish their correspondence as a book, and the two meet to begin editing, uncovering ancient camaraderie and old scars in equal measure. In a comfortable and unassuming style, Wurmfeld probes the intimate dimensions of their relationship as they work on the document that their differences may ultimately prohibit them from ever completing.