James Toback

James Toback
Toback in 2009
Born	(1944-11-23) November 23, 1944 Manhattan, New York City, U.S.
Occupation(s)	Film director, screenwriter
Spouse(s)	Consuelo Sarah Churchill Vanderbilt Russell ​ ​ (m. 1968; div. 1969)​ Stephanie Kempf ​ (m. 1992)​

James Toback (/ˈtuːbæk/; born November 23, 1944) is an American screenwriter and film director. He was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay in 1991 for Bugsy. He has directed films including The Pick-up Artist, Two Girls and a Guy and Black and White.

On October 22, 2017, the Los Angeles Times reported that 38 women have accused Toback of sexual harassment or assault. Since the article was published, 357 additional women contacted Los Angeles Times and said that Toback had sexually harassed them. The accounts stretch over a 40-year period. Toback has denied all the allegations.

Early life

Toback was born and raised in Manhattan, New York City, the only child in a well-to-do Jewish household. His mother, Selma Judith (née Levy), was a president of the League of Women Voters and a moderator of political debates on NBC. His maternal grandfather, Joseph Crawford Levy, co-founded The Harry S. Truman Research Institute for the Advancement of Peace. Levy also worked with Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan to co-found the then-radical Society for the Advancement of Judaism. Toback's father, Irwin Lionel Toback, was a stockbroker and later vice president of Dreyfus Corporation.

An assignment from Esquire to write about football great and actor Jim Brown led to Brown's invitation to host Toback for an extended stay in Brown's Hollywood Hills home. Brown said that "along with both of us liking girls, I just like his intellect." Afterward, Toback wrote a book about his experiences as Brown's house guest: Jim: The Author's Self-Centered Memoir of the Great Jim Brown (1971).

Film career

Toback at Cannes in 2013

Toback's first major film success was with writing The Gambler in 1974. He credits actress and friend Lucy Saroyan, his literary agent Lynn Nesbit, and Nesbit's contact in film Mike Medavoy with getting his the script to director Karel Reisz and then to Paramount Pictures. For a year, Toback attached himself to Reisz "as his acolyte" in "the perfect mentor-protegé relationship," and he later described Reisz as "my one-man film school." The Gambler opened in theaters in 1974.

Toback's directorial début was the 1978 film Fingers, with Harvey Keitel. In her review of Fingers, film critic Pauline Kael wrote of Toback's "true moviemaking fever." Toback followed Fingers with Love and Money in 1982, Exposed in 1983, The Pick-up Artist in 1987, and the documentary The Big Bang in 1989.

In 1991, he wrote the screenplay for Bugsy, which won the 1991 Los Angeles Film Critics Association award for best screenplay of the year and was nominated for both the Academy Award for best original screenplay and for the Golden Globe best screenplay award.

Filmmaker Nicholas Jarecki examined Toback in a 2005 documentary The Outsider: A Film about James Toback.

Toback's documentary Tyson, which he directed and co-produced, was featured at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival, winning a prize in the festival's Un Certain Regard section. That film was nominated for best documentary awards in several United States competitions.

In 2009, the San Francisco International Film Festival selected Toback for its annual Kanbar Award for excellence in screenwriting.

Over his career, Toback's film direction has ranged from the large-scale and spectacular Exposed to the small-scale and single-setting Two Girls and a Guy, one of three Toback films that cast Robert Downey Jr in a featured role. The Oldenburg International Film Festival selected Toback and his work for its 2008 "Retrospective." Other directors have since re-made two Toback films. French director Jacques Audiard's 2005 remake of Fingers as The Beat That My Heart Skipped won numerous Best Film awards. English director Rupert Wyatt re-made The Gambler in 2014.

Critical reception

Toback's films have drawn a mixed response. Many if not most of the films deal with gambling, danger, sex, and death, topics that Toback's cast members examine through intense heady dialog, in a story often punctuated by violence and sometimes leavened by humor.

Film executive Richard Albarino is quoted as saying of Toback, "He never wrote or made anything he hadn't experienced first. He can't write fiction; he can only write diaries and dramatize them."

Owen Gleiberman, chief film critic for Variety, called Toback's 2017 An Imperfect Murder "a thrift-shop psychological X-ray that demands to be taken on its own Tobackian terms. But even on those terms, it spends too much time telling us things that it should be showing us."

Critic Roger Ebert, who panned The Pick-up Artist but praised Toback's other films, said of Toback that as a director, "He's alive. He's in your face. He's trying. He's trying to do something amazing. And to see somebody trying to do that even if they don't always succeed is much more interesting than to see somebody who is not even trying to do it in the first place."

Sexual misconduct allegations

See also: Weinstein effect

Toback has been accused of sexually harassing young women.

An article in a 1989 issue of Spy magazine detailed how Toback would "hang out on the streets of the Upper West Side in New York City, and approach women. According to the story, he would in rapid-fire fashion tell them that he was a Hollywood director and offer to show them his Directors Guild of America card. The pitch invariably ended up with an invite to meet privately—sometimes at an outlandishly late hour—to talk about appearing in one of his films".

In 2008 and 2015 Gawker articles described Toback as a "pick-up artist".

On October 22, 2017, the Los Angeles Times reported that 38 women have accused Toback of sexual harassment or assault. Toback denied these allegations, saying he had not met the women, or that if he had, it "was for five minutes" about which he had "no recollection". The alleged harassment occurred at meetings framed as interviews or casting auditions in places such as hotel rooms, movie trailers, or a public park where Toback asked questions pertaining to the women's sex lives and rubbed his crotch on them or masturbated. Accusers include actresses Rachel McAdams, Selma Blair, Terri Conn, Caterina Scorsone, Julianne Moore, Becky Wahlstrom, and musician Louise Post. Toback claimed he was taking medication at the time of the alleged assaults that made it "biologically impossible" for the alleged actions to occur.

In January 2018, Los Angeles Times journalist Glenn Whipp reported that since the Times published its article in October 2017, 395 women contacted the newspaper and said that Toback had sexually harassed them. The accounts stretch over a 40-year period. Toback has denied all these allegations as well. As of January 2018 Toback has been accused by at least 38 women.

In April, 2018, Los Angeles County prosecutors declared they would not be pressing any charges against Toback. In one case the victim did not turn up for an interview, and the rest were beyond the statute of limitations. Two of the declined cases involved misdemeanors, three involved felonies.

Personal life

Toback and his wife Stephanie Kempf, married since 1992, live in New York. Kempf had edited Toback's first documentary The Big Bang in 1989. They have one son. Toback had an early and brief first marriage to Consuelo Sarah Churchill Vanderbilt Russell, the granddaughter of John Spencer-Churchill, 10th Duke of Marlborough.

Filmography

Year	Title	Director	Writer	Producer	Notes
1974	The Gambler	No	Yes	No
1978	Fingers	Yes	Yes	No
1982	Love and Money	Yes	Yes	Yes
1983	Exposed	Yes	Yes	Yes
1987	The Pick-up Artist	Yes	Yes	No
1991	Bugsy	No	Yes	No	Nominated- Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay Nominated- Golden Globe Award for Best Screenplay
1997	Two Girls and a Guy	Yes	Yes	No
1999	Black and White	Yes	Yes	No
2001	Harvard Man	Yes	Yes	No
2004	When Will I Be Loved	Yes	Yes	No
2017	The Private Life of a Modern Woman	Yes	Yes	No	Later re-titled An Imperfect Murder

Documentary films

Year	Title	Director	Writer	Producer
1989	The Big Bang	Yes	Yes	No
2008	Tyson	Yes	Yes	Yes
2013	Seduced and Abandoned	Yes	Yes	Yes

Acting roles

• Exposed (1983) ... Leo Boscovitch
• Alice (1990) ... Professor Davis
• Bugsy (1991) ... Gus Greenbaum
• Black and White (1999) ... Arnie Tishman
• Death of a Dynasty (2003) ... Lyor Cohen
• When Will I Be Loved (2004) ... Professor Hassan Al-Ibrahim Ben Rabinowitz
• The Outsider (2005) ... Himself (Documentary)
• Mississippi Grind (2015) ... Tony Roundtree

External links

• James Toback at IMDb
• Director James Toback on the Charlie Rose Show
• In-depth interview with Toback about "Tyson" at everhip.com
• Vanity Fair: "A Hollywood Mis-Education"