James Toback knows the Hollywood dance. He’s a 40 year veteran of the business, a writer (“Bugsy,” “The Gambler”) and writer-director (“Fingers,””The Pick-Up Artist”) of some repute.

As he approaches his sixty-ninth birthday, he knows the struggle it takes to find a story worth telling, stars who will tell it and financiers to get a movie made. And he thought it would be funny to show, in a documentary, that process of selling out or trying to sell out, of hustling an idea for a movie at the film financing market at the Cannes Film Festival. He would show “both worlds” that even a legendary filmmaker has to master to get a film on the screen. 

“You’ve got to be an inventive, creative, artistic person and part of that world. And yet you’ve also got to be a salesman for that endless, frustrating quest for money. Cannes is the perfect backdrop for that.”

The title says it all — “Seduced and Abandoned.” It’s a tale of endless meetings with would-be check writers, pitching his story for a sexually daring tale of modern disenchantment set against the backdrop of American ties to the Middle East. “Last Tango in Tikrit,” he jokingly titled it. Alec Baldwin would be the star. And the veteran TV actor went to Cannes with his friend, Toback for these sales pitches. Begging, cajoling, rejection and joking ensue.

“The quest would be the movie, a fun movie. It works because we’re having a tough time, and we’re still having fun doing this, with each other,” Toback says. “We’re meeting adversity. Nobody says ‘Yes.’ If we’d had unfettered success instead of rejection, there’d be no movie. The fun is in watching us beg and trip up and screw up and get screwed.”

“Seduced and Abandoned,” which premieres on HBO Oct. 28, follows two friends around the fringes of the glamour of Cannes, interviewing other filmmakers having more (Martin Scorsese) or less (Francis Ford Coppola, Roman Polanski) success than them, letting us sit in as they try to convince would-be financiers to “put your name on a work of art,” as Toback promises. 

“I could only say it if I believed it,” Toback says, laughing. “It’s worked, as bait, in the past. That worked for me with ‘Fingers’ (1978), all those years ago. George Barrie backed ‘Fingers.’ He ran Faberge, and I said ‘Two hundred years from now, nobody will remember who ran Faberge. They’ll remember you for financing ‘Fingers.'”

Critics have embraced “Seduced and Abandoned, with David Thomson, the film scholar and New Republic critic praising Toback’s gifts as an on-camera pitch-man. He’s “an exuberant storyteller” and a salesman “typical of the kind of people who flourish at Cannes.”

And the selling never stops. Toback sold this documentary to HBO, and now he has a deal to write and direct a film for the cable network. Mention how much you liked his revealing documentary interview with Mike Tyson (“Tyson”) and he shouts over his shoulder to an assistant to remind him to get Sony to make that available, again, now that Tyson’s profile has risen.

Toback agrees with the late Orson Welles, whose quote about filmmaking comprising “95% begging for cash” and 5% making the movie opens his documentary. That process is exhausting, “and it’s no way to live.”

But it’s also a meritocracy where a great idea and a great script will always find a way to the screen. Take “Vicky,” a script he wrote in 1977 about pioneering feminist Victoria Woodhull, the first woman to run for president (in 1872), first woman to open a brokerage on Wall Street.

“George Cukor (“My Fair Lady”) was going to direct it, Faye Dunaway was going to star in it. Perfect for the role. Cary Grant was on board…At the last minute, financing pulled out.”

New producers are rounding up the cash and have optioned it.

“Here it is, 36 years later, and now the script is being optioned by people who I think will get the financing to get the film made. So you never say never, ‘That movie never got made.’ Because in this business, you never know.”