Spanking the Monkey burst upon the independent film scene in 1994, winning the Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival, and Independent Spirit awards for Best First Screenplay and Best First Feature. The film, which deals with incest between a mother and son, is a startling mixture of sexual and emotional intensity, suffused with black comedy. Its particular achievement is in making this situation a metaphor for the pressures and repression present in the nuclear family. Caryn James, in the New York Times, said that the film was 'the sort of astonishingly fresh and self-assured work that can make a reputation'. Flirting with Disaster takes family matters down the road as Mel Coplin traverses America in search of his biological parents and becomes entangled in a variety of sexual and emotional misadventures. Its gentle comedy cloaks a seriousness every much as rigorous as that in Spanking the Monkey.