Background
James Toback was born on November 23, 1944 in New York City to a successful garment manufacturer.
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James Toback was born on November 23, 1944 in New York City to a successful garment manufacturer.
A 1966 graduate of Harvard College, Toback later taught creative writing at City College of New York in the early 1970s.
After graduating from Harvard, Toback worked as a journalist. An assignment from Esquire on football player Jim Brown led to collaboration on Jim: The Author's Self-Centered Memoir of the Great Jim Brown.
In the early 1970s Toback taught creative writing at the City College of New York. He drew on this experience when he wrote the screenplay for The Gambler.
In 1974, Toback's screenplay The Gambler was produced. Much of the film was shot at City College. His directorial début was the 1978 film Fingers, remade twenty-eight years later by Jacques Audiard as The Beat That My Heart Skipped. Toback followed Fingers with Love and Money in 1982. Toback wrote and directed Exposed in 1983, and in 1989, Toback directed the documentary The Big Bang.
Toback wrote the original screenplay for Bugsy, which won the Golden Globe for Best Picture and was nominated for ten Academy Awards. Toback won the Los Angeles Film Critics' Award for Best Original Screenplay and a similar award from the readers of Premiere Magazine.
In 1998, Toback wrote and directed the comedy Two Girls and a Guy, and in 2000, he wrote and directed Black and White in collaboration with members of Wu-Tang Clan. He then wrote and directed Harvard Man starring Adrien Grenier in 2002. In 2004, Toback wrote and directed When Will I Be Loved and in 2009, Toback directed Tyson, a documentary about boxer Mike Tyson.
The 2006 documentary The Outsider is about Toback and his work.
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He suffered from a gambling compulsion that still plagues him, which was the subject of his autobiographical screenplay for the Karel Reisz film Player (1974) that starred James Caan as a New York University literature professor who was a compulsive gambler.
Toback has developed a reputation as a "pick-up artist." An exposé in a 1989 issue of Spy Magazine, "The Pickup Artist's Guide to Picking Up Women," detailed how Toback would "hang out on the streets of the Upper West Side in New York City, and approach women. According to the story, he would in rapid-fire fashion tell them that he was a Hollywood director and offer to show them his Directors 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." Articles describing Toback as a pick-up artist have also appeared on Gawker.
Toback was married to Consuelo Sarah Churchill Vanderbilt Russell, the granddaughter of John Spencer-Churchill, 10th Duke of Marlborough.