Curious how such a crime could occur in the late 20th Century in a town with a black mayor and a population that is 45 percent black, the filmmakers traveled to Jasper with two cameramen and, ver the course of a year, talked to locals during the trials of the three accused perpetrators: Shawn Allen Berry, Lawrence Russell Brewer, and John William King.

Dow, 41, took a white cameraman to interview the white community. Williams, 46, brought a black cameraman to interview the black community, they expected from the start that filmmakers of different races would get different answers.

The attitudes and beliefs they found in Jasper, a small town of 8,000 people located 140 miles northwest of Houston, will be broadcast Wednesday night at 9 on WGBH-TV (Channel 2).

The film will be followed by a live Jasper town-hall meeting Thursday night at 9 on Channel 2. ABC News' Td Koppel will host the 90-minute meeting on race in America. ABC's "Nightline" will also broadcast one hour of the meeting Thursday at 11:35pm on WCVB-TV (Channel 5).

Dow went to Jasper two weeks after Byrd's murder to begin preliminary shooting. Williams joined him about six months later. Both filmmakers say the process of condensing 200 hours of footage into a racially sensitive 90-minute film was their greatest challenge.

"It was brutal," says Dow, who since 1990 has been a director of television commercials and short films used internally by businesses. "Two Towns of Jasper" is his first feature-length film.

"It took us a year and a half to edit the film," he says. "Every single cut came down to racial perspective. Who appears weak in this scene? The black person or the white person? Who has the first word and the last word? It was an incredible experience to see how biased Marco and I both were.

"I went into the film thinking our background and experienced trumped race," he adds. "That was naïve. We were both shocked to see how race trumped everything."

Williams, a faculty member in the film department at New York University, is even more explicit. "I'm a black man and he's a white man. The film is about race. What we discovered is we're very different people."

Indeed, in one instance the filmmakers clashed about a scene in which members of the Black Panther Party came to rally in Jasper with guns in hand.

Williams, who directed an episode of the PBS series "Making Peace" in 1995, says, "My read was the whites exhibited an expression of fear."

Dow says: "In my view, the whites were totally contemptuous of them. They thought they were a bunch of fools. So we kept cutting the scene. First, we made the whites look scared. Then we made the Black Panthers look weak. In the end, we couldn't agree on how that rally should be portrayed so the scene was left out."

Williams says he compromised greatly in the making of the film because "two directors is an impossible equation.

"I think ultimately that the majority voice is the prevalent voice in the film," Williams says. "What most people will take away is the experience of the whites and not the blacks. People will tend to remember the guy saying 'nigger' or saying disparaging remarks about the victim.

"I had some poignant material, like Byrd's sister reflecting on how she can't drive down a highway and see a sign that says '3 Miles' and not think about what her brother went throughŠ That didn't pass muster with the entire editorial team."

Dow says that the formal sit-down interview with the sister didn't fit in with the cinema verite style of the rest of the film. "It didn't drive the narrative forward. It brought it to a halt," he says.

They continue to disagree on edits, but the filmmakers do not spill their sentiments into the film. Indeed, they appear only briefly in the beginning of the PBS broadcast in a "Behind the Lens" segment to explain the basics of their project. The film then unfolds chillingly as Sheriff Billy Rowles walks down the road where Byrd was dragged, pointing out where he found the blood trail, clothing, dentures, and a billfold.

Later the film shifts to the media circus going on outside the courthouse as King's trial begins. Nearby, at the "Bubbas in Training" breakfast club, a group of white citizens complain that Byrd, who was known for having a drinking problem and serving time in jail, is being made into an undeserving martyr.

"I think he should be judged by the way he lived and not the way he died," says one man. Adds another woman: "I think it's wrong what they doneŠ. But still, I want the defense to come out and tell who James Byrd was. He was not the pillar of the community."

At the black hair salon Unav's, a group of women talk about how the killing has shed light on festering wounds in the community. Margena Wade, a stylist, tells the camera: "When he was brutally murdered, we didn't burn things. We didn't do an eye for an eyeŠ. It's time to prioritize some things around here. Like why there's only one black person working at the bank. And why there's [another] bank with a whole lot of black customers and there ain't no black person working there. It's just bringing some things to light. Since we're on the battlefield, we're talking about all the little wars we have to do."

As a black man, Williams was decidedly tense when he arrived in Jasper in December 1998. "I was driving alone from Houston to Jasper around 6pm. It was dark. I had never been there. I was nervous," he says. "Every time lights appeared behind my car I would think 'Oh my goodness, they're coming to get me.' "

What Williams encountered, however, were friendly people, white and black. This made his assignment all the more challenging. "I really set my teeth into this question: How did this happen in a place that is a model for the New South? I really wanted to explore to what extent the black community was part of the problem."

Indeed, Williams was confounded by what he perceived as an absence of rage in the black community over a hate crime which was generating national headlines. "The hardest thing for me was not to interject my own rage," Williams says.

"I was trying to get some emotion. I would see ministers meekly standing around at meetings with their hats in their hands. It was hard for me to site on my hands. But this film wasn't about me."

Through interviews with more than 30 black townspeople, Williams concluded that fear was a huge factor in the lack of public outcry. "I came to see that their rage was muted because this is not the first time a violent crime has happened there," he says. "A number of people I interviewed made comments like 'We're afraid for our jobs and lives' and 'It happened once, it can happen again.' "

Now that their work is over, Dow and Williams say they are still friends. Williams ate Christmas dinner with Dow's family. "Race never really came up between us before the film," says Williams. "Race never really comes up with most Americans unless they're confronted by it. We choose not to talk about it, which is part of the problem."

Says Dow: "There's no question that Marco and I are good friends. The relationship will go on but it's a different relationship. I think our relationship was superficial before. I'm far closer to Marco now. I think I have a much deeper understanding of our differences.

"We wet to the same high school but he was one of two black kids. He went to Harvard in the '70s during a time of radical unrest in Boston. I went to Columbia in the '80s. I felt no boundaries as far as where I could go in New York. You want to think race isn't an issue, but for any black or white person, every minute of the day is a different experience. When people talk about a color-blind society, it rankles me to no end. That's just an impossible idea."