The original pick-up artist
As we walk though Central Park, James Toback tells me a true story that sounds more like a scene from a movie. It's about a pedophile, accused of sleeping with boys, on the run from the police and $10,000 in debt to a bookie, who has just shown up at Toback's hotel room door begging for the money. Suddenly, Toback's voice begins to trail off. Something has caught his eye. He grabs my forearm; we stop walking.
"Come over here," he says. "I want to show you something. This is an example of how I get a bad reputation."
With his hands on my shoulders, he focuses me on a woman with long blond hair who is reading cross-legged on a blanket in the middle of the Great Lawn. "This is what I do," he whispers as we head toward her, "I see this girl, and she looks like she may be interesting. And as I get closer and closer I see if she still holds my attention. I see if there's a gravitational pull; because if there isn't, what's the fucking point?"
But we walk past her. He pans his arm from left to right across the skyline of trees that surround Central Park, This shot could be an establishing scene.
Then we actually turn back and walk up to her. His hand is on my back, guiding us toward her, and I'm nervous, scrambling for something to say. But he takes the lead, and as he approaches her he says, "Excuse me. I wonder. Have you ever done, or would you be interested in doing, anything cinematic? And if you are, would you be interested in discussing it?" Squinting her eyes in confusion and blushing, she asks what he means.
"My name's James Toback," he smiles as he shakes her hand. "I'm a movie director. Have you ever seen 'Black and White' or 'Two Girls and a Guy' or 'The Pick-Up Artist'?" She shakes her head no.
So he jokes, "You're under arrest," and turns the conversation to her. "Are you a student? What are you majoring in? Did you vote for her for Senate?" he asks, pointing to the Clinton for Senate flier in her lap. He's captivated her. She plays with her hair and beams up at the bearded, balding man who might put her name in bright lights.
He's as charming as Robert Downey Jr.'s character in "The Pick-Up Artist" (1987), the compulsive womanizer who combs the Upper West Side for candidates and justifies his behavior by saying, "I have a vested interest in meeting strangers. Every woman that I've ever liked or communed with or given great satisfaction to always started off as a stranger."
The girl has forgotten that Toback is a stranger. He interrupts her giggles and goings-on about voting for Clinton. "Check out my work," he says. "If you see anything you think you connect with and might want to be a part of -- without promising anything -- call me."
A one-of-a-kind-opportunity smile forms on her face, she hands him her flier and he writes his number on it. As she thanks him, we turn away and he says, "I do that 15 times a week. Well, OK, maybe 50 times a week. Forty girls and 10 guys."
Toback's routine reveals how life is a laboratory for his films. The director brazenly puts himself in dicey situations and then bases his films on the resulting risks and consequences. Of the nine movies he has written and directed, all are autobiographical to some extent. Just as "The Pick-Up Artist" reflects Toback's personality, so do the rest of his films.
"The idea is not to have a separation between my life and my movies," Toback says. The claim is not a novel one but seems especially interesting in his case. By leading a hopelessly theatrical life, he has found the fodder for nine films. He's an East Coast guy with West Coast connections who, like Orson Welles, demonstrates the creative uses of his theatrical extravagances.
Although Toback's obsessive lifestyle has created obstacles for him, it has also provided the formula for his filmmaking. With the release of his last film, "Black and White" (1999), Toback "[threw] down a challenge to every other filmmaker working in this country," proclaimed Film Journal. Now, at 57 and married for the second time, Toback is releasing "Harvard Man," which opened last week in New York and should reach other cities soon. It's a movie he's talked about making for more than a decade. His most autobiographical yet, it seems to encapsulate all his gambles.
Ask anyone in the film industry about Toback, and his less discreet days of '70s excess as a gambler, partygoer and womanizer are sure to arise. His libido was so legendary that in 1989 Spy magazine published an eight-page foldout chart of his exploits called "The Pick-Up Artist's Guide to Picking Up Women."
But Toback never concealed his behavior; he flaunted it. He even wrote a book, "Jim" (1971), an admittedly self-centered biography of football legend Jim Brown that chronicles Toback's experience as a Jewish white guy who lived with Brown in Hollywood, a life that was essentially a series of wild parties and orgies: "Jim [Brown] is making his rounds ... Jane Fonda is there and Sharon Tate ... I drift into an old friend, a delicate girl of angled, Nordic beauty ... and embark with her on an orgy ... Jim joins."
Jul 2, 2002 | The book includes tidbits of advice, like Warren Beatty's supposed suggestion to include a small part for a pretty young actress in every motion picture and to schedule auditions for that part late in the day. Indeed, Toback's films include a troupe of pretty young women, from unknowns to recognized actresses like Nastassja Kinski ("Exposed," 1983), Heather Graham ("Two Girls and a Guy," 1997), Claudia Schiffer ("Black and White," 1999) and Sarah Michelle Gellar, who stars in "Harvard Man."
In Toback's new film, sex, gambling, madness and drugs converge in a story loosely based on his college days at Harvard (class of 1966). Adrian Grenier stars as Alan Jensen, a philosophy student and the star of Harvard's basketball team, lured by his girlfriend and Mafia princess Cindy Bandolini (Gellar) to fix the team's game against Yale. But before the big game Alan drops LSD and winds up tripping for eight days. Soon the FBI and the Mafia are after him and his solution is to seek refuge in the arms of his sexy, bisexual philosophy teacher.
Toback sees "Harvard Man" as a complete fulfillment of his vision. "It is the first movie that really makes madness felt," says Toback. "You get the sense of the hallucinatory beauty of it," he adds, referring to the digital-effects-laden scene of Alan's trip. "It's both the ecstasy and excruciating pain of death." It includes what he describes as his favorite hallucination: seeing a nude woman walk out of a Gauguin painting.
We've almost made it to the west side of Central Park, a place Toback says he visits every day. His pace is surprisingly quick; he swerves from path to path knowingly. Near a reservoir he points left to a minicanyon of rocks and twisted trees where the opening scene of "Black and White" was filmed. But the scene is memorable more for its sex than the landscape. It opens to the beat of the Stylistics' '70s hit "Daddy's Little Girl," and the camera pans to a ménage à troisfeaturing two young girls and a black gangster pressed up against a tree while another black man looks on. Though the copulating trio is mostly clothed, it is incredibly suggestive, even after the three cuts necessary to get an R rating from the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA).
Sex has always been one of Toback's favorite subjects, especially when it's raw and unadulterated. He favors direct, explicit sexual depiction over watered-down anesthetized scenes because, he says, sexual obsession and sexual duplicity are ignored in American movies today. The director doesn't want to make NC-17 movies (many theater chains won't show them and many newspapers won't advertise them). He knows that an R rating is more marketable, but insists there's a purpose behind his explicit material.
"The whole idea of a sex scene," Toback told Charlie Rose in a 1998 TV interview, "is that it be a scene in which characters reveal themselves by the specifics of their behavior. If it's worth making a movie about these characters, it's worth understanding their sexual nature." Read On...
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