After being told that the coin toss in my OWC script reminded someone of No Country for Old Men. It reminded me that we also had Two Face flipping coins in The Dark Knight. So I googled coin tossing and came across this on wiki:  



Coin flipping in fiction

George Raft became famous as the coin-flipping gangster "Guino Rinaldo" in the 1932 Howard Hawks/Howard Hughes film Scarface (1932). Bugs Bunny parodies Raft in the classic 1946 animated short film Racketeer Rabbit. Raft himself later parodied his own gangster persona as the character "Spats Colombo" in Billy Wilder's 1959 comedy Some Like It Hot: Raft sees another mobster flipping a coin and responds, "Where did you pick up that cheap trick?" Raft's coin-tossing established a distinctive motif used in numerous later gangster movies.[1]

At the beginning of an award winning 1939 movie, a state governor has to select an interim Senator, and he is being pressured by two opposing factions to choose between their respective candidates, Mr. Hill or Mr. Miller. Unable to choose, he flips a coin in the privacy of his office, but it falls against a book and lands on edge. Consequently, he makes neither choice, and thus Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.

In the climax of Sholay, Veeru and Jaidev decide their next strategy over their encounter with the villains by tossing a coin (they are in habit of deciding over the affairs between themselves this way). It is revealed at the end that the coin used by him is actually a trick-coin (i.e. it would always show heads on tossing).

The 1972 movie adaptation of Graham Greene's novel Travels with My Aunt ends with a coin toss that will decide the future of one of the characters. The movie ends with the coin in mid-air, leaving their fate unresolved.

Two-Face, the comic book supervillain (most famously as a member of Batman's rogues gallery), has a double-sided coin (both sides are "heads") with one side defaced—a parallel to his actual character, because one side of his face is deformed—which he relies upon for all of his decisions. The coin is also representative of alter-ego Harvey Dent's obsession with duality and the number 2.

In The Twilight Zone episode "A Penny for Your Thoughts," the main character buys a newspaper, and flips a coin into the collection pan, where it lands on its edge. As a consequence, he can hear people's thoughts, but at the end of the day the coin gets knocked off its edge, and he is no longer telepathic.

Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead begins with a series of coin tosses that all come up heads, implying that the characters are suspended in one unchanging moment of time before becoming part of the play.

In the video game Final Fantasy VI, the brothers Edgar and Sabin flip a coin in order to determine who succeeds the throne of Figaro. It is later revealed that Edgar used a double-headed coin in order to win, allowing Sabin to live without the burden of the kingdom. This coin is also seen if Edgar is present in the first encounter with the gambler Setzer who is highly amused by it when it is used to trick him into providing his airship.

In the animated series Futurama, Professor Farnsworth creates a parallel universe. The only difference between our universe and the other is that every time someone flipped a coin, it landed on the opposite side. This leads to extremely different worlds and humorous confusion.

In the American comedy film Mouse Hunt, out of work brothers Lars and Ernie toss a coin to decide who gets to sleep in the only bed in the inherited house. The coin ends up spinning on the floor and coming to rest on edge—an extremely rare and unlikely occurrence—so the brothers share the bed.

The Hong Kong-made film Shaolin Soccer contains a scene in which one of Sing's brothers is being asked to join Sing's soccer team, and he refuses because he mathematically predicts the team will fail; he uses a coin toss to demonstrate his point, saying it has zero chance of landing on its edge. When the coin is carelessly dropped later in the scene, the brother is amazed to discover that it has, indeed, landed on its edge and gotten stuck inside a small crack in the asphalt.

The DVD of Final Destination 3, has a special feature allowing the viewer to flip a coin to determine the outcome of the movie; however, the outcome is fixed to maintain the plot, and the coin flip is meaningless.

Isaac Asimov's short story The Machine that Won the War ends with a character revealing that he made his decisions based on coin tosses.

The final episode of the American television series JAG ends with an incomplete coin flip.

In the book and film of No Country For Old Men, Anton Chigurh, the story's primary antagonist, occasionally flips coins for potential victims. He allows people to place their life in the hands of divine providence, and those who refuse the chance to live are killed anyway, for their obstinancy and refusal to submit to Fate. The meaning of Chigurh's coin-flipping is left ambiguous (in both the book and the film), and has led to considerable discussion: commentators suggest, for example, that Chigurh views himself as simply following the will of the universe, or is "merely cruel,"[2] or that it is an inevitable outgrowth of his (perceived) atheism or that Chigurh is in fact a stand-in for fate, or alternatively that his adherence to chance is a way for him to deny responsibility for his actions and/or to displace that responsibility onto his victims.[3]

The funny thing is that they all seem related to chance, except for the George Raft/Bugs Bunny one.  If I remember correctly, those characters just flip the coin and catch it, not paying any attention to what it actually lands on.

I guess the Twilight Zone episode is kind of along the lines as well.  I think that's the one with Dick York.  Good episode.

Wow Chris!!! This is an impressive post!

In my last OWC short, I had "dice" buried in "the past" of Ulysees Hoover, in "A Guy Named Yuley."  Literally, they were buried, (as symbolic of his past) but I didn't explain them; so they just showed up unannounced and I just confused everyone.

Although I couldn't get into it in this short because I was actually working with the idea of it as being a "part" for a feature, "The Buried Dice" were related to a buried and unresolved past. They weren't actually supposed to represent chance so much as they were meant to represent a specific destination towards "Truth".

I think I need to learn how to clarify an expression. In this case: It was the dice representing a particular and important destiny that will teach Ulysees how to rise above his fear and integrate all of his negative experiences into a unified whole-- thereby melding him with "The Brotherhood".

My idea was to represent the future as existing and most certainly existing in more than just an abstract form. Just as the destination to say Calgary exists to me as being an hour away, and south by car and I have notions about it whether I've been there before or not. But I can't see it and it's really just an illusion whether I've been there before or not.

The idea of working with The Future this way-- as a journey-- intrigues me, but it's so easy to lapse into vagueness that it just confuses everyone. I think that's what messed me up in "A Guy Named Yuley." I was working in this vague world and I hadn't bothered to explain it.

The coin toss, or the roll of the dice: I think these are powerful representations of what we think of as chance, but I truly wonder how chance-worthy they are. I like to read about superposition and other crazy quantum physics stuff and I tend to feel we can jump into new realities very quicky; so, although there might be some logic behind it-- it still needs to be explained to the audience or they won't have a clue.

Snake Eyes!!!

Sandra