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Sunday, Nov 22, 2009
We ride four blocks and Toback jumps out of the cab at a stoplight on 92nd Street and passes a wad of cash to the driver. But the restaurant is still five blocks away. When he realizes the mistake he asks himself what the hell he's doing, and we hustle the rest of the way to Elaine's.
The restaurant's namesake, Elaine Kaufman, was in "The Big Bang," Toback's 1989 documentary about the creation of the universe. The film employs Toback's idea that the cosmos began with the orgasmic explosion of God. He lets a diverse group of people, ranging from Kaufman and astronomer Fred Hess to a 7-year-old girl and basketball star Darryl Dawkins, express their theories on how it all began.
Besides God and sex they talk about other issues, like crime, madness and death. Answers range from the girl's theory on the beginning of the universe ("First there was dust, then there was a squirrel, then there was a dog, then there was a cat") to Dawkins' view of his own sex appeal: "I'm 6 foot 11 inches of steel and sex appeal and I try to live up to that." As we enter the restaurant, the maitre d' greets Toback warmly and whisks us into the back room and away from the crowd waiting for tables.
The back room is full. There is a cast party for HBO's "Sex and the City "in the corner guzzling wine, waiting for food to arrive. When the waiter arrives at our table, Toback orders a plate of pasta marinara with "extra, extra" parmesan cheese and a mineral water. I ask him if he ever drinks alcohol. He never does anymore, he says. No alcohol, no cigarettes and no drugs.
The last time Toback took LSD was "the biggest dose ever," he tells me, and it ended his drug career. At 19, in college at Harvard, he tripped for eight days: one day of ecstasy and seven days of madness. He remembers wanting to kill himself but didn't because he thought, "What if I feel like this after I'm dead? Then I can't even have the spiritual fantasy that death is going to end this agony." He says the trip didn't end until he was given an intravenous antidote devised by Max Rinkel, the German doctor who synthesized LSD in Switzerland with Albert Hoffman almost a century ago.
Besides drugs, another addiction that Toback has given up, at least publicly, is gambling. Years of gambling supplied Toback with the creative material for a series of films: After writing the screenplay for Karel Reisz's "The Gambler" in 1974, he wrote and directed "Fingers" (1978), "Love and Money" (1982), "Exposed" (1983) and "The Pick-Up Artist" (1987). All include characters who gamble, and not just with money, says Toback. They deal with obsessive, extreme forms of projection of the self, the forging of the self and the loss of self.
His screenplay for "Bugsy," Warren Beatty's movie about the Hollywood gangster who dreamed up Las Vegas, received an Oscar nomination in 1991. Today Toback concludes: "If you've seen all of my movies, I don't think you ever need to see anything else or hear anything else about gambling, because it's all in one movie or another. They say everything there is to know about gambling, not just from my point of view but from anyone's."
After "The Big Bang," Toback began to experiment with his filmmaking by gradually allowing more and more improvisation. His love for that kind of creative immediacy has meant tinkering with his control as a director. In "Black and White," he offers a medley of people who interact in a mix of improvised and scripted scenes. "It gave the actors the opportunity to display and be observed in the process," says Toback. "It was as if the film and life were going on simultaneously."
But to people who worked on the set with Toback it was a wild ride. David Ferrara, cinematographer of "Harvard Man" and "Black and White," remembers a situation set up by Toback in the latter film that shocked everyone on the set and demonstrated the director's ability to elicit performances by creating situations with unforeseen ends. In the film, Robert Downey Jr. plays Terry, an irrepressible gay man who hits on nearly every man he meets. Terry approaches convicted felon Mike Tyson (playing himself) at a party.
Tyson is standing by a window having a private moment when Downey walks up, nervous and excited to be in the presence of such a famous and violent man. "My heart is pounding," he tells the boxer. "I'm all fluttery, and if I seem strange, I'm sorry."
Tyson interrupts him to warn: "I'm on parole, brother, please."
Downey persists, eyes batting: "I had a dream about you. And in the dream you were holding me." Tyson's rage-filled reaction is real as he smacks and strangles Downey to the ground.
"It stunned me, I had no idea what was going to happen," Ferrara remembers. "I kept filming, but my heart was racing because I couldn't tell how serious the scene was. I didn't know if Mike was really hurting him."
As we leave the restaurant, Toback holds the door for two women, and once outside, he notices a woman bending over a stroller handing a bottle to her baby. He pauses to comment on the baby's cute chubby cheeks. "May I steal him? Can I eat his face?" he teases. "How can you possibly not eat his cheeks? Look at his face. How do you survive with cheeks like that?" The woman blushes as if he is referring to her.
