He's been creepily obsessed with black masculinity and sexuality at least since the very early seventies, when his exercise in neo- (or sub-) Mailerian new journalism, JIM was published. Toback, then a Harvard academic turned journalist, hung around with JIm Brown for quite some time and wrote about it in a disconcertingly competitive way, including, if memory serves, about a three-way he, Brown and a woman had. (This part did not make it into Life Magazine, where the book originated.) Brown was later featured in Toback's film "Fingers" slapping around a white call girl with distressingly real violence. Toback had goaded Brown into it.

An interesting man, James Toback, but definitely not a nice one.

Back in the day, SPY magazine had a great feature where they kept a running count of the women that Toback tried to score with by offering to put them in the movies. In an interview with MOVIELINE magazine, he defended a relative of Warren Beatty's, who worked on the crew of his film THE PICKUP ARTIST (which Beatty was producing) when the guy molested two girls he met while the film was shooting on location, saying (and I'm paraphrasing here), that said child-molestor had no other choice because "that's what he wanted." (the whole pathetic, parasitic relationship between Toback and Beatty is fascinating, with Beatty having humiliated and betrayed Toback on several occassions, yet the latter kept coming back for more). In the same interview, Toback claimed that if he found he was terminally ill, he had a list of people he was going to kill. And I'll never forget his letter to THE NEW REPUBLIC after their film critic panned one of his films (the one with Nastassia Kinski, Rudolf Nureyev, and some kinky stuff with violins)--the literary equivalent of a spoiled brat jumping up and down and hollering because somebody dared to criticize his movie.

As for Toback and muscl-y violent black men? Weird and probably unsavory. I keep seeing prison showers and dropped bars of soap . . . I think Toback does, too . . .