Program Guide - San Francisco International Film Festival - San ...

KAnbAr AWArd
JAMEs TObACK
The Kanbar Award for excellence in screenwriting
acknowledges the crucial role that strong
screenwriting plays in the creation of great films.
FEsTivAL sCREENiNg
Tyson
PREviOus RECiPiENTs
2008 Peter Morgan
2007 Robert Towne
2006 Jean-Claude Carrière
2005 Paul Haggis
40
This coming November, James Toback will be 65, and
entitled to social security benefits. I mention that because
in our lengthy friendship, he used to promise me that he
was not going to get past 40. In 1978, when we first met—
the moment of the opening of his first picture, Fingers—
there were reasons for thinking his prediction would come
true. To be blunt, he was living at every extreme he could
get his hands on. There were women, there were gambling
debts (and the occasional win), there was a lot of alcohol
and there was Jim’s constant and ferocious humor about
everything being doomed, so let’s get on with it
He was a wild and dangerous character, and Fingers was
a debut film that horrified and alarmed many people. It
was visceral in its sense of psychic nakedness—remember
Harvey Keitel crouching in the corner like a feral creature
on the run. It was greedily sexual—recollect Tanya Roberts
and Tisa Farrow. And it was a menacing portrait of
blackness—just consider the presence of Jim Brown, the
great running back, who had taken Toback into his home
and his inner circle as Toback attempted to map out the
parameters of risk. (This actually led to a book by Toback—
called Jim.)
At that time, Toback looked like a vagrant force in
mainstream cinema: He had written The Gambler for
Karel Reisz; he was attached to Warren Beatty as friend,
OuT THERE,
dANgEROus
ANd EssENTiAL
By David Thomson
adviser and role model; he had other scripts out with
major directors—George Cukor, for one, who was about
to direct Faye Dunaway in Jim’s script on the life of
Victoria Woodhull.
But times changed, the movie landscape shifted and Jim
survived. There are projects that defy belief (and do not
always earn it on screen)—like Exposed, with Rudolph
Nureyev and Nastassja Kinski, fabulous creatures but
hardly existing in the same world or in exchanged dreams.
Jim was a director or a filmmaker, yet he was always
writing scripts, sometimes three at a time, a ploy that
assisted his reluctance to actually finish or deliver anything.
But life was giddy then when Jim was likely to call and
read you a passage from a script over the phone (a pay
phone at the same Manhattan intersection)—so long as
you could accommodate the interlude in which he chatted
up a woman passing by (that interruption was probably
going to be embraced in the next draft of the script). Jim
was a Harvard man, who loved the melodrama of public
phones. He was a musical fanatic, so long as you knew
that Mahler and the Chiffons were equally valid.
His career has been unpredictable—he has a selfdestructive
streak, no matter how many people felt urged
to help his jazzy voice. He is not just “independent,” in that