|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
James
Toback[1] [1]
John Andrew Gallagher, Film directors on directing
(London: Praeger, 1989), 254, 256. James Toback's
The pick-up artist (US 1987) might usefully be
approached via a question: What motivated me to watch this
film? Of course, this is hardly the kind of question with
which criticism generally concerns itself: as readers, we
tend to be interested in what the critic made of a given
experience, not her reasons for undergoing it in the first
place. Yet no one enters a cinema without prior
expectations, and, for good or ill, these expectations form
a prism through which we interpret whatever unreels before
us. Why, then, did I view The pick-up artist (on
video - it never received a UK theatrical release - sometime
in 1989)? Publicity
materials promoted it as a star vehicle for Molly Ringwald,
and though Ringwald had been the best thing in several John
Hughes movies (she also made memorable appearances in Paul
Mazursky's Tempest [USA 1982] and Godard's
King Lear [US-Switzerland 1987]), her
presence alone would hardly have encouraged me to take a
look (it certainly wasn't enough to inspire a viewing of
John Avildsen's For keeps [US 1988]). The
actual lead turned out to be Robert Downey Jr (here credited
as "Robert Downey"), an actor I knew only as the son of a
"cult" auteur whose work I'd vaguely heard of. The subject
matter and casting suggested a John Hughes variation
(indeed, Downey had a small role in Weird science
[US 1986]) - perhaps it would be as unendurable as
John Byrum's The whoopee boys (US 1986), surely the
worst movie ever made by any filmmaker of proven
talent. No, the reason I
sought out this film was James Toback, a director whose
three previous pictures - Fingers (US 1977), Love
and money (US 1980, released, kind of, in 1982) and
Exposed (US 1983) - I adored: had Toback directed the
next Police academy movie, I would have watched it.
So what did I make of The pick-up artist? Well, to be
honest, I found it disappointing: not bad exactly - in many
ways it was quite pleasant - but hardly what I thought
Toback should be doing. Had this been the work of a new
director, I would have left it at that. But the mere fact of
Toback's authorship made it inevitable that I go back for
another look. Followed by another. And another. In all, I
must have seen The pick-up artist a dozen times, my
admiration growing with each viewing - I now consider it one
of the best American films of the 80s. Interestingly, I
followed exactly the same trajectory with another 1987
comedy, Elaine May's Ishtar (US 1987) - and there my
reactions (as well as my expectations) were even more
extreme: I usually nominate May's Mikey and Nicky (US
1973-1976) as my all-time favourite whenever I am asked to
draw up a ten-best list; I initially regarded Ishtar
as an unmitigated disaster; I now, after countless viewings,
believe it to be among the American cinema's finest
achievements. I was reminded of this when I read V.F.
Perkins' admirable monograph on Orson Welles' The
magnificent Ambersons (US 1942), in which he claimed
that "one of the merits of a director-centred approach to
cinema is that it can prompt us, in the face of a picture by
a gifted film-maker that seems boring, baffling or botched,
to ask whether the fault may not be in the movie so much as
in our way of looking at it."[2] [2]
V.F. Perkins, The magnificent Ambersons (London:
British Film Institute,1999), 18. So why did I
initially have such difficulty with The pick-up
artist and Ishtar? My confusion can, I think, be
traced to the fact that both works belong to a virtually
extinct comic tradition. If we put the 'mise en scene'
school (Frank Tashlin, Jerry Lewis, Mel Brooks, John Landis,
Joe Dante) off to one side, it becomes clear that the sound
era's greatest comedies - from Leo McCarey's The awful
truth (US 1937), Howard Hawks' Bringing up Baby
(US 1938) and Preston Sturges' The lady Eve (USA
1941) to Billy Wilder's Kiss me, stupid (USA 1964)
and Welles' The trial (France-Italy-Germany 1962) -
all share the same theme: the chastisement of masculine
presumption by one or a series of independent women. In the
80s - apart from a handful of throwbacks such as Scorsese's
After hours (US 1985),which is virtually a remake of
The trial, and Blake Edwards' late masterpieces - the
emphasis becomes rather different, and is best summed up by
a line of dialogue from Ghostbusters (US 1984):
"Let's show this prehistoric bitch how we do things
downtown". Although we hardly think of Toback as a
classicist, Fingers clearly belongs with the male
melodramas of Aldrich and Minnelli, and it is safe to say
that I initially rejected The pick-up artist because
of an inability to connect its strategies with that
tradition to which, in retrospect, they so obviously
belong. But the film's
"problems" run deeper than this, and demonstrate the
advantages of Perkins' "director centred approach to
cinema". Based on the little evidence I have, it would seem
that The pick-up artist changed considerably between
original concept and final form. These changes - most
(though not all) of which come under the heading of
commercial compromise - would be of no interest to us had
they not left marks and traces. The most obvious of these
"marks" (indeed, their reductio ad absurdum) is also the
most trivial: it appears that the film was originally
intended to be released with an American R-certificate, but
was reworked during post-production to conform with the
stricter rules of the (then relatively new) PG-13 category:
thus we now hear Harvey Keitel tell Robert Downey to "get
the hell out of here" while his lips mouth the words "get
the fuck out of here". But those traces
left by the conceptual alterations are just as visible: in
his 1994 journal, Toback recalls that "The pick-up
artist was originally conceived as a movie for a man in
his mid-forties, and Bobby De Niro was to play him. After a
reading at De Niro's apartment, however, it became
simultaneously clear to him and to me, and independently to
The pick-up artist's shadow producer Warren Beatty,
that the idea of a man nearing fifty compulsively repeating
his obsessional cruising habits was perhaps a bit too
unpalatable...So we switched gears and I reconceived the
role for Robert Downey, who was twenty-five years
younger".[3]
Toback doesn't say as much, but after three financial flops
he was probably looking for a project which might attract a
wider audience. [3]
James Toback, "Divisions and dislocations: a journal for
1994", in John Boorman and Walter Donohue (eds),
Projections 4 (London: Faber and Faber, 1995),
53-4. Toback's admirers
may be able to reconstruct the initial concept by reference
to the director's previous films: perhaps Jack Jericho was a
university lecturer along the lines of James Caan's Axel
Freed in The gambler (US 1974, directed by Karel
Reisz from Toback's screenplay) or Toback himself in
Exposed, though the casting of Downey makes the
character's employment as a teacher of small children more
appropriate; perhaps Jack was supposed to live with his
aging mother (echoing the problematic parental relationships
of The gambler, Fingers and Exposed),
transformed into a grandmother when the script was rewritten
(though even this has a precedent in Love and money,
where the protagonist lives with his senile grandfather), a
structural alteration curiously alluded to in the finished
film when the grandmother wakes up and tells Jack that she
had been dreaming about "your mother in a convertible
Plymouth, looking younger than you do". The pick-up
artist might have been a tougher film with an older
actor, and while it seems reasonable to assume that Toback
considered offering the part to "shadow producer" (another
ghost?) Warren Beatty, the ideal casting would surely have
been Fingers star Harvey Keitel. What makes this more
than just idle speculation is that The pick-up artist
features Keitel in the minor role of Alonzo, an older
version of the character he played in Fingers, now
deprived of his more human qualities (difficult to imagine
Alonzo pursuing a career as a concert pianist) and living in
that purely animal state to which we saw him reduced at the
end of the previous film: cementing the connection is Tony
Sirico as "Patsy", the hood murdered by Keitel in
Fingers, here returned to life (same name, same
actor) as Keitel's subordinate. Such ghostly
traces and strange coincidences appear in abundance: Flash
(Dennis Hopper) refers to Jack as "Jimmy", the name of
Keitel's character in Fingers; when Jack tries his
standard "face of a Botticelli" line on Randy Jensen
(Ringwald), whom he pursues in precisely the way Keitel
pursued Tisa Farrow in Fingers, he discovers she is
carrying a Botticelli anthology (hidden under several
gambling books, another echo of Fingers and The
gambler's culture/violence split); and Jack later sees
Randy taking the same medication as his grandmother. As in
Monte Hellman's Silent night, deadly night III: better
watch out! (US 1989), the director addresses a "popular"
audience while occasionally winking at cinephiles (Hellman
even provides a narrative justification for this by
structuring his film around different kinds of coded
communication), the casting connections suggesting that
Toback's original concept was not so much altered as
relegated to sub-plot status, with the unhealthy
obsessiveness we might be tempted to criticise in Jack
Jericho shifted into the background: Alonzo, the ass-grabber
on the street, the "creep" on the bus and the rich Colombian
businessman Fernando (Bob Gunton), who, like Jack, is
"obsessed" with Randy, all function as vile doubles for the
ostensibly sympathetic protagonist. The connection is
made explicit during Jack's outburst in the casino, when he
disowns his own behaviour by projecting it onto Alonzo
("I've seen your kind all my life. Everybody has... He hits
on women wherever he goes, he walks, talks, jumps 'em in the
back of his car, practically breaks their back on the gear
shift, then takes their number and never calls...I bet you
got a list of all the women that you've done this to and I
bet you carry it around in your back pocket."): as on his
first appearance rehearsing pick-up lines before a mirror,
Jack talks to himself while supposedly addressing someone
else. In a sense, these
doubles compensate for the casting compromises while
creating several cracks through which Toback's original
concept can seep. Of course, to praise The pick-up
artist in these terms would be to praise its
incoherence, its failure as a self-contained work of art. It
is here that an auteurist approach comes into conflict with
traditional critical methods. Shouldn't a film be judged on
its own merits rather than justified by reference to its
director's past achievements? Perhaps, but then again, this
seems needlessly limiting. A better question might be, can
we take pleasure from The pick-up artist? And if so,
where is this pleasure located? I have suggested
that the film's function is comparable to that of the
classical Hollywood comedy, but I would be lying if I denied
that part of my positive response involves an
unreconstructed auteurist joy at recognizing Toback's
authorial signature. I have long maintained that we
cinephiles are nothing more than the wandering ghosts of
those mythical popular audiences who once visited the cinema
regularly, and it would seem that Toback feels much the same
way: he has learnt the lesson Hollywood's masters had to
teach - not a formula for feel-good entertainment calculated
to produce certain effects (as with Spielberg), but a role
model for the communication of ideologically problematic and
even radical ideas. By connecting this impulse to a more
modern interest in authorial discourse, The pick-up
artist suggests a way forward for the American
cinema.
1974 words
Abstract
| Printer
version
"It's a
comedy about subjects which more easily lend themselves
to tragedy (...)The pick-up artist was more of a
collaboration than any other film by far, but my original
intentions were clear throughout, changed
throughout."
