The sleazy rise – and billion-dollar fall – of Hollywood's self-styled ‘pick up artist'

Telegraph

11-04-2025

A few years ago, the actress Julianne Moore shared an illustrative anecdote on social media. She recounted how a film-maker, of some standing, approached her on Columbus Avenue in New York in the Eighties and asked her if she would come and audition for him. Moore, suspecting nefarious intent, refused. A month later, she ran into the film-maker again, and he propositioned her again, using exactly the same language. Exasperated as much as anything else, she responded 'Don't you remember you did this before?'
The director was James Toback, who has now been found responsible for sexually assaulting 40 separate women over a four-decade period in New York. Toback, 80, has been ordered to pay a staggering $1.68 billion; $1.4 billion in punitive damages and $280 million in compensation to his victims. He has denied all of the charges against him, saying that his health issues, which include diabetes and a heart condition, have made it physically impossible for him to have committed the crimes, and that he either never met the women who have levelled complaints against him or, if he did, it 'was for five minutes and [he has] no recollection'.
He went further in a combative 2017 Rolling Stone interview, in which he said of the allegations that he found them 'offensive and insulting and disgusting' and that 'It's too stupid to dignify. It's pathetic lies. It's just too f______ embarrassing and idiotic.' But a jury sided with his accusers – many now in their 40s and 50s – and awarded them $42 million each.
In truth, Toback's downfall had been in train for years, and it seemed appropriate that it took place shortly after the exposure of Harvey Weinstein. The Los Angeles Times ran a detailed story in October 2017 about Toback's penchant for exploitative behaviour around young women. According to the feature, his modus operandi was consistent. Toback would walk up to attractive strangers and introduce himself as a big-shot Hollywood director, a close friend and mentor to Robert Downey Jr and an Oscar-nominated screenwriter. These women, impressed by his charisma, would often consent to an audition with him, sometimes in public but more often in a hotel room or on-set trailer.
Under the guise of an interview, Toback would ask increasingly personal and pointed questions about their sex lives and personal appearance, before he would talk about his own high sex drive, saying that he was unable to function unless he masturbated several times a day. He would then demonstrate this by masturbating in front of these appalled women, often ejaculating over them, and then, abruptly, the meeting was finished and they would never hear from him ever again.
As one actress interviewed by the LA Times, Adrienne LaValley, recounted: 'The way he presented it, it was like, 'This is how things are done.'' After Toback had finished, she was aghast. 'I felt like a prostitute, an utter disappointment to myself, my parents, my friends. And I deserved not to tell anyone.'
Hollywood is a strange place when it comes to its film-makers. If you're responsible for a notorious flop, and you're not an especially popular character in the first place, then prepare for a visit to director jail, and to remain there for a considerable time to come. Yet if you are, like Toback, friends with some of the leading figures in the Hollywood A-list, and you've assiduously – some would argue luckily – built a reputation as a respected auteur, it neither matters that your films flop nor that your public standing is, at best, controversial.
After decades sailing close to the wind, and offering unfortunately candid comments in interviews that now read like statements of untouchable arrogance, he now faces disgrace and destitution. It's the end of a once-glittering career that came to represent the highs and lows of auteur cinema.
A few decades ago, it was all rather different. After graduating from Harvard, where he was friends with Tommy Lee Jones and claimed to have taken the largest single dose of LSD in history, Toback worked briefly as a journalist before he received acclaim for writing the screenplay of Karel Reisz's loose Dostoyevsky adaptation The Gambler, into which he incorporated autobiographical elements relating to its obsessive protagonist.
That film's success enabled him to make his first picture as director in 1978, Fingers, which starred Harvey Keitel and began a pattern in his filmmaking that would recur over and over again: Keitel played a brilliant, solitary and tormented pianist who moonlighted as an enforcer for his gangster father.
In the unquestioning depiction of his artistic genius, Toback clearly intended his protagonist to be a self-reflection, just as James Caan's brilliant, solitary (etc) gambler had been in the previous film. Initially, few were convinced. The critic-turned-screenwriter Stephen Schiff scoffed that the film was not 'just bad; it's wildly; extravagantly, even entertainingly bad,' and went on to suggest, presciently, 'what comes through is not how troubled Jimmy is, but how bizarre the man who made this film [Toback] must be.' (It was remade, far more successfully, by Jacques Audiard in 2005 as The Beat That My Heart Skipped.)
Fingers should have killed his career immediately, but the hugely influential film critic Pauline Kael loved it, raving that it had 'the wild self-dramatization that one associates with the young Tennessee Williams, or with Mailer when he gets high on excess.' She was so impressed with Toback that she offered to help him with his next film, 1982's Love and Money, which Warren Beatty intended to star in and produce. However, as would become a feature in Toback's career, early intentions did not come to pass; the eventual result, made without Kael or Beatty, flopped.
By rights, Toback's career should have fallen apart, but unbelievably he managed to obtain an $18 million budget for his reunion with Keitel, 1983's Exposed, which starred Nastassja Kinski as a waitress who engages in a love affair with an obsessive violinist (played, equally unbelievably, by the ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev) while being pursued by a terrorist (Keitel, naturally). It is a truly terrible picture, which even the great Ian McShane cannot rescue, but according to Toback, it came about after he bribed the MGM executive David Begelman with money he won at gambling at Las Vegas to allow him to make the film. (He had picked the right person; Begelman was a notorious crook who was once, accurately, denigrated by Kirk Douglas as 'a forger and a thief' after being found to have embezzled money from his studio, Columbia Pictures, throughout the Seventies, and committed suicide after being declared bankrupt.)
Toback declared in a contemporary interview that 'I'm not getting much money but I'm being treated a lot better than most studios treat me... I figure now I have a remote chance of putting across a movie that only got made by a miracle anyway.'
Inevitably, Exposed – which he suggested was inspired by his own affair with an airline hostess he met – flopped heavily, but Toback sprang out of director jail a few years later with what was intended to be a bright and breezy John Hughes-style romantic comedy, 1987's The Pick Up Artist, with his regular collaborator Robert Downey Jr in the lead opposite Molly Ringwald.
The film, which was produced by Beatty, starred Downey Jr as another idealised version of how Toback saw himself: a womaniser so irresistible to women that he charms everyone he meet. He even has to keep away from the mothers of the students he teaches as otherwise his wiles will inevitably work on them, too. Downey Jr's charisma makes the film less ridiculous than it would otherwise be, but it was no particular success and, once again, suggested that Toback was a one-trick pony with delusions.
These delusions were in full evidence in his unintentionally hilarious 1990 documentary The Big Bang, which featured Toback earnestly interviewing various figures – billed as The Writer, The Survivor and The Gangster, amongst others - about the meaning of life and existence. Although it was as vacuous as the rest of his pictures, with added faux-profundity, it got better reviews than it deserved, as Toback persuaded critics that he knew something about existence that they did not.
His friendship with Beatty then led to his being asked to write the screenplay for Bugsy, for which he was Oscar-nominated, but already murmurs about his off-screen behaviour were so widespread for Spy magazine to write in 1989 that 'he would in rapid-fire fashion tell [women] that he was a Hollywood director and offer to show them his Director's 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.'
He was, at least, consistent in his modus operandi. His next film, Two Girls And A Guy, reunited him with Downey Jr – then in the midst of his well-publicised drug addiction – and attracted controversy for an envelope-pushing sex scene between Downey and his co-star Heather Graham, which would have led to the film being rated NC-17, the commercial kiss of death, unless Toback agreed to edit it. It was modestly profitable, because of the hoo-ha, but only minimally; it had cost $1 million to make and grossed slightly more than double that.
One unexpected and deeply unfortunate side-effect is that it allowed Toback to make his most controversial film to date in 1999 in the form of the dismal Black and White, which featured various members of the Wu Tung Clan along with Downey Jr, Claudia Schiffer and Mike Tyson. Its most memorable moment comes when Downey Jr, in character as a closeted homosexual, attempts to kiss an unsuspecting Tyson: matters go as you would expect.
Nominally a crime drama about hip-hop, it was clear that the (largely improvised) script bore about as much relation to any understanding of the complex post-Tupac Shakur world of rap music as did the Teletubbies. It also became regrettably clear that Toback, a large, bearded man in his mid-fifties, came to believe that he himself was a hip, down-with-the-kids pioneer, despite his film featuring dialogue along the lines of 'These pants is just big, yo!' Toback at one point announced that he knew what it was to be 'the only white guy in a totally black orgiastic world'.
He may have wished to record his own hip-hop album around this time, but instead he gave self-regarding and hollow interviews, even as one of his defenders, the chairman of Sony Pictures, accurately observed that 'His life is more interesting than his films, which is rarely true anymore.' In one New York Times profile, which now reads very differently to when it was published, the journalist observed: 'Sex is to Mr. Toback what violence is to Quentin Tarantino'. A friend of Toback's added: 'He sees an attractive woman three or four cars back, so he goes back to talk to her and leaves me sitting in traffic.'
The director laughed off the scorn as simple jealousy, and continued to make films throughout the 2000s. Sometimes these were acclaimed, as with his 2008 documentary about Mike Tyson, simply entitled Tyson. At other times, they seemed like Bernardo Bertolucci-level male wish fulfilment, in the case of the Neve Campbell-starring When Will I Be Loved, which featured lengthy scenes of Campbell naked, having sex or masturbating.
Toback talked a good game about his picture – 'I have never had an actor do anything faked or real, sexually, on the screen, that hasn't been in complete harmony with what that actor wanted to do or would believe he or she would be doing in the context of the character and the scene' – but most observers of his work might have described it as simple prurience. It did not help that he claimed, of the film's five-minute opening masturbation scene, 'Well, I'm obsessed with women, so I can imagine my way into a female consciousness very well.' Others may have disagreed.
By the time that Toback's 2013 Cannes-set mock-documentary Seduced and Abandoned, which he made with another equally problematic figure in the shape of Alec Baldwin, came around, critics had wearied of his schtick. Slant magazine's review, which began was especially damning, as it posited the ridiculousness of the idea of Toback and Baldwin trying to mount a sexually explicit drama starring the actor and Campbell on a $20 million budget. 'To enjoy Seduced and Abandoned,' read the review, 'you'll have to be able to push a lumbering, hypocritical white elephant out the nearest door.'
That Toback was still able to draw attention and a starry range of interviewees – including Ryan Gosling, Martin Scorsese and Jessica Chastain, as well as the more predictable inclusions of Bertolucci and Polanski – was a testament to his being able to talk a good game, just as he had done to all the would-be stars he, appropriately enough, was said to have seduced and abandoned.
Those days are now well and truly over. It seems impossible that Toback will be able to pay the staggering amount that he has been ordered to pay, but his reputation has been ruined forever and his film-making career has ended in the process. It is salutary to return to a remark that his friend Warren Beatty made to the New York Times in 2000: 'Let me put it this way: Jimmy is not boring.'