When Deadline recently reported that Martin Scorsese, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Departed writer William Monahan would be working on a remake of the semi-autobiographical, 1974 tale written by James Toback, The Gambler, James Toback was sad, because no one had called him :-(. Now, if that doesn’t seem like a story worth 3,000-plus words, then you don’t know James Toback, one of the all-time Hollywood blowhards, who could probably go name-drop for name-drop with Bob Evans. Toback wrote a tome of a response for Deadline, which starts with a reference to Brett Ratner (Toback’s housemate) and culminates with an insanely circuitous way of saying “Scorsese is rude.” I’d urge you to check out the entire thing, but either way, I’ve taken the liberty of excerpting some of my favorite, most blowhardy moments here. Savor it with snifter of brandy, a fine cigar, and your own farts.
Perhaps my inability to view this “tribute” as primarily flattering was additionally influenced by a recent and infinitely more felicitous experience which involved remarkably similar circumstances. My movie, Fingers, was remade as a Cesar prize-sweeping film, The Beat That My Heart Skipped by Jacques Audiard, the great French filmmaker who called me from Paris and then flew to New York to discuss Fingers in great detail before redoing it, apparently not sharing the current group’s quaint — if indeed entirely legal –notion that as long as they “own” something — even a movie — they are fully entitled to do whatever they wish to it without even bothering to consult its creator.
Of course, the French have always had an entirely different set of laws and values governing intellectual property based on the poignant notion that a writer’s work cannot be tampered with by anyone even including someone who paid money to take ownership of it.
BOOM, DOUBLE SARCASTI-QUOTES! Take that, Scorsese! You could learn some manners from the French, all of whom I know, having personally sat at their tables to break butter. But instead, it seems you’ve become the victim OF A DISS MOST SUBTLE! Thesauruses at dawn?
From there, Toback takes the opportunity to weave a florid and similarly verbose tale about his favorite subject: himself, and how awesome he was! Or as Toback says it…
I would like to offer an unexpurgated chronology of the history of The Gambler since the movie seems, after 37 years, to have ignited the energies of all these busy and important people. So here it is, covering all incidents — in the words of Winston Churchill — “from erection to resurrection.”
Well it’s about time. Too many chronologies get expurgated these days, and without nearly enough throwaway Churchill references, I always say.
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