TYSON’S DOCU-MOVIE SCORES BIG AT CANNES FILM FESTIVAL
Movie fans and cine-industry delegates cheered Mike Tyson like days of old when a new documentary of the former world heavyweight champion was premiered at the world famous Cannes Film Festival.
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After the film was screened Mike and director James Toback went on stage and Tyson said he was intimidated by the noisy applause.
Our Vegas resident and nightclub regular said as the packed house crowd continued its lengthy applause: “I’ve never experienced anything like this in my whole career. I’m an athlete and this is totally out of my field here, it’s kind of intimidating.”
The retired fighter, who had a starting string of 37-unbroken ring victories, flew to the French Riviera from his new Vegas home for the premiere of Tyson, with an entourage including some of his six children.
The film combines more than 30 hours of interviews along with highlights of his fight career. It shows his rags-to-riches story from the mean streets poverty of Brooklyn to his extraordinary rise to super stardom and then subsequent fall from drug addiction, a rape conviction and finally the humiliation of his final fight. The film openly admits that Tyson lost some $400 million of his prize fight wins. He scored 44 knockouts in his 50 fight career as the youngest and undisputed champion at just 20 years old in 1986 and continued until 1990.
Both Tyson and Toback were near tears when Mike said: “Jim, he just elicited all this stuff out of me, I don’t know how he did it.” Toback commented: “I believe I succeeded in showing him as a complex and iconic and noble human being.” Toback, said he believed he had succeeded in presenting Tyson as a “complex and iconic and noble human being.” The director said he first met Tyson, then a teen in 1985, while making The PickUp Artist in New York. He cast hm in two films, Black and White, in 1999 and When Will I Be Loved in 2004. Last year he interviewed the fallen fighter while he was in a California rehab clinic for drug and alcohol addiction treatment.
Tyson, now 42, says in the film that he was the victim of vicious bullying while an oversized child. “It was kill or be killed,” he explained. By age 12 he was in a juvenile detention home, but legendary trainer Gus D’Amato rescued him and became a “father” to him to build his self-esteem. Tyson says he underwent relentless hours in training and learned all the tricks of a championship fighter. “It was tactical and psychological, everything necessary to bring an opponent to his knees. I knew all the skullduggery. Most of these guys lost the fight before it even started. Once I get in the ring I am a god.”
In the documentary, to be released here later this year, Tyson reflects upon his mistakes, including an unhappy marriage and bitter divorce from actress Robin Givens. He’s still angry about the three years he served in prison following a 1992 rape conviction with a beauty pageant winner and still denies the charges. “I may have taken advantage of women before, but not of that woman,” he tells the camera. “That still bothers me today.”
He won back the heavyweight throne but lost it to Evander Holyfield in 1996 and bit his ears twice in their 1997 rematch, adding banishment to his ridicule. His final bid to to recapture the crown failed in 2002 when he lost in an 8th round knockout to Britain’s Lennox Lewis. He filed for bankruptcy in 2003 and retired after losing two other insignificant fights in 2004 and 2005. “I just didn’t have it in me anymore, I lost the desire to be a champion,” he sums up in the movie.