Rated ‘O’ (for Obsessed)

Sex is writer-director James Toback’s favorite subject. Death and his alma mater, Harvard, are also abiding interests, but neither holds a candle to copulation.

Toback’s 1987 film, “The Pick-up Artist,” featured Robert Downey Jr. as a relentless lech who pursued women like a heat-seeking missile. His 1989 documentary, “The Big Bang,” was built on the idea that the creation of the cosmos was the orgasmic explosion of God. And his own libido is so legendary that Spy magazine once published a fold-out chart of his conquests.

So it seemed fitting that sex brought Toback, a lifelong New Yorker, back to Los Angeles last week. The Motion Picture Assn. of America had given his latest film, “Two Girls and a Guy,” an NC-17 rating, and the 52-year-old filmmaker was here to lobby--unsuccessfully, as it turned out--for an R.

“I’m depressed and enraged,” Toback said just minutes after the MPAA appeals board refused to budge on the film, which stars Downey as a two-timing actor whose girlfriends (Heather Graham and Natasha Gregson Wagner) discover each other’s existence.

“Sexual obsession and sexual duplicity are being completely ignored in American movies today,” Toback lamented, clutching a cranberry juice in the lobby of the Four Seasons Hotel. “You don’t have movies made about sex. Not that every movie should be that. But should no movie be that?”

The question haunts the bearded, slightly wild-eyed Toback. His 1978 directorial debut--”Fingers,” the story of a pianist who breaks arms for the Mob--won praise from both top critics (Pauline Kael) and big-name directors (Francois Truffaut). Some of his scripts have gotten similar acclaim--”The Gambler” (1974) is a keen portrait of compulsive behavior; “Bugsy” (1991), about the creator of Las Vegas, was nominated for an Academy Award.

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But Toback has had several lean years, creatively speaking. In 1994, he gave up on “Shrink,” a script about a compulsive psychiatrist that he’d struggled for two years to write for Warren Beatty. Since then, he has tried in vain to get financing for “Harvard Man,” his script about the sexual and criminal exploits of a basketball-playing philosophy major.

In short, Toback needs to score. “Two Girls and a Guy,” which Fox Searchlight Pictures is releasing in early 1998, is his first directing gig in eight years. He sees it as his chance for a comeback.

“If it does well,” he said hopefully, “I think it could definitely change things.”

Already, the film appears to have changed Toback. A perfectionist and procrastinator who has been known to take as long as six years on a script, he wrote “Two Girls” in four days, shot it in 11 and kept to a budget of just over $1 million.

The resulting film--shot almost entirely inside a New York City loft--is a raunchy, three-way rant. You have to give Toback this: Rarely has an argument about fidelity, monogamy and betrayal been given so much time on the big screen.

“You are a lying, mugging, misogynistic, unemployable, short, loft-inheriting, piece of s--- fraud,” Wagner’s character says to Downey at one point.

“I’m short now, too, huh?” Downey responds.

Critic, biographer and author David Thomson once wrote that his friendship with Toback had endured for years because of “his rogue charm, his endless capacity for telephone gossip, his generosity, his lack of pomp, his zest for existential limits, his humor . . . and the entertainment of wondering how much to believe.”

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To spend a few hours with Toback is to appreciate Thomson’s precision. Toback charms, likening his interviewer to a former model. He jokes, noting that if the average movie costs about $40 million to make, maybe he should ask financiers to fund his next 40 movies all at once.

But mostly, Toback inspires wonder--about the rat-a-tat of his banter and about the veracity of the tales he tells. For example, he says he was the last person to talk to Don Simpson, the movie producer who was found dead in his bathroom in 1996. The two had been on the phone for four hours, Toback says, during which Simpson committed to producing “Harvard Man.”

They hung up and, according to Toback, “he died literally three minutes [later]. The phone records show it.”

Next, Toback tells of his habit of following strangers around New York, just to see what they do. He mentions his connections, both intimate and remote, to famous Harvard alumni, including his friend Norman Mailer.

He describes “Vicky,” a 19th century drama about Victoria Woodhull--the feminist, free-love advocate and presidential candidate--that he wrote for Faye Dunaway. Dunaway, he says, considers the fact that it never got made “one of the great tragedies in the history of movies.”

Then, just when Toback’s braggadocio--not to mention his claims to being “very tight” with everyone from director Barry Levinson to actors Dustin Hoffman, Leonardo DiCaprio and Mark Wahlberg--seems to strain the limits of credibility, the truth backs him up.

“It remains one of the tragedies of the business that ‘Vicky’ never became a movie,” Dunaway writes in her autobiography, calling it “one of the best scripts I have ever read.”

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Getting a handle on Toback is definitely harder than it looks, which perhaps is part of the reason for his current tangle with the MPAA over “Two Girls and a Guy.” The ratings board objects to a single, dimly lighted scene in which Downey and Graham, though almost fully clothed, engage in a sexual practice that is outlawed in some states.

Undeniably, the scene is raw and intense. But anyone who’s seen the R-rated “Boogie Nights”--New Line Cinema’s recently released film about the pornography industry--will probably judge “Two Girls” to be the tamer film by far.

Toback says MPAA appeals board members told him they upheld the NC-17 rating because “Two Girls” is “groundbreaking” in its sexual depiction--an assessment that he might once have advocated using in the film’s marketing campaign. But that is not to be.

Under his contract with Fox, Toback must turn in an R-rated film. He has resigned himself to going back to the editing room.

“With ‘Fingers,’ it took me 13 submissions [to the MPAA] before the X became an R,” he grumbles. “I will trim the scene. But if I have to do anything more than trim, I may have to get into my Ted Kaczinski mode.”

A moment later, as the relevance of the alleged Unabomber remains unclear, he smiles, as to offer the key to deciphering all things Toback.

“He went to Harvard,” Toback says meaningfully. “Two years behind me.”