Mike Tyson is my neighbor in Cannes
Doing the Cannes thing against this year for Box Office Psychics.
This means a painful flight from LAX to Frankfurt to Nice on Lufthansa. If you thought American flight attendants didn’t have sense of humor. You should get a load of these Germans….
On my flight were the honorable and missus Scott Lambert (agent William Morris Agency) and Alexandra Milchan (heiress and producer and all around nice person….) as well as Bryan Lourd (chieftain of all things as one of the main figure-heads behind CAA)
Was not picked up at the airport in Nice. (That’s not nice, but shit happens) Headed in a taxi towards the Hotel Palais Stephanie (was previously called the Noga Hilton) on the Croisette.
90 Euros (That’s like $140) for the taxi ride. That’s 25 minutes with traffic and the guy is getting paid twice what my shrink would (if I wasn’t too cheap to go to a shrink, but alas I am, so I started this blog…)
Got to the hotel room/suite/business center and found it to be one enormous space-age UFO vessel circa the imaginings of one crazy drug-induced French guy circa 1972. The walls are a orange-reddish and they are built in the craziest angles. I was so tired I went to bed.
But not before going in the lobby and checking out the scene. On my return to the room I realized that there is a large tattoo faced man standing right outside. Turns out Mike Tyson is my neighbor for the Cannes Film Festival. This ought to be interesting. “Iron” Mike is inches away from me for the entire time I’ll be here in the South of France.
Why is he here?
Turns out Mike is here to help promote a film about his life. The film “Tyson” directed by James Toback (”Fingers“) details the live thus far of the 41-year-old living legend.
Apparently the film got a standing ovation at the Cannes screening and Mike told the press the following:
“I lived a wild and extreme life… I used drugs. I had altercations with dangerous people. I slept with guys’ wives that wanted to kill me. I’m just happy to be here, you know. It’s just a miracle.”
The movie, which blends old video footage and TV interviews shows how Tyson grew from a kid who got beat up when he was overweight to how he later beats up and steals people when he started training.
Tyson spares no details in describing his sex life, and covers his career’s low points, like biting Evander Holyfield’s ear in 1997
The film even dwells on an issue he refuses to take responsibility for (and perhaps rightly so given the facts and the all-white jury in Indiana which convicted him) - the 1991 rape of an 18-year-old beauty queen for which he served three years in prison. He says he’s innocent.
“I’ve been abusive to women before in my life, I thought (the conviction) was wrong, I thought it was unfair.”
Director James Toback who has known Tyson for 23 years gave him a small part in his Leonardo DiCaprio film “Black and White” and also in “When Will I Be Loved,” says he talked to Tyson in a soothing, hypnotic voice to get him to open up for the film.
If I see Mike late tonight after drinking a few too many, I’ll remember to use my soothing and hypnotic voice to make sure he leaves me alone…
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