WHEN HOLLYWOOD DOUBLES DOWN

An executive-producer credit on a Mark Wahlberg film and an ovation at the premiere? Sounds nice, right? But success in Hollywood can be a double-edged sword, or worse, as writer-director JAMES TOBACK discovered when he learned his first, highly personal film, 1974's The Gambler; was about to be remade four decades later—with or without him. The question: how would he play his cards?

Among the many rapidly shifting tensions of today's Hollywood—a place which has meaning as metaphor more than geography—the question of original authorship is one of very few that have existed without interruption and are likely to continue to exist for the rest of film history. Invented art versus derivative art. Of course, great work— and dreadful work as well—has emanated from both approaches, but there is a special pride in originality.

I seem to have stumbled into a vested personal interest in this perennial battle as the result of a paradox: the one claim I can lay to cinematic uniqueness is that I have recently become the only filmmaker, to my knowledge, who has had both of his first two movies— The Gambler and Fingers—remade.

Fingers, which I wrote and directed in 1978, starred Harvey Keitel as Jimmy Angelelli, a frustrated concert pianist who earns his living as a collector for his bookmaker/loanshark father. Twenty-five years after its debut I was approached by Jacques Audiard, the great French writer-director, who proposed that he "re-invent" the film in contemporary Paris with the wonderful French actor Romain Duris in the lead. My immediate instinct was to leap across the table, grab Monsieur Audiard by the lapels, and protest with a glint of menace: "How dare you suggest tampering with my masterpiece!" My second impulse was to cry out: "Bravo! You are a wonderful filmmaker. I am thrilled to have inspired you. Your film will only serve to rekindle interest in mine. So therefore, march on!" It was this second choice which, in slightly less exuberant language, I articulated, and Audiard did indeed proceed to make—to great international acclaim—his film, The Beat That My Heart Skipped, which received eight French Cesars (the Gallic equivalent to the Academy Awards) as well as generating great financial profit.

The Gambler is another story in every sense. It is the only quasi-autobiographical film I have invented. The character of Axel Freed—played by James Caan in the original—is a lecturer in English at the City College of New ¾⅛ a Harvard graduate, a compulsive gambler with gangster friends, a lover of Mahler, an apparent heir to the fortune of a grandfather who is a self-made Jewish tycoon, and the son of a brilliant and independent physician mother. (My own mother was an NBC moderator of political debates and the president of the League of Women Voters, not a doctor. Otherwise the glove fits.) It was also my initiation into the film world, a major studio production at Paramount in its 70s Robert EvansFrank Yablans heyday, and created in ideal harmony with the British director Karel Reisz. Over the decades—at racetracks, casinos, meetings of Gamblers Anonymous, parties, and during simple walks on the street—there have been hundreds if not thousands of men (as well as three or four women) who have stopped me and said: "That's my story you told in The Gambler"

So to call it a "personal" film would be to engage in tepid understatement. How bizarre then, how downright infuriating-with an admitted dose of flattery-it was to learn on Nikki Finke's Deadline Hollywood in 2011 that The Gambler was being remade at Paramount with Irwin Winkler, the original producer, producing, Martin Scorsese directing, Leonardo DiCaprio starring, and William Monahan adapting my screenplay. I immediately called Nikki Finke, who kindly provided me with space for a several-thousand-word screed whose tone I made only minimal effort to temper. Minutes after the posting I got a call from Rick Yorn, who manages both Scorsese and DiCaprio.

"First of all," he began after a brief introduction, "neither Marty nor Leo knew anything about this until they read it—just as you did—in Nikki Finke. And, secondly, in a million years Marty would never agree to do a remake of The Gambler unless he had your blessing. You are one of Marty's few idols!"

If I had been a detached third party bugging this conversation, this last statement would have seemed no more credible a claim than if Yorn had insisted that Marty wished to offer his town house to me as a gift. However, since detachment was the farthest emotion from my exacerbated condition, a radiation of pleasure spread through me. I had met Marty only a handful of times, and he had always been polite, but other than a haiku-length tribute to my 1999 film, Black and White, bestowed upon me during a one-minute chat at Harvey Keitel's wedding, I had never heard, or read, anything suggesting that he was a "huge fan" (the common phrase of Hollywood praise) let alone that I was his "idol." But I was certainly not about to allow this exhilarating piece of news to enter my zone of skepticism when it felt much better simply to take it at face value.

"I had no idea!," I said to Yorn. "Although it does seem a bit odd, because I've never heard anything along those lines before."

"Trust me," Yorn said. "And, by the way, there's no need for you to write anything else negative about all this—particularly since you now know that neither Marty nor Leo knew anything about it."

"TELL WAHLBERGI WANT TO RE-WRITE THE SCRIPT AND DIRECT HIM IN IT," I SAID.

"There is no fucking way that this fucking movie is happening behind my back," I said, suddenly surprising myself with a strident note of thuggery.

"Hey! Calm down," Yorn said. "I'm on your side. Why don't you come by Marty's office tomorrow, and we'll figure out how you and he can do something together, because I know he'd love to produce a picture for you."

It is hard not to like Yorn, particularly when he wants you to like him. He laughs generously at everything you say which is meant to be laughed at and gives off the air of someone whose primary goal in life is to see you satisfied. The meeting began with a lengthy discussion between Yorn and me of the imminent N.B.A. playoffs. Marty sat silently at his desk, content to let Yorn carry the ball for the moment.

"So you don't want Marty to direct a remake of The Gambler, " he said, "assuming the whole thing is real, which it may well not be."

"That's right," I said, in what might have ranked among the two or three least constructive career decisions I have made, in a life hardly bereft of questionable moves.

"Then he won't do it," Yorn said.

Marty looked up and projected a look of affirmation.

"But I would love Marty to do two things," I said. "I'd love him... at this point I turned to Marty—"you ... to be in Seduced and Abandoned, which I'm shooting with Alec Baldwin in Cannes this summer, and I'd love you to produce Vicky, which I wrote 40 years ago for Faye Dunaway and Cary Grant, with George Cukor signed to direct, but which never got made and which I want to direct now."

"Great. With both." Marty was decisive. Maybe I was his idol after all. In any case, I decided to act on the assumption that, at the very least, he would keep his word on the issues at hand—which he did and has (with the tragic footnote that Vicky is still seeking its funding).

Unlike my non-history with Scorsese, I had an intriguing long-term history with Leonardo DiCaprio, beginning in 1994 when we were close to making my film Harvard Man together. I chose to believe Yorn, that Leo knew nothing of the plan to do The Gambler, because to suggest that he did and had not bothered to call to get my reaction would have implied that the effusive hugs and periodic renewals of mutual affection and admiration over the years were no more than manifestations of formulaic protocol rather than expressions of genuine sentiment and high regard.

What soon became undeniable to me was that Irwin Winkler—whose 40-year-old contract with Paramount guaranteed his inclusion as producer on any remake—had gone to Paramount with the proposal to remake The Gambler without the suggestion that I be involved. Given the omission of guarantees in my own 40-year-old contract with Paramount, the assumption was that any objection I might have would be my problem entirely. What soon became undeniable to Winkler, however, was that if The Gambler were to proceed, I would have to be either assassinated or treated with a kind of faux respect or at least with the same caution one employs when in the presence of a disturbed loner sporting a loaded .38.

The next practical step in the saga was taken with the announcement that Todd Phillips-coming off a double blast of immensely successful hits, The Hangover and The Hangover Part II—was "in negotiations" to direct The Gambler. I knew Todd Phillips a bit and had been inclined to like him if for no other reason than that he always spoke with sufficient excitement about my cinematic achievements and that he was an admitted heavy gambler with a good sense of humor about the insanity of his addiction. Whether it was out of prudence or respect, Phillips called to suggest that I meet with him and Winkler to discuss my potential relationship to the film. I asked him to send me a copy of the script, which he promptly got Winkler to do.

I read The Gambler by William Monahan "based on the original screenplay by James Toback" out loud—the only way scripts should be read—with an increasing and, ultimately, raging sense of frustration. Monahan exhibited what can charitably be described as an immaculate lack of understanding of compulsive gambling in all of its psychological dynamics as well as a disconcertingly slothful ignorance of the rules of even the simplest games. (The player in blackjack has both cards dealt faceup, not one facedown and one faceup!) More egregiously, there is not a hint of pleasure in winning, not even for a moment. The extremes of emotion, the lure of desire as well as despair, are transmogrified into an uninterrupted masochistic slide into the abyss. Alcoholics and junkies reach a point where they cannot get high anymore, where they reload simply to get back to functional subsistence. Gamblers continue to get high along the road to potential destruction. If you keep betting, you win some of the time. This experience of swinging back and forth from extreme to extreme is glaringly absent from Monahan's script, and it represents a total misunderstanding of the essence of the original film it purports to re-invent.

Overall, the main character, Jim Bennett, as Axel Freed is now called, has no capacity for joy, no thrill at living on the edge. What he has is a monochromatic desire to lose, a conscious wish to be punished. The problem is not so much that such a character does not resemble Axel Freed or that he does not resemble any compulsive gambler in the history of the addiction. It's that he does not resemble a human being of sufficient dimension and complexity to warrant status as a protagonist.

"YOU MAY BE TOO CLOSE TO YOUR CONCEPTION," WAHLBERG TOLD ME. "IT MAY BE IMPOSSIBLE FOR YOU TO BE OBJECTIVE."

I expressed these grim views of the script to Winkler and Phillips in the lovely garden of Winkler's charming house in Beverly Hills. My sense was that I crossed over into the realm of verbal brutality, an approach so out of fashion in such meetings that I perceived an instinctive freeze of resistance and spontaneous defense. Lest I appear to be only the bearer of bad tidings with no light at the end of the tunnel, I also suggested that if Paramount was actually planning to go ahead with this film I would— for a generous fee—be willing to start from scratch and write a new script.

Winkler looked at me as if I had three heads, and said, "How is it possible that someone who has been around as long as you have and knows how things are done would even dream of telling a studio that a script that they have green-lit is no good and needs to be completely re-written? It's almost impossible to get a studio to finance a serious adult movie in today's world. Why would you want to turn a green light into a red light?"

"Let them pay me a million dollars, and I'll write a script we can shoot with pride," I said as if it were the first time I had suggested it.

"I think this meeting has pretty much concluded," Winkler said. "Let's see where we are after Leonardo has read the script."

"You think Leonardo is going to read this script and do this movie?," I yelled. "You're out of your fucking mind!"

"He wants to work with Todd," Winkler said. "They're very close."

"I don't care if he wants to be the father of Todd's children; he will never do this script. He actually reads. Out loud. And he imagines what scenes will feel like."

"We'll see," said Winkler.

In the driveway, waiting for our cars, I was alone with Phillips.

"Listen, Todd," I said. "I've heard stories about you that make you sound as crazy as I've been in the past—$200,000 on a hand of blackjack. Shit like that."

He smiled.

"Why don't you pay me $500,000 out of your pocket—they can reimburse you later— and I'll write a great script for us to do."

Phillips laughed heartily.

"I'm serious," I said.

"I know you are," Phillips said, still laughing.

"You take a shot with cards. You should take a shot with work," I said. "Show some balls."

He smiled, gave me a hug, got in his car, and drove off.

The next news I got about The Gambler came months later from Winkler. "Todd Phillips dropped out," he said. "Leonardo turned the movie down, and apparently that soured Todd on it, but it's just as well. The greatest news is that we have Mark Wahlberg."

I was shocked and excited. I had known Wahlberg for 20 years and had always felt a rapport bordering on communion with him. We had sat next to each other on a red-eye from Los Angeles to New York in 1994 when he was just emerging from Calvin Klein-underwear iconography and from his identity as Marly Mark. Over the years I had crossed paths with Wahlberg often, and working together seemed an inevitability. At one point we had agreed to pursue his starring in Harvard Man.

As a Hollywood figure, Wahlberg—despite his great success as a movie star and a producer of movies and TV series—is still a vastly underrated force. Whether it is because of the wildly unlikely sources from which he sprang or the radically wide variety of roles he has chosen to play, so that he doesn't fit any category or image, Wahlbergis rarely listed among the most talented film actors of the era. And yet, who, if anyone, can present an array of performances as impressive in their diversity as Wahlberg can by citing Boogie Nights, Three Kings, The Yards, The Perfect. Storm, I Heart Huckabees, The Fighter, Ted, Broken City, Lone Survivor, and The Departed, in which he fully holds his own with DiCaprio, Nicholson, Matt Damon, and Alec Baldwin?

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"Tell Wahlberg I want to re-write the script and direct him in it," I told Winkler. Looking at him it was possible to read only two reactions. The first was that he would not deliver the message. The second was that he knew more than he was telling me and that events had moved considerably beyond a commitment to Wahlberg, so that it was not even marginally conceivable to meet my request.

Still, I regarded it as the exercise of a proprietary interest in my own life and family and how they would be perceived now and into the future, so when I finally spoke to Wahlberg it was still with a molecule of hope.

"They've already got a director," Wahlberg said, erasing the molecule in one sentence. "Rupert Wyatt. Paramount wants him. If I tell them I insist that you direct the movie, they'll cancel it on the spot. I'm giving it to you straight."

"He's very talented," Wahlberg said of Wyatt, who had directed 2011 's Rise of the Planet of the Apes. "I know you don't want to hear that right now, but he is. You know I want to work with you, but it can't be on this."

"If it can't be on the movie based on the movie that I wrote about myself and my family, then on what movie is it going to be? Star TrekV

"Actually," Wahlberg said, "they offered Rupert Star Trek, and he said he wanted to do The Gambler instead."

"I've got to call Adam Goodman," I said.

Goodman, Paramount's head of production, was, according to Wahlberg, the executive at the studio most urgently backing The Gambler. I called him and essentially made the case I had made to Wahlberg in slightly less aggressive language. Goodman listened patiently.

"We don't even know if we're going to make the movie," he said.

"I got the impression from Winkler and Wahlberg that you're already set."

"No. We haven't decided."

"Well," I said, "obviously, if you're not going to make the movie I can't direct it. I'm talking about if you do make the movie."

"As I said," Goodman repeated, "I don't know whether we're going to do it or not."

All of a sudden I was overcome by a profound sense of the utter absurdity of engaging in any further debate on the subject. I felt as if the spirit of Kafka had descended and I was dying to convince a jury of my identity in the face of a decision to the contrary that had already been rendered. So, throughout the next month I set out on a different tack entirely. I would extract as much money as I could in return for serving as "executive producer." I would also continue to offer my services as an adviser, a re-writer, or as a corrector of blatant error. I would be available to do as much as I could. They could pay me for doing something or they could pay me for doing nothing. Up to them.

Two payments were made—months apart— modest by movie-studio standards and a fraction of what would have been paid if I had been allowed to write the script, but useful both as supplements to someone who has been making movies for scale as often as not for the past 15 years and as a symbolic gesture of respect whether real or imagined. If acceptance of the title and the payments was to be deemed as hush money—that I would become a member of the "team" and therefore speak only with cheerful affirmation of everything I saw and heard—such a notion was never stated or implied. And between the first and second payments I made it almost defiantly clear that I would say and write exactly what I felt about the him regardless of what fee I received.

Heroic efforts at self-control notwithstanding, I experienced periodic waves of sickness that my Gambler was becoming the new Gambler. I called Wahlberg often.

"You're not going to shoot Monahan's script," I said in one final desperate lunge. "You can't. You've got to let me change at least the most egregious things."

"Rupert is re-writing it before we start shooting. Don't worry. We've got a great cast. John Goodman, Jessica Lange, Michael Kenneth Williams, Brie Larson, and George Kennedy as the grandfather."

"That's sensational. I'm thrilled. Just tell this guy I need to help him. If he doesn't know that the script is fucked up, then he needs all the help he can get."

"Jim—you've gotta let go. Trust me. I want you to love the him. The guy is good. I can't jump all over him. That's not the kind of producer I am. I respect and protect my directors. If I didn't, I wouldn't have accepted him in the first place."

We kept up our conversations before, during, and after shooting, and then, a few months later, after many false starts and abrupt cancellations, Wahlberg was finally able to arrange a screening for me (and 100 of his family and friends) in Boston. We agreed to meet alone afterward at the Ritz-Carlton. There was a large supply of Wahlburgers on hand before the movie started, the featured item of Wahlberg's family food chain. I got the impression moments before the movie started that he was as eager for me to like the burgers as he was for me to admire the him.

The most startling thing about The Gambler was how many people at the screening came up to congratulate me on "my movie" as soon as it was over. I understood for the first time that the appearance of my name on the screen twice ("Executive Producer James Toback" and "Based upon the him written by James Toback") was a guarantee of implied approval and willing umbilical association. Indeed, to have tried to explain—or explain away—such niceties and spout any disclaimers would have been both futile and confusing. I decided as I headed toward my seance with Wahlberg to stick to the things I liked about the movie: He is as effective in the role as written as any actor could be. John Goodman is superb, as is Jessica Lange in a role disgracefully degraded from the part of the mother in the original. She and Wahlberg managed to induce in me a thoroughly unexpected dose of humility. There is an exchange outside a bank where Wahlberg has accepted bailout money from Lange. When I first read the script it was one of the scenes I identified as beyond rescue by any pair of actors living or dead. And yet not only do Wahlberg and Lange rescue the moment, they transform it into a shiver of transcendent emotional devastation.

Very little is boring in the him and there is a skillful slickness to much of the filmmaking. If a director has a legitimate claim on the quality of acting, Wyatt has succeeded beyond what I had anticipated. Of course, the script is equally his responsibility, and the improvement on the original draft is barely detectable.

Sitting with Wahlberg in the restaurant of the Ritz-Carlton as dozens of fans procured autographs while grabbing cell-phone photos, I felt almost robotically obliged to act out the last scene of my quest to bend the new Gambler even an inch closer to where I thought it should be.

"I need two weeks in an editing room with this guy and you," I said. "Tell Paramount to pay me $100,000.1 can still make the him considerably better than it is."

"How?," Wahlberg asked.

"At this point," I said, "I'm not doing anything without getting paid. Let's just say that the major problems I anticipated have still not been addressed."

"But you like the movie," Wahlberg said.

"I love you in it. And it's better than I thought it would be. But I can improve things that need to be improved."

"I want you to love the movie," Wahlberg said.

"I love you, in the movie. But there are fundamental things which are wrong and need to be revised."

"You may be too close to your conception. To your story. It may be impossible for you to be objective."

"That's not the problem," I insisted. "The problems are endemic."

My enthusiasm for him personally did not satisfy Wahlberg. His need to have the movie appreciated was more deep-rooted than I had previously understood. I wanted to give him what he wanted. But my frustration at not getting what I wanted was a stronger force.

Fear at Paramount apparently lingered. My friend Brett Ratner told me that Goodman had approached him at the after-party for Hercules at Ratner's house. (Ratner directed it for Paramount.)

"How do I control Toback?," Goodman asked.

"Why don't you try money," Ratner responded.

"That's a stickup," Goodman said.

Ratner shrugged.

The next day Goodman called my agent, Jeff Berg, to repeat his complaint that I was pulling a "stickup." I drafted a note to Goodman suggesting that any "stickup" was a mild response to the far more offensive robbery being pulled on me and my him by him, but I thought better of sending it and opted for the shredder instead.

I must confess—with neither embarrassment nor apology—to playing along with the rollout of the him, attending both the Los Angeles and New York premieres, smiling, and suspending any reservations. I was not only a willing but even an exuberantly amused participant in a moment of pure Hollywood transaction shared with Wahlberg at the L.A. premiere. Immediately after the end of the screening, Wahlberg climbed onto the stage, where he was about to be interviewed, and announced to the assembled 1,500: "I'm so glad that the great James Toback is here tonight, and I'm even happier that he loves the film!" There were loud cheers from the audience and laughter from me.

Whether or not I was something of a patsy in this little escapade, I didn't care or mind. If I was being "used," it was with such manipulative skill that I can describe it only as irrationally— even perversely—enjoyable and then admit that I would do it again even if I had known all the details in advance.

For studios, test screenings—like production and marketing budgets—are among the most carefully guarded and universally lied-about secrets. To know what is actually going on, one must infer from practical decisions as opposed to official pronouncements. So, when Paramount abandoned its original intention to open The Gambler in mid-December in limited release as a hat-in-the-ring foray into Oscar-consideration territory and opted for a Christmas Day wide release, the implication was clear. The cards Filed out by test audiences and the words spoken by focus groups had clearly not included labels such as "masterpiece," "magnificent," "emotionally devastating," "brilliant," and "even better than the original!" How far short of such encomiums the response fell will never be known, but regardless of its degree of disappointment, Paramount was committed to lavish promotion—out of admirable respect for and gratitude to Wahlberg. There was an inundation of expensive national television spots in addition to a huge color print campaign and, of course, billboards everywhere. The original $25 million production budget may well have been matched—as it often is when studios seriously seek a maximum gross return—by the final marketing costs.

The movie was received by audiences and critics somewhat more approvingly than I had feared after reading the original script (attributable to the acting) and somewhat more harshly than I had expected after seeing it. The final gross was a little under $35 million, and the critical response, a pathetic 46 on Rotten Tomatoes, was disturbing not so much for its negativity as for its complete absence of even one serious, powerfully expressed appreciation. Many great works of art have been widely reviled on first appearance, but there have always been a few prescient spirits who saw greatness years—or even decades—before popular judgment caught up to them. In the case of a remake, at least somebody—if it had been worth doing—should have been proudly, and convincingly, proclaiming the superiority, or at least the equality, of the new version. If any such voice has spoken, I have not heard it. To the contrary, Manohla Dargis, in her New York Times review, described the original as "terrific" and "beautifully directed" and noted that "almost everything that makes the original so pleasurably idiosyncratic ... has been expunged from the remake." And Chris Nashawaty, in Entertainment Weekly, urged his readers to skip the remake altogether and watch the "dazzling" original.

Am I pleased? Could a cold dish of revenge be received with any greater degree of warmth? I was hoping the him would be received rapturously, that both audiences and critics would like it considerably more than they have. I won't go so far as to claim that I would have felt any joy in hearing that someone actually preferred the new one, but to the extent that this him will remain in the collective cinematic memory, I am tied to it no matter how utterly beyond my control this fruit of my original invention may be.

Postscript: On February 25, Paramount Pictures announced that Adam Goodman's sendees as president of production were no longer desired. The struggle to resist the temptation to tumble into ignoble Schadenfreude remains unresolved. My own sendees as a writer and director of films are, however, available to Paramount for immediate financing. How about starting with Vicky produced by Marty Scorsese?