Uploaded 1 March 2001

“It’s a comedy about subjects which more easily lend themselves to tragedy (…)The Pick-Up Artist was more of a collaboration than any other film by far, but my original intentions were clear throughout, changed throughout.”
James Toback [1]

James Toback’s The Pick-Up Artist (US 1987) might usefully be approached via a question: What motivated me to watch this film? Of course, this is hardly the kind of question with which criticism generally concerns itself: as readers, we tend to be interested in what the critic made of a given experience, not her reasons for undergoing it in the first place. Yet no one enters a cinema without prior expectations, and, for good or ill, these expectations form a prism through which we interpret whatever unreels before us. Why, then, did I view The Pick-Up Artist (on video – it never received a UK theatrical release – sometime in 1989)?

Publicity materials promoted it as a star vehicle for Molly Ringwald, and though Ringwald had been the best thing in several John Hughes movies (she also made memorable appearances in Paul Mazursky’s Tempest [USA 1982] and Godard’s King Lear [US-Switzerland 1987]), her presence alone would hardly have encouraged me to take a look (it certainly wasn’t enough to inspire a viewing of John Avildsen’s For Keeps [US 1988]). The actual lead turned out to be Robert Downey Jr (here credited as “Robert Downey”), an actor I knew only as the son of a “cult” auteur whose work I’d vaguely heard of. The subject matter and casting suggested a John Hughes variation (indeed, Downey had a small role in Weird Science [US 1986]) – perhaps it would be as unendurable as John Byrum’s The Whoopee Boys (US 1986), surely the worst movie ever made by any filmmaker of proven talent.

No, the reason I sought out this film was James Toback, a director whose three previous pictures –Fingers (US 1977), Love and Money (US 1980, released, kind of, in 1982) and Exposed (US 1983) – I adored: had Toback directed the next Police Academy movie, I would have watched it. So what did I make of The Pick-Up Artist? Well, to be honest, I found it disappointing: not bad exactly – in many ways it was quite pleasant – but hardly what I thought Toback should be doing. Had this been the work of a new director, I would have left it at that. But the mere fact of Toback’s authorship made it inevitable that I go back for another look. Followed by another. And another. In all, I must have seen The Pick-Up Artist a dozen times, my admiration growing with each viewing – I now consider it one of the best American films of the 80s.

Interestingly, I followed exactly the same trajectory with another 1987 comedy, Elaine May’s Ishtar (US 1987) – and there my reactions (as well as my expectations) were even more extreme: I usually nominate May’s Mikey and Nicky (US 1973-1976) as my all-time favourite whenever I am asked to draw up a ten-best list; I initially regarded Ishtar as an unmitigated disaster; I now, after countless viewings, believe it to be among the American cinema’s finest achievements. I was reminded of this when I read V.F. Perkins’ admirable monograph on Orson Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons (US 1942), in which he claimed that “one of the merits of a director-centred approach to cinema is that it can prompt us, in the face of a picture by a gifted film-maker that seems boring, baffling or botched, to ask whether the fault may not be in the movie so much as in our way of looking at it.” [2]

So why did I initially have such difficulty with The Pick-Up Artist and Ishtar? My confusion can, I think, be traced to the fact that both works belong to a virtually extinct comic tradition. If we put the ‘mise en scene’ school (Frank Tashlin, Jerry Lewis, Mel Brooks, John Landis, Joe Dante) off to one side, it becomes clear that the sound era’s greatest comedies – from Leo McCarey’s The Awful Truth (US 1937), Howard Hawks’ Bringing up Baby (US 1938) and Preston Sturges’ The Lady Eve (USA 1941) to Billy Wilder’s Kiss Me, Stupid (USA 1964) and Welles’ The Trial (France-Italy-Germany 1962) – all share the same theme: the chastisement of masculine presumption by one or a series of independent women. In the 80s – apart from a handful of throwbacks such as Scorsese’s After Hours (US 1985),which is virtually a remake of The Trial, and Blake Edwards’ late masterpieces – the emphasis becomes rather different, and is best summed up by a line of dialogue from Ghostbusters (US 1984): “Let’s show this prehistoric bitch how we do things downtown”. Although we hardly think of Toback as a classicist, Fingers clearly belongs with the male melodramas of Aldrich and Minnelli, and it is safe to say that I initially rejected The Pick-Up Artist because of an inability to connect its strategies with that tradition to which, in retrospect, they so obviously belong.

But the film’s “problems” run deeper than this, and demonstrate the advantages of Perkins’ “director centred approach to cinema”. Based on the little evidence I have, it would seem that The Pick-Up Artist changed considerably between original concept and final form. These changes – most (though not all) of which come under the heading of commercial compromise – would be of no interest to us had they not left marks and traces. The most obvious of these “marks” (indeed, their reductio ad absurdum) is also the most trivial: it appears that the film was originally intended to be released with an American R-certificate, but was reworked during post-production to conform with the stricter rules of the (then relatively new) PG-13 category: thus we now hear Harvey Keitel tell Robert Downey to “get the hell out of here” while his lips mouth the words “get the fuck out of here”.

But those traces left by the conceptual alterations are just as visible: in his 1994 journal, Toback recalls that “The Pick-Up Artist was originally conceived as a movie for a man in his mid-forties, and Bobby De Niro was to play him. After a reading at De Niro’s apartment, however, it became simultaneously clear to him and to me, and independently to The Pick-Up Artist’s shadow producer Warren Beatty, that the idea of a man nearing fifty compulsively repeating his obsessional cruising habits was perhaps a bit too unpalatable…So we switched gears and I reconceived the role for Robert Downey, who was twenty-five years younger”[3] Toback doesn’t say as much, but after three financial flops he was probably looking for a project which might attract a wider audience.

Toback’s admirers may be able to reconstruct the initial concept by reference to the director’s previous films: perhaps Jack Jericho was a university lecturer along the lines of James Caan’s Axel Freed in The Gambler (US 1974, directed by Karel Reisz from Toback’s screenplay) or Toback himself in Exposed, though the casting of Downey makes the character’s employment as a teacher of small children more appropriate; perhaps Jack was supposed to live with his aging mother (echoing the problematic parental relationships of The Gambler, Fingers and Exposed), transformed into a grandmother when the script was rewritten (though even this has a precedent in Love and Money, where the protagonist lives with his senile grandfather), a structural alteration curiously alluded to in the finished film when the grandmother wakes up and tells Jack that she had been dreaming about “your mother in a convertible Plymouth, looking younger than you do”.

The Pick-Up Artist might have been a tougher film with an older actor, and while it seems reasonable to assume that Toback considered offering the part to “shadow producer” (another ghost?) Warren Beatty, the ideal casting would surely have beenFingers star Harvey Keitel. What makes this more than just idle speculation is that The Pick-Up Artist features Keitel in the minor role of Alonzo, an older version of the character he played in Fingers, now deprived of his more human qualities (difficult to imagine Alonzo pursuing a career as a concert pianist) and living in that purely animal state to which we saw him reduced at the end of the previous film: cementing the connection is Tony Sirico as “Patsy”, the hood murdered by Keitel in Fingers, here returned to life (same name, same actor) as Keitel’s subordinate.

Such ghostly traces and strange coincidences appear in abundance: Flash (Dennis Hopper) refers to Jack as “Jimmy”, the name of Keitel’s character in Fingers; when Jack tries his standard “face of a Botticelli” line on Randy Jensen (Ringwald), whom he pursues in precisely the way Keitel pursued Tisa Farrow in Fingers, he discovers she is carrying a Botticelli anthology (hidden under several gambling books, another echo of Fingers and The Gambler’s culture/violence split); and Jack later sees Randy taking the same medication as his grandmother. As in Monte Hellman’s Silent Night, Deadly Night III: Better Watch Out!  (US 1989), the director addresses a “popular” audience while occasionally winking at cinephiles (Hellman even provides a narrative justification for this by structuring his film around different kinds of coded communication), the casting connections suggesting that Toback’s original concept was not so much altered as relegated to sub-plot status, with the unhealthy obsessiveness we might be tempted to criticise in Jack Jericho shifted into the background: Alonzo, the ass-grabber on the street, the “creep” on the bus and the rich Colombian businessman Fernando (Bob Gunton), who, like Jack, is “obsessed” with Randy, all function as vile doubles for the ostensibly sympathetic protagonist.

The connection is made explicit during Jack’s outburst in the casino, when he disowns his own behaviour by projecting it onto Alonzo (“I’ve seen your kind all my life. Everybody has… He hits on women wherever he goes, he walks, talks, jumps ’em in the back of his car, practically breaks their back on the gear shift, then takes their number and never calls…I bet you got a list of all the women that you’ve done this to and I bet you carry it around in your back pocket.”): as on his first appearance rehearsing pick-up lines before a mirror, Jack talks to himself while supposedly addressing someone else.

In a sense, these doubles compensate for the casting compromises while creating several cracks through which Toback’s original concept can seep. Of course, to praise The Pick-Up Artist in these terms would be to praise its incoherence, its failure as a self-contained work of art. It is here that an auteurist approach comes into conflict with traditional critical methods. Shouldn’t a film be judged on its own merits rather than justified by reference to its director’s past achievements? Perhaps, but then again, this seems needlessly limiting. A better question might be, can we take pleasure from The Pick-Up Artist? And if so, where is this pleasure located?

I have suggested that the film’s function is comparable to that of the classical Hollywood comedy, but I would be lying if I denied that part of my positive response involves an unreconstructed auteurist joy at recognizing Toback’s authorial signature. I have long maintained that we cinephiles are nothing more than the wandering ghosts of those mythical popular audiences who once visited the cinema regularly, and it would seem that Toback feels much the same way: he has learnt the lesson Hollywood’s masters had to teach – not a formula for feel-good entertainment calculated to produce certain effects (as with Spielberg), but a role model for the communication of ideologically problematic and even radical ideas. By connecting this impulse to a more modern interest in authorial discourse, The Pick-Up Artist suggests a way forward for the American cinema.

Footnotes:

[1] John Andrew Gallagher, Film Directors on Directing (London: Praeger, 1989), 254, 256.
[2] V.F. Perkins, The Magnificent Ambersons (London: British Film Institute,1999), 18.
[3] James Toback, “Divisions and dislocations: a journal for 1994”, in John Boorman and Walter Donohue (eds), Projections 4 (London: Faber and Faber, 1995), 53-4.