The Screengrab : Alan Dershowitz

Forgotten Films: "Fallen Champ: The Untold Story of Mike Tyson" (1993)

Phil Nugent — Fri, 01 May 2009 17:00:00 GMT

Tyson, director James Toback's feature-length sit-down with the disgraced former boxing champ, is fascinating in a narrow, claustrophobic way: with no new interview footage from anyone but Tyson himself (and only a few minutes of testimony from other--mainly Toback's boxing mentor and father figure Cus D'Amato--in the archival material that's included)--it seals the viewer inside the echo chamber of Tyson's head, and it's confusing and scary in there. The movie carries a charge, but that's partly because Tyson and Toback have similar attitudes and obsessions, especially regarding machismo, women and sex, and the supposed nobility of outlaw behavior, that they'd both have been better off dropping as soon as they hit puberty. (It's skin-crawling to listen to the convicted rapist Tyson babbling about how he once thought a "great man" was obliged to "conquer" a vast number of beautiful and powerful women, and how, rather than get over that, he came to realize that these succubi only suck the strength from the men in their grasp--especially since it's easy to picture Toback, sitting off-camera. nodding his hairy melon head.) Powerful as Toback's movie is as psychodrama, it's not the place to go to get a clear, thoughtful picture of Tyson's life and career. For that, viewers would be best off tracking down Fallen Champ: The Untold Story of Mike Tyson, a documentary made by Barbara Kopple (whose other credits range from the classic 1976 Harlan County, USA and its 1990 follow-up American Dream to the more recent Dixie Chicks doc Shut Up & Sing) for NBC TV in 1993. The film, which first aired while Tyson was serving his prison sentence, won Kopple the Directors' Guild Award for "Best Directorial Achievement in Documentary" of the year. It was released on videocassette but hasn't made it to DVD.

Tyson never knew his father, and the most he has to say about his mother (who died when he was sixteen) in Toback's film is that she was "promiscuous." Kopple found some folks who remember him as a kid in his old Brownsville neighborhood, but most of the interview subjects here who knew him when he was young entered his life when he was in juvenile detention. (One of them, his caseworker, Ernestine Coleman, later saw him on TV talking about his eagerness to do permanent physical injury to his opponents in the ring and sent him a message, imploring him to become "a man, not an animal.") It was while he was in juvie that Tyson met a counselor named Bobby Stewart, who he begged to teach him to box. Stewart told him he'd consider it if Tyson could do a good enough job of mending his ways to prove that he might be worth the trouble, and was surprised when Tyson did such a thorough job of it that he moved up a reading level. After teaching Tyson some of the ropes, Stewart turned him over to Cus D'Amato, a lovably deranged boxing enthusiast who ran a sort of halfway house cum sparring academy for wayward boys. D'Amato, who in archive footage looks like Lawrence Tierney's good twin, is described affectionately by one witness as "a cuckoo bird", but he knew how to put his stamp on fighters--his previous padwas had included Jose Torres (who had a memorable cameo in Toback's Exposed) and Floyd Patterson--and there are a lot of people who think he was the first human being who ever made Mike Tyson feel loved.

"I'm not a creator," D'Amato can be seen telling an interviewer. "What I do is discover and uncover. And when I uncover, the boys discover qualities in themselves that they didn't know they had." The quality that Mike Tyson once had that Fallen Champ uncovers is the ability to charm. Not the dubious, high-pressure charm of the brassy big-time player that he developed when he was on top of the world and taking style tips from such questionable role models as Donald Trump and Don King, but the boyish, secretly girl-shy charm of an overgrown kid who has no idea how to "be a man" but who, for a while there, was reveling in becoming the best at something and didn't have to worry too much about anything bigger. The years between 1982, when Tyson won the Silver Medal at the Junior Olympic Games, and 1985, when he made his professional debut eight months before D'Amato's death, might have been the only time in Tyson's life when he was able to have fun. Before, he'd felt alone in a dangerous environment, and felt that he had to turn to crime to support himself; once the rapid rise to the top of the world began, he felt that he had to keep the wheels turning so that the millions he was making for himself, and others, didn't disappear overnight. Watching him in the footage from that brief window when he didn't feel as if he were carrying the weight of the world, when he could celebrate a victory in the ring by bouncing around happily and jumping on the ropes, you're painfully aware of how much pressure he must have felt just about every other minute of his life.

At the same time, he was developing some scary attitudes at just the point where those who saw him as the golden goose might not be inclined to risk alienating his affections by urging him to re-examine them. A woman boxing trainer recalls that young Mike, who was too shy to ask girls to dance for fear of being rejected, once told her excitedly that he'd finally figured out the solution: you just walked up to a girl, grabbed her hand, and pulled her onto the dance floor without giving her the chance to say no. One figure close to Tyson in this period was the trainer Teddy Atlas, who's seen telling a reporter that Mike has a "weak" personality and then hastens to clarify that he means Mike is "easily misled. He needs love, he needs confidence...somebody to be with him."

Unfortunately, Teddy fell out with Tyson, big-time--a gun was involved--in a dispute over what the trainer saw as Tyson's unhealthy attitude towards women. In the end, D'Amato gave Atlas his walking papers. After D'Amato died, Tyson was managed by a team that included an old associate named Jimmy Jacobs, but Jacobs himself died in 1988, just at a point when Tyson needed sound counsel more than ever. (He had just married Robin Givens, and Don King was moving in for the kill.) Jacobs's death effectively cut Tyson's last tie to someone in his inner circle who had known him before he was a major commercial property. It isn't long before Tyson is seen demanding of the reporters at a press conference, "Are you here because you like me or because I make a lot of cash?" The fact that he could even think of putting that question to that particular gathering of lost souls tells you just how much growing up he still needed to do. (With the arrival of Givens, the media's attitude towards Tyson becomes insulting on a fresh new level. Kopple includes a clip of a sportscaster asking the blushing bride how "a woman who went to Sarah Lawrence and Harvard Medical School winds up falling in love with a guy who graduated from the school of hard knocks." Givens proceeds to top him by telling him that she and this fatherless son of an absentee mother have "a lot in common--like traditional families!")

The last third of Kopple's film deals with examining what happened between Tyson and Desiree Washington, who Toback, in his own movie, is content to write off as, in Tyson's words, "that wretched swine of a woman." Kopple uses the journalist Sonja Steptoe to provide a running narrative of the events that transpired after Tyson and Washington's first (public) meeting, interweaving it with comments from a cross section of African-American women, the women's studies professor Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, and Alan Dershowitz (who, slime all but oozing visibly from his pores, complains that by objecting to Tyson's treatment of her, Washington broke the sacred "rule of the groupies", adding that the "rule", which seems to be that male celebrities can do anything they want to women who agree to meet them late at night "is tragic, and I wish it didn't exist," but that since it does exist, it must be honored for the protection of our male celebrity population). There are also interviews with Tyson's bodyguard and driver, and provide hair-raising examples of what kind of enlightened brain trust Tyson had to turn to in the absence of D'Amato and Jacobs (sample proverb: "Women said that Mike grabbed them, but I can't grab you unless you're within reach!") and a clip of Louis Farrakhan, leader of an organization that advertises its commitment to protecting the honor of black woman, entertains the audience at a "Free Mike Tyson" gathering by viciously mocking the idea that any woman who would agree to be alone with Tyson wasn't asking for whatever she got. It all amounts to a clear-eyed, wide-ranging, and very dispiriting documentary essay on the state of the dialogue about race and sex in this country at a very low point, but Kopple doesn't lose the specific human dimension of it: at the end, she brings in Donald Washington, Desiree's father, a self-confessed Tyson "fight fan" whose composure crumbles before the camera as he describes hugging his daughter and feeling that he'd lost a part of her that he was afraid might never be coming back. Of course, Kopple's movie, unlike Toback's, ends with Tyson still in prison, leaving it a matter of conjecture whether he would ever fight again. It was impossible to know at the time that, by cutting his story off at that point, she was doing him a kindness.

Related:

Screengrab Review: "Tyson"

Screengrab at Sundance: Review of Tyson

Ron Silver, 1946 - 2009

Phil Nugent — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 14:00:00 GMT

Ron Silver has died, at 62, after a two year battle with esophageal cancer. The living image of the "New York actor", Silver, was something of a specialist in fast-talking, saturnine cynics, an association that became even greater after he won a Tony Award for his semi-legendary performance as a Hollywood shark in David Mamet's 1988 Broadway hit Speed-the-Plow. Silver's performances in the Mamet play and in David Rabe's 1984 Hurlyburly--neither of which, sadly, he got to repeat on film--cemented his image as the great white way's modern notion of a successful movie industry sleazeball. Ironically, he never became the star in movies that he was onstage, but he had a long and healthy career in TV and movies anyway. After a barely detectable film debut in the unfunny underground comedy Tunnel Vision (1977) and a recurring role alongside a fellow Broadway baby on 1980's The Stockard Channing Show, Silver began to develop a name for himself in movies with his rambunctiously funny performances in the romantic comedies Best Friends (1982), in which he played, yes, a Hollywood producer, and Lovesick (1983), in which his character, a Hollywood star returning to his New York stage roots, gave him the chance to mock Al Pacino.

Throughout the rest of the decade, Silver would move freely from stage to TV to movie roles, including a starring role in Sidney Lumet's Garbo Talks (1984). His peak of national visibility probably came in 1989 and 1990, when he played Jerry Lewis's son in a multi-episode story arc of the cult series Wiseguy; gave the performance of his movie career as the lead in Paul Mazursky's superb movie version of Isaac Bashevis Singer's Enemies, a Love Story; stalked Jamie Lee Curtis as a deranged stockbroker turned serial gunman in Kathryn Bigelow's Blue Steel; starred as a leftish screenwriter navigating the 1950s blacklist era in the British TV film Fellow Traveller; and don a Groucho mustache to play Alan Dershowitz in counterpoint to Jeremy Irons's Oscar-winning turn as Claus von Bulow in Barbet Schroeder's torn-from-the-headlines Reversal of Fortune.

Though he continued to work steadily, his days of playing leads in theatrical features that people went to see receded behind him, and he began to enjoy his best opportunities in movies as a campy villain, in such movies as the Jean-Claude Van Damme picture Timecop (1994), where he confronted his younger self with a plea that he lay off the candy bars, and The Arrival (2006), where he got to deliver a speech explaining that global warming was part of a plan for an imminent extraterrestrial takeover of the Earth. (He parodied this side of his career in the famous Ben Stiller-directed, unaired TV pilot Heat Vision and Jack, in which he played a sinister character named Ron Silver whose acting career was a cover for his principal occupation of serving the conspiracy to install a New World Order.) He made his directing debut with the 1993 TV film Lifepod, a sci-fi variation on Hitchcock's Lifeboat. He returned to the courtroom to play Robert Shapiro in American Tragedy, a 2000 O. J. Simpson docudrama written by Norman Mailer, was hilarious as tennis hustler Bobby Riggs in the TV film When Billie Beat Bobby (2001), convincingly dogged as Angelo Dundee in Michael Mann's The Greatest biopic Ali (2001), and reunited with Lumet for Find Me Guilty (2006), yet another fact-based courtroom drama, for which he was upgraded from lawyer to judge.

Silver also had recurring or regular roles on the TV series Chicago Hope, Veronica's Closet, Skin, and The West Wing, where he played a political consultant who, over the course of the show, had a political conversion from left to right. Silver himself experienced his own sea change after September 11, 2001, and became a highly public proponent for his changed views, making the rounds of the TV talk shows, appearing at the 2004 Republican National Convention, and blogging for Pajamas Media. He also narrated FahrenHYPE 9/11 (a 2004 documentary response to Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, and co-directing, with Kevin Knoblock, the documentary Broken Promises: The United Nations at 60. His last performance was in the 2008 Distant Runners.

Hebrew Hammers: The Top 12 Tough Jews of Cinema (Part II)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 15 May 2008 20:30:00 GMT

JOHN GOODMAN AS WALTER SOBCHAK IN THE BIG LEBOWSKI (1998)

Okay, so technically, this one is a bit of a cheat. Not only was Walter Sobchak portrayed by the decidedly non-Jewish John Goodman, but the character isn’t even technically of the People; as the Dude points out, he’s a Polish Catholic who converted when he married a Jewish woman. Still, that doesn’t stop him from maintaining his Jewish identity to the point of outright hostility; he won’t roll on Shabbos, and claims that he’s “as Jewish as fuckin’ Tevye”. Nor does it stop him, in a movie not exactly known for its macho tough guys, from being the toughest guy on screen: whether it’s pulling a .45 on a burned-out hippie for going over the line while bowling, hatching a scheme to take out an entire gang of phony kidnappers, or biting the ear off of a German nihilist, the proprietor of Sobchak Security displays a toughness that borders on the psychotic. And if he sometimes flags a bit, backing off from an outraged neighbor whose car he’s just totaled, he makes up for it later by brusquely yanking a paraplegic out of his wheelchair to see if he’s faking. (Turns out he isn’t, but hey, he had to check, right?) As an aside, Walter may be the toughest Jew in the Coen Brothers’ cinematic ouvre, but he’s hardly the only one; their films are crammed full of hard-assed Hebrews. There’s tough-as-nails furniture magnate Nathan Arizona (nee Huffheinz) in Raising Arizona; steely mob moll Verna Birnbaum in Miller’s Crossing, who has plenty more guts than her conniving brother Bernie; monstrous movie producer/force of nature Jack Lipnick (played by longtime tough Jew Michael Lerner) in Barton Fink; scheming business tycoon Sidney Mussberger in The Hudsucker Proxy; and inscrutable post-modernist shyster Freddie Riedenschneider in The Man Who Wasn’t There. Sure, only one of those characters was actually played by a Jewish actor, but the Coen Brothers clearly have a soft spot for tough Jews, and Walter may be the best, but he won’t be the last.

HANK GREENBERG IN THE LIFE AND TIMES OF HANK GREENBERG (1998)

No other baseball player could ever match the impact of Jackie Robinson breaking the color line in 1947, or go through the hell he did to achieve it. But as the 1998 documentary The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg makes clear, the major leagues were no picnic for the first Jewish slugger either. When Greenberg got his start in the Texas League, a teammate was puzzled by his appearance; he'd been told that all Jews had horns. Things didn't improve when he made it to the show in the 1930s. Between Father Coughlin and Henry Ford, Detroit was a hotbed of anti-Semitism. Chants of "kike" and "sheeny" rang out through the stands and opposing dugouts. But through it all, Greenberg was a one-man wrecking crew. He was twice voted the American League MVP and he led the Detroit Tigers to back-to-back World Series in 1934 and 1935, despite refusing to play on Yom Kippur during the pennant drive. (He did play on Rosh Hashanah, though – his rabbi found a loophole in the Talmud.) The Hebrew Hammerin' Hank was the first prominent Jew known for physical prowess and an inspiration to kids like Walter Matthau ("I was just delighted to know there was someone like Hank Greenberg around, and I didn't have to wind up as a presser, a cutter or a salesman in the garment center") and Alan Dershowitz ("He defied every stereotype – he defied Hitler's stereotype!"). He's in the baseball Hall of Fame – and now he's in our Hall of Tough Jews.

MICHAEL LERNER AS ARNOLD ROTHSTEIN IN EIGHT MEN OUT (1988)

How tough was Arnold Rothstein, the only man to successfully fix the World Series? So tough that Rich Cohen, the author of Tough Jews, calls him “the Moses of organized crime”. Though the man many refer to as the most successful Jewish gangster in American history met an ugly end, getting his gut shot after he bowed out of what he claimed was a crooked poker game, he made quite a name for himself along the way: starting out as a masterful oddsmaker and proposition bettor, he rose to such prominence that Lucky Luciano credits him as having taught the Italian mobsters of the day how to act and dress, and Frank Costello claims he was the first to truly recognize the vast amounts of money to be made off of prohibition. He became fodder for no less an artist than F. Scott Fitzgerald, who based The Great Gatsby’s Meyer Wolfsheim on him; Damon Runyon picked up the gauntlet, writing Arnold into many of his stories under a variety of names. Along the way, he also became a legendary pool shark (providing inspiration for the marathon game in The Hustler) and made a nearly unprecedented mark on modern organized crime – so much so that another tough Jew, The Godfather Part II’s Hyman Roth, cites him as an inspiration. Oh, yeah – and he fixed the 1919 World Series and got away with it scot-free. Although the names of many a White Sox great was dragged down into ignominious disgrace (including two, Joe Jackson and Buck Weaver, who were likely innocent of any wrongdoing), Rothstein, the architect of the fix and the man who made more money off of it than anyone else, was completely exonerated by an impressionable jury. In Eight Men Out, Rothstein is expertly played by Michael Lerner, no stranger to playing tough Jews (see the entry on Walter Sobchak, above); his icy, unflappable confidence and contempt is perfectly realized in a scene where, discussing with his fixer the likelihood that the best players in baseball will take a dive, says “I know guys like that. I grew up with them. I was the fat kid they wouldn't let play. ‘Sit down, fat boy'. That's what they'd say. ‘Sit down, maybe you'll learn something.’ Well, I learned something all right. Pretty soon, I owned the game, and those guys I grew up with come to me with their hats in their hands.”

LEE STRASBERG AS HYMAN ROTH IN THE GODFATHER, PART II (1974)

By the time we meet him Hyman Roth is an old man in ill health, yet we'd never think to call him frail. His body may be failing, but his mind is sharp and his lust for wealth and power undiminished. The Godfather saga's fictionalized version of Meyer Lansky was one of the few screen roles taken on by Actors Studio guru Lee Strasberg, and easily the greatest. In a few short scenes, with a handful of well-chosen gestures – the dismissive passing of a gold telephone, the raising of a plate of cake – Strasberg gives us a man in full. We may never have seen him in the full bloom of youth, but we can guess how terrifying he must have been from his "Moe Green" speech to Michael Corleone, one of the all-time great movie monologues. His gaze steady and full of fire, his breath hitching in fierce, staccato snorts, Roth lays it on the line: This is the business we've chosen.

ADAM GOLDBERG AS MELLISH IN SAVING PRIVATE RYAN (1998) AND THE HEBREW HAMMER IN THE HEBREW HAMMER (2003)

In comedic roles from Dazed & Confused to Entourage, Adam Goldberg frequently comes across as a younger, hairier Woody Allen with his fast-talking, hyper-cerebral neurotic characters. But, even in his lighter moments, there’s always a sense of intensity and simmering anger underpinning his performances, leading my fellow Screengrabber Phil Nugent to suggest his work in 2 Days In Paris for this list (“What can I say? The guy scares me!”). But instead, I’ve chosen two of his more overtly tough screen personas, in films where his characters literally bring the pain. As the Jewish soldier Private Stanley Mellish in Saving Private Ryan, Goldberg’s character is a smart, regular guy hardened by combat and his own, very personal stake in the war. Even when his tough façade finally cracks (in one of the most harrowing, visceral depictions of impending death I’ve ever seen), Mellish, despite his fear, remains determined and clear-headed to the end. As the titular superhero in The Hebrew Hammer, meanwhile, Goldberg tweaks the popular notion that Jews are more brainy than brawny in what writer/director Jonathan Kesselman dubbed the first “Jewsploitation” movie. As Mordechai Jefferson Carver, Goldberg wears the wide-brimmed hat of a Hasidim like a pimp crossed with Clint Eastwood as he fights to save Hanukah from the clutches of Santa’s murderous, power-mad son, Damian. Non-P.C. hilarity and Jewish stereotypes repurposed as standard Hollywood action clichés ensue. Shabbat Shalom, muthahfuckers!

CHARLTON HESTON AS MOSES IN THE TEN COMMANDMENTS (1956)

It’s one of the crowning ironies in the history of religious cinema that Charlton Heston, a man who tended to project about the same spiritual qualities as a forcefully hurled brick, portrayed not only the author of the Pentateuch, but also the Pope. It’s even more ironic that Moses, perhaps the toughest Jew in history, was given his most memorable screen portrayal by a man so WASPy his first name was “Charlton”. The Bible tells us that Moses was a willful but often reticent man, a man so unsure of himself, so terrified to lead, that he asked his brother Aaron to do his public speaking; in Cecil B. DeMille’s last huge Bible epic, Heston’s Moses couldn’t be farther from that portrayal. Moses, in the hands of Chuck amok, is a primal force of nature, as intimidating as God himself; when he struts down from the Mount after having received the Decalogue, he looks less like a man awed by coming face-to-face with the creator of the universe than he does Tony Manero in Saturday Night Fever. His jaw jutting even beneath his pasted-on beard and his iron chest swelling outside of his robes, Heston’s Moses looks like he’s received special dispensation from Jehovah to start kicking ass and taking names, and he can’t wait to get started. When Moses sneers “Hear His word, Ramses, and obey,” he isn’t imploring, he’s demanding – let my people go, he seems to say, or I’ll take these stone tablets and flatten you right across the choppers with them. It’s no wonder this portrayal resonated with Chosen People and Gentiles alike; the goyim got to claim the actor as their own, and the Jews got to see their main man transformed from thoughtful liberationist rebbe to one-man Pharoah-stomping machine. Heston would go on to play Judah Ben-Hur, who was almost as tough a Jew as Moses, but The Ten Commandments still remains the pinnacle of big-screen Hebrew bad-assery.

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Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Scott Von Doviak