James Toback on Fingers

The French import from director Jacques Audiard, The Beat That My Heart Skipped (De battre mon coeur s'est arete) is a good film. But Fingers, the 1977 James Toback film that Audiard based his movie on, is an excellent film. Fingers ranks alongside Taxi Driver as one of the key films of that era. An argument could be made that Finger’s star Harvey Keitel is an essential part of a trilogy of New York’s seamy side made up of Mean Streets, Fingers, and The Bad Lieutenant.
Free Press Houston spoke with Toback by phone last week regarding his significant debut film. “Make a right turn at Madison and 92nd,” Toback says to a cab driver, as he answers questions on his cell phone while running errands around upper Manhattan.
Both Fingers and The Beat That My Heart Skipped deal with the dichotomy of a character’s psyche. In each film the lead character is divided between violent criminal behavior and the artistic ambition of being a concert pianist. Toback explores Jimmy Fingers’ (Keitel) through the “fundamental patterns of different worlds.”
There is an emphasis in Fingers on diegetic sound or the sound of Jimmy Fingers’ environment. When we see Jimmy play classic rock songs on his portable cassette (like The Jamies’ “Summertime, Summertime” or the Inez and Charlie Foxx standard “Mockingbird”) that is the soundtrack music. Normally in a film, say, Mean Streets, classic songs propel the narrative but as sounds separate from the character’s milieu.
Exploring man’s dual nature is a trait that runs throughout Toback’s films. (Two Girls & A Guy, the psychedelic The Harvard Man, and philosophical docu The Big Bang are standouts among Toback’s films.) So it comes as no surprise when Toback explains how he went from the prestige marriage as the husband of the granddaughter of the Duke of Marlborough to living the wild life at the house of football great Jim Brown. Brown who also appears in Fingers was the subject of Toback’s 1971 book Jim. Toback mentions that “Fingers was the only script that didn’t change,” from completion to production whereas his script for The Pick-Up Artist went through 15 drafts. Toback did delete a scene from Fingers that shows Keitel having a homosexual encounter before filming began.
Audiard’s film follows the template of Fingers but varies slightly in two aspects. Instead of immersing the protag Thomas Seyr (Romain Duris, of L’Auberge Espagnole) in mob politics he is a corrupt real estate mogul. Additionally a pivotal scene where Jimmy Fingers shoots a mobster to avenge the death of his father is changed in Beat That My Heart Skipped to Seyr deciding not to kill.
“That would never happen like that,” notes Toback. “You wouldn’t stick a gun in a Russian mobster’s mouth and then not kill him, because then you would be dead in two days.”
The Beat That My Heart Skipped currently unspools exclusively at the Angelika Film Center. Fingers is available as a DVD release, complete with a commentary track featuring Toback plus a conversation on indie film between Toback and Keitel. Also a documentary about Toback making the film Black and White, The Outsider by Nicholas Jarecki, can currently be seen making the rounds at film festivals.

John Dahl on The Great Raid

A list of films set in the Pacific Theater of World War II includes Too Late the Hero, The Bridge Over the River Kwai, Never So Few, the more recent Paradise Road and now the John Dahl directed The Great Raid. Dahl’s film touches on a point that never comes up about that war; 70,000 American and Allied troops surrendered in Bataan in 1942. The Japanese had invaded the Philippines days after they bombed Peal Harbor. Great Raid recounts an actual rescue mission in 1945 that freed over 500 prisoners at Cabanatuan on the island of Luzon in the Philippines.
Dahl brings a realistic and sometimes brutal sense of the mission to The Great Raid. His previous helming of modern film noirs Red Rock West and The Last Seduction nourished his feel for action.
Dahl’s classy noir credentials are all the more amazing because the companies involved didn’t want to distribute the films.
“Red Rock West was made by Polygram and had theatrical distribution in place,” Dahl told Free Press Houston during a press stop in town. Another company broke their contract to distribute and the film ended up on HBO. “If you have a movie that goes exclusively to cable they pay you more money.”
A Canadian distributor saw Red Rock West in France during its European release and acquired it for the Toronto Film Festival. Then Roxie Releasing picked it up for their art house theater in San Francisco. “It started as one print … at one point they had 40 prints in distribution,” attests Dahl. “Ironically the same thing happened with The Last Seduction.” The distributors didn’t feel they could release it domestically but then it did well in Europe. “October Films saw it in England, it had already run in the U.S. on cable. It caught on at a couple of theaters in New York and eventually played on about 120 screens.”
When both films were released in the early 90s they became poster children for independent film success. In 1993 (through 1995) Miramax started its Academy award studded dominance of the indie scene. Now a decade and an ownership change later Miramax is releasing several films in the next two months, among them Terry Gilliam’s The Brother’s Grimm and The Great Raid (August 12).
Dahl found footage of the actual participants and James Franco uncannily looks similar to his character Captain Prince. In the actual rescue mission (documented in the books Ghost Soldiers by Hampton Sides and The Great Raid on Cabanatuan by William Brueur) the 120 men and eight officers included three photographers. Fascination with battle footage isn’t a phenomenon of cable news channels. Dahl begins the film with a lengthy montage of WWII footage that documents the war in the Pacific.
Miramax owned the rights to Brueur’s book and Dahl (who also helmed Miramax’s The Rounders) explained how an early version played loose with the official version. After Ghost Soldiers came out Dahl supervised a revision of the script that emphasized the events as they actually happened although the love story between the characters played by Connie Nielsen and Joseph Fiennes was fictionalized.
Nielsen’s character Margaret Utinsky deserves a movie of her own. A google search indicates that Utinsky wrote a book after the war about her life before dropping out of sight. “Her true story is stunning,” exclaimed Dahl. “She was married to an American officer who died during the Bataan Death March. She forged a Lithuanian passport and got work at a hospital as a nurse. She organized an underground with leading citizens of Manila. Eventually the Japanese did arrest her. They tortured her for 37 days before they released her.”

Apocalyptic Sign #35: Jandek live in Austin

If you thought you would see the Kennedy assassination papers revealed before you saw Jandek make a public appearance you were mistaken. The Houston resident who’s been recording arcane music since 1978 has a worldwide cult for which any musician would slay. On Sunday, August 28 Jandek will perform his first ever U.S. live gig at the Austin Scottish Rite Theatre in the Texas capital city.
After years of hermit like anonymity Jandek has recently played three live shows in the U.K. Up to that point in time, part of the Jandek mystique lay in the fact nobody really knew who the guy was or what he looked like.
Free Press Houston contacted a prominent local Jandek fan with this tidbit of info and they immediately shouted back: “I don't believe in this Jandek. I think he's the Manchurian Jandek. He's the fake Jandek. He's the Bin Laden Jandek. They set him up just like they set up the fake Saddam that we are supposedly holding. They've done something with the real Jandek. He would never appear live in Austin.”
Speaking on the condition they not be identified, Jandek’s biggest, and now most secret fan, revealed that they had often thought about what made Jandek tick.
“He's this weird, socially inept, has subtle mental problems kind of guy. He’s extremely paranoid and is wanted by the FBI in 48 states. He has an obscure disease that makes his eyes dilate and has to stay in the dark or wear very dark glasses.”
But surely, I countered, this is a good thing, and Jandek fans will recall his concert as a positive memory.
Silence was the reply. After a while I coaxed a few more comments from the reticent fan with a couple of cigarettes and a small piece of semi-sweet chocolate.
“We all have our personal Jandek that we have kept quiet about all these years. Our separate and subjective images of Jandek fleshed out by imagination in the space left blank by his failure to materialize,” they explained. “He can't turn out to be just some ordinary guy that shows up at a club in Austin with a guitar. I can’t accept that. I have too much psychologically invested in his constructed persona at this point.”