Crossing the Impossible Bridge in a Dynamite Truck: Observations on Film, Friendship and Collaboration

In the context of the annual CWL conference (April16-18) on Writers of Extreme Situations, Christopher Goffard

“Crossing the Impossible Bridge in a Dynamite Truck: Observations on Film, Friendship and Collaboration”

In “Crossing the Impossible Bridge in a Dynamite Truck,” Goffard will reflect on his friendship and collaboration with one of cinema’s great poets of desperation and obsession, William Friedkin, and of their efforts to bring some of Goffard’s riskier stories to the screen. As a crystallization of Friedkin’s danger-courting artistry—and as a metaphor for their quest to get controversial projects made— Goffard invokes an image from the filmmaker’s 1977 masterpiece Sorcerer, in which a truck laden with nitroglycerin attempts to cross a crumbling suspension bridge in the South American jungle.

Christopher Goffard is a journalist, novelist, screenwriter and podcaster. A Los Angeles native, he graduated from Cornell University in 1994 with a B.A. in English. His 2007 novel Snitch Jacket was a finalist for the Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best First Novel. At the Los Angeles Times, where he is a staff writer, he was part of the team that won the Pulitzer Prize in Public Service in 2011 for a series exposing corruption in the city of Bell. He has twice been a Pulitzer finalist for feature writing, as well as the winner of the Edward R. Murrow Award and the Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Award. His work appeared in the Best American Newspaper Narratives anthology five years in a row.

Goffard is a pioneer in the realm of nonfiction narrative podcasts, with nearly 100 million downloads. Rolling Stone called his 2017 show, Dirty John, one of the two greatest true-crime podcasts of all time, and he was a writer/producer on the television adaptation starring Eric Bana and Connie Britton. His other two podcasts, Detective Trapp and the Trials of Frank Carson, are currently being developed for television with his participation. His 2018 collection, Dirty John and Other True Stories of Outlaws and Outsiders, published by Simon & Schuster, collects most of his best journalism. Since 2016, he has taught part-time at the Literary Journalism Department at UC Irvine.