Love and Money, Ecstasy and Death: A Conversation with James Toback

Abstract

Hardly anyone has ever burst into American filmmaking with quite the combination of unlikely background and brash command of James Toback. After a life which veered through university teaching, compulsive gambling and huge debts, a shortlived marriage into an aristocratic English family, and an offbeat collection of literary efforts, among them a pseudonymous porno novel called Substitute Gun, Toback broke into movies with his semi-autobiographical screenplay for Gambler. Under Karel Reisz's direction, this magisterial film became one of the most powerful nightmare visions of the seventies, still incomprehensibly neglected. But Toback surmounted its commercial failure in America to write and direct Fingers for, of all people, George Barrie, whose Brut cosmetics company was taking a flyer in movies. This seething, hallucinatory study of Jimmy Angelelli (Harvey Keitel), a baroquely tormented New Yorker striving to become a concert pianist, like his ethereal, mad mother, but in thrall to his bellowing gangster father as a brutal debt collector, bucked weak advertising and many hostile reviews to find limited American audiences, much of which it jolted into bewilderment with its garish yet elegant explosions of oedipal trauma, sexual longing, and criminal viciousness. Yet a growing number of viewers know it as the most thrilling American debut film (along with Badlands) of the past decade. Intoxicated with the flamboyance of self-destructive seekers after richer, deeper feelings than life seems able to offer in more than tantalizing glimmers, both films also bear the mark of another, often disconcerting Toback work, Jim: Author's Self-Centered Memoir on the Great Jim Brown, a book which grew out of an assignment from Esquire to write an article about the former star fullback for the Cleveland Browns. Instead, Toback ended up sharing Brown's Hollywood high life for around a year-parties, sexual bouts, promotion of black businesses, edgy collisions with a racist-tinged Los Angeles sheriff's department. An undoubted descendant of Norman Mailer's The White Negro, the book is full of pronouncements about blacks as America's true sexual outlaws and sources of psychic power and Toback's obsession with penetrating what he considered an exotic and dangerous world-partly as an initiation rite into manhood, partly as an exorcism of the white's dread of darkness. Later, the book boomeranged against Gambler and Fingers when some critics noticed blacks as emblems of dread and swaggering sexuality in the first and Jim Brown himself in the second, playing a scary stud, Dreems, who, in one shocking scene, clouts the heads of his two white mistresses together. Now comes Love and Money, trailing a different brand of controversy-the announcement that Pauline Kael was leaving her critic's post at New Yorker to work on it under the aegis of Warren Beatty, who was going to star in it, then her departure from the project, even though she and Toback were known to be friends. But, as it turns out, he ascribes their break-up to differences of opinion, about which he is nonspecific. We remain very friendly, he notes. would say, probably in terms of sheer obstinacy, that I would be a lot guiltier than she. In Love and Money, a young Los Angeles banker, Byron Levin (Ray Sharkey), chafes against his job and his happy yet elusively dissatisfying domestic life with his girlfriend Vicki (Susan Heldfond), a dealer in rare books, and his grandfather (King Vidor), a former tycoon forever bantering with him in a senile, yet airily witty, track-jumping conversation. (Vidor took the role after Harry Ritz, of the Ritz Brothers comedy team, fell ill after one day's shooting. Toback's original choice, Henry Miller, was too feeble physically to take it on.) When Frederick Stockheinz (Klaus Kinski), a silver magnate brusque with the swollen power of multinational conglomerates, offers Byron $1 mil-