At a little after 9pm on Wednesday, November 11, I learned via Twitter that boxer Mike Tyson, the former heavyweight champion of the world, had just scored his latest knockout. Unfortunately for “Iron Mike,” early reports indicated that the opponent was not a fellow boxer but an overagressive paparazzo; the fight took place not in a ring but at Los Angeles International Airport; the referee was not wearing a striped shirt but a police badge; and the prize was not the millions of dollars to which Tyson was once accustomed but a free ride in the back of a squad car to the nearest detention center. With details few and far between, I picked up the phone and called perhaps the only man in the world who really knows Tyson — at least since his beloved trainer and surrogate father Cus D’Amato died 24 years ago — to try to get some answers. As it turned out, the news had not yet reached James Toback.
“Holy shit,” was the reaction of the larger-than-life filmmaker whose recent documentary about Tyson — titled, appropriately enough, “Tyson” — is now very much in the running to make the Academy’s shortlist of documentaries (to be announced later today) from which five will ultimately be chosen as nominees. “That’s not good.” He paused for what seemed like an eternity, perhaps digesting the news, before adding, “I mean, nothing ever surprises me, unfortunately.”
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Toback, who is a week shy of his 65th birthday, was born into Manhattan’s high society. His mother was a president of The League of Women Voters who moderated several political debates on NBC and his father was a top stockbroker on Wall Street. After attending an elite preparatory school, he headed off to Harvard, from which he would graduate magna cum laude in 1966. But things weren’t nearly as picture-perfect as they seemed. At the same time that Toback was excelling in the classroom, he was also experimenting in all sorts of ways outside of it. One, in particular, has “haunted” him ever since: as a 19-year-old sophomore, he recounts, “I flipped out on LSD for eight days.”
Since graduating, Toback has led a full and exciting life. He taught for two years in the writing program at City College as part of an English Department that also included Donald Barthelme, John Hawkes, Joseph Heller, Israel Horovitz, and Ishmael Reed. While there, he began submitting articles to academic publications, including the definitive survey of Norman Mailer’s writings and personal politics. But he was not cut out for the life of a professor; he craved more excitement, perhaps even more risk. Mainstream magazines had begun commissioning him to write articles about a wide variety of topics, and it was this that led him to the doorstep of the man most regard as greatest player in the history of professional football, Jim Brown.
Brown had retired a few years earlier at the age of 29 — at the peak of his abilities and popularity — and was now dividing his time between appearing in Hollywood films (like “The Dirty Dozen,” in 1967) and sleeping with beautiful women (he had mastered womanizing while growing up in a brothel). Toback was invited into his home after claiming that he had been asked to write a lengthy profile of him for Esquire, although he now confesses “I don’t really believe that I intended to” and “just wanted to hang out there.” And who wouldn’t? “I was very intrigued with stories I’d heard about his wild life,” he recalls. “You know, this was the early seventies, and things were sort of crazy out there… and I just wanted to see what happens.” Then something strange happened. “We hit it off, and I moved in, and it became clear to me that I actually did want to write something, but not an article,” he says. Instead, he wrote “Jim,” a personal memoir of his time with Brown that was published in 1971.
Toback’s life experiences subsequently offered him an entree into Hollywood, as well. He penned a largely autobiographical screenplay about a college professor addicted to gambling, and the resulting film, Karel Reisz’s “The Gambler” (1974), became a critically-acclaimed hit starring James Caan. On the basis of that film’s success, he was permitted to direct his next screenplay, which might be called a hybrid of “The Jazz Singer” and “The Godfather” — in “Fingers” (1978), which has since become a cult-classic and been remade as “The Beat That My Heart Skipped” (2005), Harvey Keitel plays the son of an aging mobster who is torn between being the violent debt-collector that his father wants him to be and the classical pianist that his mother would like him to be instead. (Jim Brown also made an appearance.)
Over the years since, Toback has fairly steadily written and directed gritty, low-budget indies that have courted controversy, generated mixed-reviews, and almost always turned profits. These have included “Love & Money” (1982), in which a normal guy winds up in business with a billionaire and in bed with his wife; “Exposed” (1983), which is less a narrative than an appreciation of the stunning Natassja Kinski; “The Pick-Up Artist” (1987), which provided the first major role for Robert Downey, Jr. (whom Toback refers to as his “alter-ego”) as a womanizer who meets his female match; “The Big Bang” (1989), a provocative film in which he asked a wide variety of people to share their views on the meaning of life; “Two Girls and a Guy” (1997), in which two women learn that they’re involved with the same man (Downey, again) and confront him; “Black & White” (1999), which is about white kids’ attraction to black pop-culture (a third collaboration with Downey); “Harvard Man” (2001), in which Adrien Grenier reenacts Toback’s Harvard years somewhere between the way they were and the way he wanted them to be; and “When Will I Be Loved” (2004), in which Neve Campbell, of all people, discovers the thrills and hazards of a sexually-uninhibted life.
The film for which Toback is best-known, however, “Bugsy” (1991), which he wrote but Barry Levinson directed. Toback says he initially thought he was going to be directing the film, too, and wanted to murder Levinson after being informed that he had gotten the job instead, but says he found Levinson to be so likable that he reconsidered. The film went on to receive 10 Oscar nominations, including one for Toback for best original screenplay. Most filmmakers consider such an honor to be their primary bragging right, but Toback actually tends to downplay it because, he says, “it sort of made me someone that everyone wanted to hire as a screenwriter, which I was not interested in being. I was interested in writing and directing. So, in terms of its usefulness, I would say that it didn’t really have any.”
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Toback and Tyson have been close friends since the day they first met in 1984, when the name Tyson was still more associated with chicken than boxing. You might wonder what a 40-year-old white film director from Manhattan society and a 19-year-old black boxer from a Brooklyn ghetto could possibly have in common. The answer is actually quite simple: madness.
During the making of “The Pick-Up Artist,” cast members Anthony Michael Hall and Brian Hamill brought Tyson to the set to meet the film’s star, Downey. As Toback recalls, “Hamill had been telling me about Tyson for years — about what a great fighter he was going to be and all the rest — and I saw Tyson walking towards us, and when we were introduced he recognized the name and said, ‘You’re the guy Jim Brown was telling me about!” As it turned out, Tyson had also stayed at Brown’s house (the previous week, in fact), and after exchanging stories they “just hit it off.” At five o’clock in the morning, the two men took a long stroll through Central Park. during which Toback remembers thinking, “Well, if there’s ever going to be a night where I’m attacked in Central Park, I hope this is the night.”
Their conversation covered “everything,” but, like most of Toback’s conversations (and films), it eventually found its way to his mind-altering experience with LSD. Tyson was fascinated. “He really was obsessed with finding out what I meant by madness,” Toback says. “And I was trying to explain it to him, and finally I said, ‘Well, the only way you really are ever going to know is if you go insane yourself, which is not something I would recommend because it’s sheer agony.’”
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The two men kept in touch over the ensuing years, during which Toback became an Oscar-winning filmmaker and Tyson became the heavyweight champion of the world. They might not talk often, but when they did — during high-points and low-points – it was always “intense.”
In early 1999, Tyson was sentenced to a year in prison for assaulting two motorists after a traffic accident. He was released after nine months, and not long after ran into Toback in New York. The director says he asked him if he would appear in his next film, “Black & White,” and that the boxer’s response was, “I’m gonna be wherever you want me to be. I’m gonna do it. But I have to tell you now I know what you were talking about.” Toback replied, “What do you mean?” Tyson explained, “Well, I was sitting in solitary confinement in my nineteenth month in prison, and all of a sudden it came to me: this is what Toback was talking about that night in the park. I am now insane.”
Tyson would go on to make cameos in two of Toback’s films over the next decade, “Black & White” (1999) and “When Will I Be Loved” (2004). The most memorable scene of the former features Tyson being approached and hit on by Downey, who is playing a gay man in a straight relationship. Tyson was not informed in advance that this would be happening and is caught on camera reacting with shocking rage and violence, throwing Downey to the floor and spewing homosexual slurs at him. Only moments later, though, he is at a loss for words when sexy Brooke Shields‘ character puts her own moves on him. Talk about black and white!
In late 2006, Tyson was arrested again, this time on suspicion of driving under the influence and for felony drug possession. In February 2007, while awaiting his trial (he would ultimately be sentenced to 1 day in jail and 3 years of probation), he checked himself into a rehab center. When he was released, Toback approached him — just as he had Downey a decade earlier upon his release from rehab — with an idea for a film. (He told another interviewer, “You get some interesting effects when you have people when they’re sane but have just been through an ordeal.”) Toback wanted to build a documentary around Tyson sharing his own story and outlook. Tyson agreed to do his part.
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“Tyson” was shot over the course of three days in a rented house in the Hollywood Hills and two days on a beach near Malibu, both places that Toback felt were conducive to getting Tyson into a “meditative state,” as opposed to his usual “ADD-like, random, erratic” mindset. During this time together, Toback sought to engage Tyson in “a kind of quasi-psychoanalytic stream-of-consciousness self-revelation” by raising various topics and then “letting his language unleash itself.” And sure enough it does — as Toback notes, Tyson is “very articulate in his own way,” employing certain words “at the mercy of his own sense of invention,” like “skullduggery” and “erudite.” The words that most surprised Toback? Tyson’s “admission of constant fear, an enveloping sense of fear which motivated and generated just about everything in his life.”
Having captured roughly 30 hours of interview footage, Toback repaired to his home editing room for the next few months. There, he hoped to be able to piece together a film that would convey the sense of “madness” that both he and Tyson had experienced — “that sense of isolation, of separation, of threat,” as he describes it. He settled on a few techniques that proved to be startlingly effective: mixing footage of present-day Tyson — a bloated, mellow, reflective man — with stock footage of his highest and lowest moments in the past; playing different portions of the interviews that he shot simultaneously on different parts of the screen, with audio from one part often overlapping audio from another; and, at times, simply allowing the camera to linger on Tyson’s battered, tattooed face even after he has spoken his piece. The effect is that he really does look and sound like a lost man, or a rabid animal, or an alien who does not and never will be able to peacefully co-exist with this world.
As the film began to come together, Toback developed a crazy idea: that women might respond to it as much if not more than men. In his typical unabashed style, he began approaching them on the street and inviting them into his editing room to check out a rough cut with the lure, “I’ll give you $100 if you leave after five minutes, but if you stay I won’t give you anything and you’ve got to tell me what you think.” According to Toback, all 35 women that he approached passed up the cash and stayed for the duration of the film, and “many of them were in tears” by the time the credits rolled. To what does he attribute this reaction? “The fact that there’s such an unadulterated sense of truthfulness” in Tyson’s responses to Toback’s interview questions. “You’re meeting an extremely complex person who seems to be, and in fact is, not trying to come across any special way, but is allowing you to see him as he is, and is only too ready to condemn himself.”
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Documentaries are rarely included in competition at the Cannes Film Festival, and the 2008 event’s organizers made no exception for “Tyson.” Toback was, however, invited to show the film out of competition, so he and Tyson, along with their families, made the trek out to attend the world premiere screening. When it was greeted with a 12-minute standing ovation, both men were shocked and deeply emotional. As Toback recalls, “Part of my brain was saying, ‘Well, life is all downhill from here.’”
Not quite. First, the Cannes jury created a special prize — “The Knockout of Un Certain Regard” — to honor the film. Then, in January, following a discouraging few months in which the spiraling economy seemed to have claimed any hope of the film finding a major distributor, Sony Pictures Classics purchased its North American distribution rights. Then, in April, the film opened in select theaters, and while it didn’t leave a dent at the box-office (earning just under $900,000) it was received without almost exclusively positive reviews. Now, as the awards season gets underway, it appears to have a shot at garnering what would be its highest honor yet: an Oscar nomination. (Incidentally, Toback reports that Tyson “has an almost iconic fascination with the Academy Award — I think he looks at it as sort of the complement to the heavyweight championship.” This may partially explain his willingness to do a significant number of interviews on behalf of the film.)
Three weeks before the LAX incident involving Tyson, Toback shared with me a recent conversation that he’d had with him that seems very apropos in light of what happened there: “I was talking to him a couple of weeks ago and I said to him, ‘You know, you and I’ — because I do put myself in the same category — ‘are in the unique and unfortunate position of probably having caused ourselves more pain and misery than any of our enemies or people who wished us ill ever could have done in combination.’” For both Tyson and “Tyson,” the last lines of the film say it all: “What I did in the past is history. What I’ll do in the future is mystery.”
Photo: Mike Tyson and James Toback take a break from filming the documentary “Tyson.” Credit: Sony Pictures Classics.
