The two-man play by Ira Lewis was adapted by the author for the screen, with Pacino returning to the role he had played in two successive stagings as well as taking the director’s chair for a feature narrative debut. In Greenwich Village, flailing writer Pacino drops in on debatably more successful photographer Jerry Orbach to collect a debt—and to pick his brains about a roman à clef manuscript, cueing nocturnal reflections on past slights, lost loves, and future plans.