Sunday, Jul 20, 2008
Filmmaker James Toback talks about race, sex, Warren Beatty and his explosive new movie, "Black and White."
Mar 30, 2000 | For much of his improbable career as a filmmaker, James Toback has suffered the slings and arrows of his own outrageousness. Entering the American movie scene first as a screenwriter (for Karel Reisz's 1974 "The Gambler") and then as a writer-director (with the 1978 urban nightmare "Fingers"), Toback was an unruly provocateur at a time when the Hollywood spectrum was constricting into popcorn mythology at one end and yuppie soap opera at the other.
The merging of his personal life and his creative obsessions with sex and gambling made him a target of Spy magazine, which detailed his dating methodology with great merriment. Journalists have always had difficulty dealing with the outsize appetites of expansive theatrical personalities; both gossip columnists and upscale pundits love to wax holier than them.
Combined with all the bad P.R., early career flops like the inchoate "Love and Money" (1982) and the charming, underrated "The Pick-up Artist" (1987) would have sunk less hardy spirits. But with the help of friends like Warren Beatty and Barry Levinson, Toback kept pulling himself back into the movie game. His scintillating 1990 documentary about the meaning of life, "The Big Bang," followed quickly by his droll, Oscar-nominated 1991 script for Beatty's and Levinson's "Bugsy," opened new accounts in the bank of critical goodwill.
By the time he made "Two Girls and a Guy," a sexual psychodrama with Robert Downey Jr., Heather Graham and Natasha Gregson Wagner, hipsters and independents had caught up with him. It was one of the best-reviewed films of the '90s -- though, to my mind, it was flaccid work and the rare Toback film to be overrated.
My sense that he'd arrived was confirmed when Steven Soderbergh referred to Toback's movies with insight in the 1999 book "Getting Away With It." In a diary section, Soderbergh writes, "Here I sit like a character in a James Toback movie, having promised something I can't hope to deliver and, on top of it, feeling completely bankrupt in an artistic sense. I've put myself in this situation, so what am I seeking from this? Do I want to fail and be disgraced?"
Soderbergh sees the Toback persona as an all-or-nothing aesthetic gambler. Which brings us to Toback's comeback in that vein, "Black and White," a semi-improvised piece of documentary fiction that has the heat and deftness of Norman Mailer's journalism or John Dos Passos' "U.S.A." At its core it depicts the intersection of upper-middle-class, hip-hop-besotted white youths with street blacks yearning to sell their mystique for a slice of white America's pie. It's also an inflammatory, millennial vision of lives lived without boundaries, for better and worse. It's a group portrait of Our City, USA, with guns, basketball, bimbos and bribes.
The pivot of the film is Bijou Phillips (John Phillips' daughter), a preppy blond beauty who erotically flaunts her way into the circle of Power -- that is, the Wu-Tang Clan member who goes by the name of Power, playing a rapper who wants to leave his back-alley ways behind and become a bona fide pop-culture success. Toback surrounds them with a panoply of figures who are equally confused and compromised, ranging from a black basketball player (Allan Houston) and his white Ph.D.-bound girlfriend (Claudia Schiffer) to a conniving undercover cop (Ben Stiller) and an ambitious D.A. (Joe Pantoliano) whose sons are also in thrall to hip-hop. Add Brooke Shields as a documentary filmmaker, Downey as her gay husband, Marla Maples as Phillips' mom and Mike Tyson as himself, and you've got a society that's suffering, collectively, from exploding possibilities and imploding personal identities.
Toback plays a bit part as a recording-studio owner who will deal with Power only through a lawyer. But the film's echt Toback character is Stiller, a guy who can't help going for what he wants even if it results in murder by proxy.
Advance publicity has predictably focused on Leonardo DiCaprio's tangential relationship to the movie: Toback was doing the New York club scene with the young actor when he was struck by the influence of hip-hop on the star and his friends. But his fascination with black urban culture goes back decades, to earlier New York hip scenes and to his close friendship with Jim Brown.
Toback says that as a teenager he was living the life of "the White Negro" even before he read the famous Dissent essay in which his old friend Norman Mailer named and analyzed the phenomenon. Indeed, rereading Mailer's essay after seeing Toback's movie, which also portrays psychopathy as a mode of existential exploration, you may feel that the biggest difference between "White Negroes" and today's "wiggers" is that what once was cutting-edge behavior is now (in urban society, at least) perilously common.
I've read that "Black and White" derives from your experiences a few years ago clubbing around with Leonardo DiCaprio. But the subject matter of this movie is not that new for you.
The real origins are much deeper. They go back to the sons of the woman who worked in our apartment when I was growing up. Thomas and Eugene were my age -- we're talking about when I was 3, 4, 5 years old -- and I was keenly aware of them being a completely different kind of person because of race. I was definitely drawn to them. I think I ended up doing something physically violent to one of them, but it was out of a competitive friendliness. Then there was a guy named Gus Chappell in third grade, who I became very close to. [He was] the only black guy in school -- the Ethical Culture school, a purely white, liberal, upper-middle-class, largely Jewish private school in New York, which puts you in a world at once broad-minded and narrow in its social exposure.
The real turning point came when I met and fell under the spell of Carl Lee. When I was 15 or 16 I saw Shirley Clarke's "The Cool World" [the 1963 urban underground classic] and was magnetized by Carl Lee. I went back to 72nd Street, where I lived, and down the block, there, two hours after seeing him play the lead on screen, was Carl Lee standing in front of his white Triumph TR6, smoking a cigarette in his navy-blue blazer and his white shirt, looking very debonair. I told him I'd just seen the movie and that he was great. He was effusively friendly, and by the end of the conversation I had lent him $20 and bought some marijuana for him.
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