Film School
With its staccato editing and pulp visions of a very non-Buffy Sarah Michelle Gellar getting down and dirty, James Toback’s Harvard Man should have made more of an impact upon its limited release. But it’s too edgy for the Buffy fanbase and too drug-laden for the theater chains, who’d rather show heads being cleaved in half than acid trips.
When Toback visits Kansas City to screen Harvard Man for the upcoming Kansas City Filmmakers Jubilee Indy Film Showcase, he gets to speak for himself about a movie critics have said exemplifies the so-bad-it’s-good genre.
Toback’s Two Girls and a Guy and Black and White both starred his pal Robert Downey Jr. In its exploration of white youths’ adoption of black hip-hop culture and parlance, Black and White seemed to be one of the few American films of the last five years that was really about something. This observation sends Toback into a rant about how disgusted he is with modern filmmaking and filmmakers.
“Movies marketed effectively today have to be marketed by one loud note — simple to describe and simple to receive,” he says. “Everyone wants to make a profit — that’s not the issue. But now it’s all about gross; the business has become a quest to gross $100 million and … if you’re on the wrong side of that equation, you’re fucked. The good side: I can make the movies I want.”
Harvard Man opens with split screens. A Harvard basketball game is going on in half the frame; in the other, Gellar and the title character, played by Adrian Grenier, have noisy sex beneath a Gauguin poster. The fact that Grenier — a skinny 5-feet-10-inches — plays college ball is the first of several credulity-stretching aspects that make the film a bit translucent. If you buy this, Toback seems to insist, then you also must accept Gellar as a mafioso princess and the parakeet-voiced Joey Lauren Adams as a Harvard philosophy professor lecturing on Kierkegaard.
When Grenier’s character takes a massive dose of acid (Toback did the same thing while a Harvard man), it’s not an accident or a goof. The boy’s interests are scholarly and introspective. And his split affections between Gellar and Adams provoke thoughtful discussions about what sex partners want when the sex is exhausted.
Gellar, who hinted at her dark side in Cruel Intentions but is known to toddlers everywhere from Scooby-Doo, had no reservations about her clothed but graphic sex scenes. “When she decided to work with me, anyone who works for her [who might have objected] had to get out of the way,” Toback says. “She’s extremely clear-headed and almost unique that way. Most [young stars] run a Gallup poll about who they’re supposed to like and work with. Sarah’s far too directly opinionated for that.”
