  When two 2D electron gas layers, each at Landau level filling factor
$\nu=1/2$, are close together a condensate of interlayer excitons emerges at
low temperature. Although the excitonic phase is qualitatively well understood,
the incoherent phase just above the critical layer separation is not. Using a
combination of interlayer tunneling spectroscopy and conventional transport, we
explore the incoherent phase in samples both near the phase boundary and
further from it. In the more closely spaced bilayers we find the electronic
spectral functions narrower and the Fermi energy of the $\nu = 1/2$ composite
fermion metal smaller than in the more widely separated bilayers. We attribute
these effects to a softening of the intralayer Coulomb interaction due to
interlayer screening.
