a TV agent that Julia is friends with will be there. JR agrees to come to the party and convinces Colin to come by reminding him that Kim will be there. At the party, the TV agent does not show up and JR has difficulty getting along with her former friends, who seem to have more successful lives than her. Meanwhile, Colin gets into a fight with some guys at the party. After Colin recovers, he makes out with Kim. JR walks into the room where Colin is making out, they engage in a heated argument with Kim. Colin later vomits grossed out by Kim. After the party JR and Colin stop bickering and arguing with each other and connect emotionally. They then passionately kiss and fall asleep; it is implied that they later have sex. The next day, they part as JR drops Colin off at Zoe's house. As JR is about to leave in her car, the front door of the house briefly opens, hinting that Colin is about to come back outside. Production Director Alex Ross Perry first met Carlen Altman at a stand-up comedy show where both were performing. The two became friends, and later co-wrote the screenplay for The Color Wheel. Perry has stated that film was influenced by the novels of Philip Roth, which he was reading while working on the script. Perry wrote the first draft of the script on his own before passing it along to Altman to re-write. The film was shot on black-and-white 16mm film. Production took eighteen days. Unlike many contemporary independent film productions, the film features almost no improvisation and was extensively rehearsed beforehand. The Color Wheel had its world premiere on 14 April 2011 at the Sarasota Film Festival. It played in competition at the Locarno Film Festival, and was also screened at the Vancouver International Film Festival, Maryland Film Festival, and Ljubljana International Film Festival. The film shared the prize for Best Narrative Feature Film at the 2011 Chicago Underground Film Festival. Reception Prior to its 2012 theatrical release, The Color Wheel was named the best undistributed film of 2011 by the Indiewire and Village Voice polls of film critics, and placed 12th in a similar poll conducted by Film Comment. Since its release, the film has received both strongly positive and strongly negative responses from critics. A.O. Scott of The New York Times wrote that