“I love addicts. I love these guys. That’s the people I want to be around. You know, former users. And I think that’s really crazy.”That's Mike Tyson talking to Tim Arango in The New York Times. Now 41 and, one assumes, or maybe hopes, Tyson still has his own peculiar addictions, and one of them seems to be to the filmmaker James Toback. Tyson supplied Toback with the most memorable scene of his 2000 improvisational jam session Black and White when he turned up as himself in a party scene and gets cruised by Robert Downey, Jr., a scene that ends with the unHooksexupd Tyson ("I'm on parole, brother, please") ringing Downey's bell. (After Downey goes down, Brooke Shields, playing his wife, rushes over to see if he's all right, and then she hits on Tyson. "“They say I raped a woman,” Iron Mike tells her politely. “They put me in the penitentiary. I don’t need no white bitch coming on to me.” At the time, there was some indication that Tyson was unhappy with how he came across onscreen and felt that Toback had set him up--not an unreasonably paranoid reaction to Toback, a self-styled provocateur who likes to surround himself with celebrities and stir up some shit. But Tyson came back for an appearance in Toback's little-seen When a Man Loves a Woman, and now he's the star of Toback's new film, a documentary simply called Tyson, "which interposes interviews of Mr. Tyson conducted last year while he was in rehab, with fight clips," and which premieres at the Cannes Film Festival.
“I look at it now, and I’m embarrassed I did it,” Tyson, currently trying to keep a low profile in Las Vegas, says about the film. “There’s a lot of information people didn’t need to know.” His claims to feel shame over his past is believable. But Tyson, who spent the first half of his career easily dominating his opponents in the ring (and the second half showing a complete inability to deal with it when he could no longer easily dominate, so that he'd do anything--go down fast, aim below the belt, turn cannibal--to just make it stop) now seems to be a glutton for this kind of punishment. (He's also working on an autobiographer with a professional ghostwriter.) This focus on sifting through his past may not be entirely based on his having nothing else to peddle. He may be hoping to educate himself. “I don’t know who I am,” he told the Times. “That might sound stupid. I really have no idea. All my life I’ve been drinking and drugging and partying, and all of a sudden this comes to a stop.” Maybe that's why he likes hanging around Toback, who recalls that when they first met back in the 1980s, “somehow the subject got on to madness. I told him about an LSD experience I had as a sophomore at Harvard. We talked about losing the self, and the difference between dread and fear.” (It's too bad that Toback's movies aren't more like his interviews.) Why Toback wants to be around Tyson, in good times and bad, is less mysterious. “I didn’t know how to be any other way," Tyson says now about his free-spending, sometimes lunatic-seeming behavior when things were good, or at lest profitable. "I felt like one of those barbarian kings just coming to conquer the Roman Empire. I was crazy.”