Skip navigation

Bookmark and Share

The Outsider (tbc)

  • Run time: 1 hour 25 mins
  • Genre: Documentary
  • Release date: 1st January 2005

Plot Synopsis

‘It’s just not mainstream stuff,’ says Woody Allen, in an impossibly rare on-set interview. He’s not talking about his own films, but those of fellow New Yorker James Toback – the subject of this revealing documentary. Allen calls Toback a ‘Personal Filmmaker’, and it’s easy to see why – his movies (eleven to date) all draw on his own colourful background: from gambling addiction (in his screenwriting debut The Gambler) and LSD overdosing (Harvard Man), through to the sexual adventuring of last year’s When Will I Be Loved.

It’s Toback’s struggle to shoot When Will I Be Loved in twelve days flat that forms the spine of the documentary – filled in with candid accounts from famous fans and friends of which there are quite a panoply: Harvey Kietel and Robert Downey Jr, grandmaster screenwriters Norman Mailer and Robert Towne and even sporting legends Mike Tyson and Jim Brown.

Toback cuts an imposing figure throughout: an enormous, overeducated, charming, obsessive, arrogant, passionate artist. The Outsider is an object lesson in the zeal, craftsmanship and facial that a Personal Filmmaker needs to get a Personal Film in the can. It may even make more people watch his movies – whatever Woody says.

When Jarecki was 21, he emerged from NYU film school and hit on a clever idea for breaking into the industry: write a book of interviews on how to do it, befriending various bigwigs in the process (and raising some cash). Four years on, his debut feature is a documentary about one of them.