Art Imitates Life … Sort Of

In the new feature film Adult Best Friends, characters Delaney and Katie have been best friends since childhood. And their bond has carried into adulthood, too, but as so often happens, life intervenes and life choices – even perfectly normal ones — can open up cracks in the relationship.

There’s something vaguely familiar about all of this to Delaney Buffett ’10 and Katie Cummings Corwin ’10, who, Corwin says, have been best friends since they were 10 years old even before they attended Lawrenceville together. And no, Adult Best Friends isn’t autobiographical, but the two longtime pals were able to tap into their history together to explore the dynamic of old friends trying to lead grown-up lives while still having space for each other in them.

“After college, we decided to team up as writing partners for film and TV,” Corwin says. “We’ve been extremely close to getting projects made, but, as is so often the nature of the business, things seemed to always fall through at the last minute. We finally decided to take matters into our own hands and produce our script independently.”

Their gamble paid off. Co-written by the pair, directed by Buffett, and starring them both, Adult Best Friends premiered at last year’s Tribeca Film Festival, secured distribution, and was released to the public on February 28.

“It was certainly a labor of love,” Corwin says. “We shot in friends’ apartments, called in every possible favor we could think of, but we saw it through.”

In the film, the old friends have remained close but have become different types of personalities as adults. The emergent homebody, Katie, takes her codependent and more impulsive best friend Delaney on a girls’ trip to break the news that she is getting married. Things … don’t go well.

“Adult Best Friends is about the strangeness of getting older — the tensions, banality and bizarreness inherent in changing friendships,” critic Lovia Gyarkye wrote in The Hollywood Reporter, which called the 90-minute film “charming.”

Adult Best Friends is available to buy or rent on Amazon Prime Video beginning May 2.