“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 unnerved 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.
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