A Film by Spencer Ludwig, By David Flusfeder

Life with Dad; backgammon and hookers

Spencer Ludwig is a London-based film-maker; a perfectionist who has an unrealised ambition to make a single great film.

While on a trip to New York, he takes his ailing, 87-year-old dad for a medical check-up, then impulsively decides to whisk him to Atlantic City. What follows is a road-trip full of bickering, backgammon, cops, hookers and gambling, all seen through Spencer's eyes as the kind of movie it would be if it were a movie. Short sections are laid out as a film script. Both father and son are prickly, principled characters – there is a crackle and tension in their dialogue, rendered poignant by the elder man's stroke-induced aphasia. A tragicomic novel about middle- and old-age, and the father-son relationship.