Remembering Sam Shepard

If you recognize Sam Shepard's name, it's probably as the award-winning playwright and actor famous for showing us the darker side of American family life. His work tapped into dysfunctional, somber, sometimes violent themes.

He won a Pulitzer Prize for his play Buried Child and was nominated twice more for Fool for Love and True West. As an actor, he was nominated for an Academy Award for his role as fighter pilot Chuck Yeager in the space race movie, The Right Stuff. Shepard died Thursday of complications from Lou Gehrig's disease.

Shepard wrote fascinating plays during his lifetime. But he also left behind something else: 40 years worth of letters to one of his best friends, a man named Johnny Dark. The letters and their friendship were recently the subject of a documentary showing an intimate side of Shepard — a guy who could be pretty aloof.

Tom Power speaks to Shepard's old friend, housemate, and former father-in-law today on q.

— Produced by Ben Jamieson