Speaker 1: This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to. Here's the
Speaker 1: thing my guest today, James Tobak is no ordinary filmmaker.
Speaker 1: He's no ordinary anything. Tobak has strong opinions and doesn't
Speaker 1: forget things easily. Robert Downey Junior described Tobak as a
Speaker 1: revenge specialist for a rapid fire education in Tobak's personal
Speaker 1: demons and obsessions. Just review the titles of some of
Speaker 1: his films, The Gambler, The pick Up Artist, Love and Money,
Speaker 1: Black and White. James Tobak makes movies on his own terms.
Speaker 1: No one hovers over him to ensure he pleases a
Speaker 1: mass audience or conforms to the needs of a studio. Recently,
Speaker 1: my friend Jimmy and I made the documentary Seduced and Abandoned,
Speaker 1: which premier at can and will air on HBO starting October.
Speaker 1: This is the world and film business. These people are
Speaker 1: here doing what selling films they have, are trying to
Speaker 1: find a film to grab. The documentary began as a
Speaker 1: chronicle of our attempt to raise money for a film,
Speaker 1: but soon became a study of the tension between art
Speaker 1: and commerce. It's about how difficult it's become to secure
Speaker 1: financing for independent films. Just for argument's sake, the kind
Speaker 1: of movie we're thinking of couldn't go much lower than that.
Speaker 1: But what would be the number that that cast would
Speaker 1: be a feasible bet? A quarter five million? I'm too
Speaker 1: old for that, you know. We spoke to Martin Scorsese,
Speaker 1: Francis Ford Coppola, Bernardo Bertolucci, and Roman Polanski, among others.
Speaker 1: But no matter how challenging the climate gets for independ
Speaker 1: in filmmakers, I have no doubt that James Tobec will
Speaker 1: find a way to fund his next project. It's clear
Speaker 1: he was put on this earth to make movies. Film
Speaker 1: as a child was probably the primary treat of my life.
Speaker 1: Maybe watching tennis at Forest Hills, which is where the
Speaker 1: Open was played then, and or going to New York
Speaker 1: Giant baseball game so I could watch Whitey Lockman and
Speaker 1: Willie Mays. They'd probably be at an equal footing. But
Speaker 1: I loved going to the movies, and it was also
Speaker 1: a way of entering a world that I found dazzling
Speaker 1: and beautiful and intriguing and appealing. And of course there
Speaker 1: was no TV, there were no computers, there was no
Speaker 1: other screen. There was that big screen in a theater.
Speaker 1: So it had a specialness that it's completely lost today. Um,
Speaker 1: I didn't know that I was going to get it
Speaker 1: directly involved as a filmmaker. For years later, I remained fascinated.
Speaker 1: I watched movies when you didn't study film in school. No,
Speaker 1: I never took a film course in my life to
Speaker 1: this day. When I got out of Harvard, I figured
Speaker 1: I'll be d Harvard English Comparative Literature. And I did
Speaker 1: teach comparative literature. And I wrote a book which was
Speaker 1: called Jim, A Record of my rather wildlife in Jim
Speaker 1: Brown's house in the Hollywood Hills. And it wasn't until
Speaker 1: seventy two, when I started an autobiographical novel called The Gambler,
Speaker 1: that I realized halfway through it that I was conceiving
Speaker 1: it as a film. And um. Eventually it fell into
Speaker 1: the hands of Mike Metavoi, who was the movie agent
Speaker 1: who ran I C M S Movie division at the time,
Speaker 1: Marvin Josephs, and I think it was called and Linnez,
Speaker 1: my literary agent, gave it to him. He called me up.
Speaker 1: He said this movie is gonna get made. I said great.
Speaker 1: He said, um, I know who's perfect for it? And
Speaker 1: I said who's that and he said Redford And I said, well,
Speaker 1: the guy's jew from New York and he said, Redford
Speaker 1: is a great actor. He can play anything. By then,
Speaker 1: by that time, I had already shared the script with
Speaker 1: de Niro, who was a friend of Lucy Saroyan's, and
Speaker 1: Lucy was my best friend, and um, de Niro had
Speaker 1: gone up to my class with me, learned the script,
Speaker 1: knew every move and where was in his career He
Speaker 1: was at the no he was just doing mean streets.
Speaker 1: It was DeNiro very beginning. Yeah, but he was the
Speaker 1: guy everyone at the actor's studio was talking about. Everyone
Speaker 1: was saying that was much like everyone was saying at
Speaker 1: the actor's studio, de Niro is going to be the guy.
Speaker 1: He's the guy. They always saying it. So DeNiro came
Speaker 1: up to class with me. He got his hair cut
Speaker 1: by Carol at Sassoon where I get He wore the
Speaker 1: car down blazer and he had the part down. Now
Speaker 1: Metavoy comes into play, says he's going to get it
Speaker 1: done and says in addition to Redford, he says, now,
Speaker 1: who do you want to have direct this movie? And
Speaker 1: I said, well, I'll direct it. He said, what have
Speaker 1: you directed? I said nothing. He said, well, I mean,
Speaker 1: you know, like shorts or something. I said nothing. So
Speaker 1: we can't direct the movie out of nowhere. We gotta
Speaker 1: get a director to do this movie. So he gave
Speaker 1: me a list of directors. He said, these are the
Speaker 1: ten best directors in the world. They turned out to
Speaker 1: be his ten director clients and um. He asked me
Speaker 1: to research them and see which one I like best.
Speaker 1: And Carol Rice, who had done Is a Door, which
Speaker 1: I loved and Saturday night and Sunday morning I felt
Speaker 1: would be ideal, and he called Carol sent him the script.
Speaker 1: Carol called me up and said, I don't know this
Speaker 1: world gambling New York. Uh, I do know. The character
Speaker 1: intrigues me. Will you come to London and work with
Speaker 1: me for a year or so and maybe I'll be
Speaker 1: able to do it? So I thought, why not? It
Speaker 1: sounds like an interesting experience. If I don't like it,
Speaker 1: I can always come back. So Paramount gave me a check.
Speaker 1: I cashed it, got on a plane, and spent the
Speaker 1: next year seven hours a day in Carol Rice's study,
Speaker 1: developing what I could only describe as the perfect mentor
Speaker 1: protege relationship. He taught me. He was my film school.
Speaker 1: Have you got an idea? How much you all forty
Speaker 1: four and change forty four dimes? That's six Eldoradosto dollars.
Speaker 1: Acts at ain't just numbers. So when you look back
Speaker 1: on that period in the seventies, wasn't exciting for you?
Speaker 1: You must have been. I mean to this day you
Speaker 1: enjoy this place putting the filmmakers who are great admirers
Speaker 1: of yours and your work. What was it like for
Speaker 1: you back then when those people were at their height,
Speaker 1: when Copola was making films and all of these people
Speaker 1: were It was just a different world back then, the
Speaker 1: completely different world. It was as if you were nothing
Speaker 1: was corporate. You were just on your own. You were
Speaker 1: given money and you made a movie and you made
Speaker 1: the movie you wanted to make and the way you wanted. Now,
Speaker 1: I've always done that, but I've had to take much
Speaker 1: much less money than other people are getting to do it.
Speaker 1: I can't work any other way. That's the way I
Speaker 1: learned how to work. And by the way I learned
Speaker 1: that from Carol Rice to The number one rule with
Speaker 1: Carol was decide what you want and then make your
Speaker 1: wishes clear to everybody you're working with. That way of
Speaker 1: making movies as a fulfillment of an intention is something
Speaker 1: that has always stayed with me. Invent it, create it,
Speaker 1: write it, direct it, edited or totally self. Yeah. So therefore,
Speaker 1: when you're at this point in the seventies where Carol Rice,
Speaker 1: who was a very well regarded director back then, he
Speaker 1: makes The Gambler con was a huge movie star back then.
Speaker 1: But um, were their turns you might have made? Were
Speaker 1: their choices you might have made. I'm assuming you could
Speaker 1: have hitched your wagon to the system, absolutely, and you
Speaker 1: could have gotten into moving with it. Without naming names
Speaker 1: because I don't want to be penny about it, but
Speaker 1: movies you might have done, offers you might have gotten,
Speaker 1: forks and road you might have taken that you didn't take.
Speaker 1: Were those opportunities there for you? There were many? Um
Speaker 1: what happened that there was never I wasn't constitutionally opposed
Speaker 1: to the idea of well, I know I could never
Speaker 1: have done that. I could do in other areas in
Speaker 1: my life, not in that I am a pri any
Speaker 1: area except movies. You cannot get me to do it
Speaker 1: with movies. I just can't do it. I'll take the
Speaker 1: money and run. I won't take the money and be
Speaker 1: a performing Whoreor but what I could do was read
Speaker 1: someone else's script and say, is this something I could
Speaker 1: make my own and do a decent job with? And
Speaker 1: the answer on the various offers that I got, which
Speaker 1: I hardly ever get anymore, and I used to get
Speaker 1: many of, was always the same. No, I don't believe
Speaker 1: in it. I'm not excited by it. If I have
Speaker 1: invented a film and written it and created it, I
Speaker 1: know no one else can do it the way I can,
Speaker 1: or I don't want it done except the way I
Speaker 1: want it done. I would never say that about somebody
Speaker 1: else's script. There has to be someone else at In fact,
Speaker 1: I'm shocked that the guy who wrote that doesn't want
Speaker 1: to do it himself. I can't imagine that he wants
Speaker 1: to turn it over to somebody else. And if you
Speaker 1: don't have that kind of faith, I don't know how
Speaker 1: you do movies. I wouldn't be able to do it.
Speaker 1: You need a heavy dose of megalomania and a heavy
Speaker 1: dose of humility. It's a combination of the two. Where
Speaker 1: does your humility come from from how do you access
Speaker 1: your humility? The humility is that you say to your collaborators,
Speaker 1: you can either enable me to achieve what I know
Speaker 1: I can do with this movie, or you can prevent
Speaker 1: me from achieving it. I am at your mercy. If
Speaker 1: you can give me what I know, you can give
Speaker 1: me humility or manipulation. No, it's humility because I know
Speaker 1: that if they're not all there for me, and if
Speaker 1: I've made a wrong selection, I'm gonna I'm doomed. But
Speaker 1: the point is that let's go back to the seventies
Speaker 1: and talk about just uh, name two directors who you
Speaker 1: admired what they were doing when you were coming up,
Speaker 1: You were looking at their films. Now you're in the business,
Speaker 1: now you're making films. Who do you turned on by
Speaker 1: his filmmaker is number one by a mile, And then
Speaker 1: behind him were a few. And the first two I
Speaker 1: would say were Visconti and go dar Um. I would
Speaker 1: say new Vell vague people. Yeah, I would not. There
Speaker 1: were no American directors at that time. I liked a
Speaker 1: lot um the very people we've used in our masterpiece,
Speaker 1: seduced and abandoned Copelus Scorsese, Polanski, and Bert Lucci a
Speaker 1: little bit later became the four directors that I was
Speaker 1: most enamored of. My earlier icon when I was at
Speaker 1: Harvard watching his early movies was Trufaux and then, as
Speaker 1: I said, go dar Visconti, in particular The Leopard, which
Speaker 1: I regarded as an absolute masterpiece. None of the Americans
Speaker 1: were on the scene at the time. Even Cooper No,
Speaker 1: I I like you were indifferent. Coper no not indifferent.
Speaker 1: I liked him, I just didn't put him on the
Speaker 1: same level. The only movie of Kubricks that I absolutely
Speaker 1: thought was was I liked Paths of Glory a lot.
Speaker 1: I thought Lolita was a great, great movie. I still do.
Speaker 1: Was television ever on the menu for you? Ever? Never?
Speaker 1: And even as film has become less of an opportunity,
Speaker 1: shall we say, you might say that the film is
Speaker 1: less special and film has diminished you all the word
Speaker 1: you might one might use how to describe the rather
Speaker 1: sickly condition of the movie business from one standpoint. From
Speaker 1: from our standpoint. Uh, many people, of course have and
Speaker 1: some very big names have migrated. Big director's names, I
Speaker 1: mean colleagues of yours that you admire and some of
Speaker 1: them you worked with, Levinson and so forth, have migrated
Speaker 1: to television and you haven't. Well, then, um uh, television
Speaker 1: was still television. It's now something different. Cable is responsible, Yes,
Speaker 1: cable is responsible. It still is in transition. I like
Speaker 1: Breaking Bad a lot. I think it's terrific, But you've
Speaker 1: got commercials all the way through it. To me, that's
Speaker 1: the reason right there. You cannot work in a medium
Speaker 1: that interrupts the your movie seven times to sell toilet paper.
Speaker 1: I'm sorry, you just can't do that. So when television
Speaker 1: was commercial interrupted television it was not viable. Now that
Speaker 1: there are big screens at home with excellent quality, and
Speaker 1: you have serious, ambitious work, much more of it being
Speaker 1: done on cable than in film, I would be open
Speaker 1: to it. I am open to an HBO in particular
Speaker 1: because of a great relationship there. I like these guys
Speaker 1: and it's a viable place to work. In the seventies,
Speaker 1: though Tobac wouldn't even consider working in television. He made
Speaker 1: three films, The Gambler, Fingers and Loving Money, which came
Speaker 1: out in It was about then the Tobec observed a
Speaker 1: change in the business, the era of the studio head,
Speaker 1: an individual deciding what gets done is beginning to crack.
Speaker 1: It's going to take quite a while, as you know.
Speaker 1: Ron Meyer, in one of the more revealing aspects of
Speaker 1: Seduced an Abandon about the movie business, says something really
Speaker 1: startlingly relatory. He's talking about the seventies and the eighties.
Speaker 1: He says, I could walk into Universal or any studio
Speaker 1: for that matter, if he had the elements this movie,
Speaker 1: and they do it that day on the spot. Now,
Speaker 1: he said, I, as head of NBC Universal, would never
Speaker 1: do anything unless I had the team with me. That
Speaker 1: transition was beginning in the eighties. Uh, there were not
Speaker 1: that many people. I think it was the it's the
Speaker 1: corporatization of movies, the corporate ownership of movies, the conglomerate
Speaker 1: ownership where there's less trust, where it's who are you exactly?
Speaker 1: Then you're And I noticed that as I was trying
Speaker 1: to get my next movie exposed financed, because a fairly
Speaker 1: expensive film, well it's eighteen million, and that would be
Speaker 1: like sixty five today. Big movie shot in Paris and Vermont, Wisconsin,
Speaker 1: New York. I had Nastasia Kinsky, Rudolph Naree of Harvey
Speaker 1: Kitel B B Anderson, Pierre Claimante and your stational cast. Yes,
Speaker 1: Rhode It produced it, directed it, and acted in it.
Speaker 1: The problem was I could not get it financed. Jeff Berg,
Speaker 1: my agent, was over ten. Everyone turned it down. And
Speaker 1: what happened well, including David Bagelman, who was running MGM
Speaker 1: U A. He'd already turned it down. But I found
Speaker 1: myself with two million dollars cash, which I won in Vegas.
Speaker 1: By the way, less the I R S be listening,
Speaker 1: my net figure with Vegas is about minus fifty million,
Speaker 1: so please don't tell me I made money that way,
Speaker 1: as anyone in Vegas will vouch. But in any event,
Speaker 1: I had that two million. This is nineteen eighty one,
Speaker 1: and I thought, Christ, I'm not gonna hang around here
Speaker 1: anymore pounding on doors chasing money. I'll just bribe Bagelman
Speaker 1: and get the movie done. So I walked into his
Speaker 1: office and with two suitcases and to make with your
Speaker 1: Vegas winnings. Yeah, and let's say, without filling in the details,
Speaker 1: it got a green light and how much money do
Speaker 1: they give you to make the movie? Five hundred thousand?
Speaker 1: So I was at minus a million five. In other words,
Speaker 1: I paid a million five to have it done. He
Speaker 1: gave you a budget? How much? Oh, he gave me
Speaker 1: a budget of eighteen million, of which I received five
Speaker 1: hundred thousand. So my net for the movie was minus
Speaker 1: a million and a half. Yeah, but I didn't care.
Speaker 1: I wanted to make the movie. So you go and
Speaker 1: make Exposed and now you have Now you're making a
Speaker 1: movie and you have a good amount of money. What's
Speaker 1: the experience? I learned that I could handle very easily
Speaker 1: a big, ambitious, eighty day shoot, just as easily and
Speaker 1: skillfully as I could handle a twenty day shoot. That
Speaker 1: I had the knowledge and the cinematic skills to take
Speaker 1: a big canvas through a kind of epic size movie
Speaker 1: with plots and subplots and diverse characters, and do it
Speaker 1: with great quality. It was a really ambitious, interesting and
Speaker 1: what happened to the film when it came out uh
Speaker 1: Sitan sound The b f I British On Institutes publication
Speaker 1: Tom Millne referred to me as the American Buna Well,
Speaker 1: and I got some sensational reviews. Dave Kerr, who writes
Speaker 1: for the Times, that picked the best movie of the year,
Speaker 1: and there were some people who didn't like it. It
Speaker 1: was sort of a mixed response, some great, some pretty good,
Speaker 1: some negative. Quentin Tarantino today still refers to it as
Speaker 1: his favorite movie of mine. He knows the whole script
Speaker 1: by heart. He literally knows all of Harvey Keitel's language
Speaker 1: word for word, and it came out on how many
Speaker 1: screens I think eight hundred, which at the time was
Speaker 1: a lot. Yeah, eight hundred. What was your writing career
Speaker 1: like during this time of year you're making these three films,
Speaker 1: But at the same time, the guy that wrote The
Speaker 1: Gambler and also wrote Bugsy you wrote Bugsy win Next, No,
Speaker 1: not next, Sorry I didn't I Bugsy Next. The next
Speaker 1: thing I wrote was The Pickup Artist, right, Warren't I
Speaker 1: sold it to Warrant for him to act in again.
Speaker 1: He was supposed to act in Loving Money, and we're
Speaker 1: supposed to act in The Pickup Artists. Then de Niro
Speaker 1: was supposed to act in The Pickup Artist, and we
Speaker 1: were all behind DeNiro doing it. Warren't had already set
Speaker 1: it up with Diller at Fox, and we had a
Speaker 1: reading at de Niro's apartment, and it became very clear
Speaker 1: to Warren and me that not only was DeNiro too old.
Speaker 1: The idea of a guy of that age was ridiculous.
Speaker 1: It should be a guy twenty years younger. And he
Speaker 1: asked me to make the call to de Niro to
Speaker 1: say this, and as I was about to make a goal.
Speaker 1: No one knows this is true except me, but it's
Speaker 1: literally the case, he called me and said, listen, I've
Speaker 1: been thinking a lot. If you want me to do
Speaker 1: the movie, I'm gonna do the movie. But you know,
Speaker 1: I've been thinking more and more about this. This is
Speaker 1: not a guy forty years old, thirty years old. You
Speaker 1: really need a guy like twenty one years old in
Speaker 1: this part. I said, you know what, Warren and I
Speaker 1: have been talking about the same thing, and in one
Speaker 1: smooth conversation we decided to go literally with the guy
Speaker 1: young enough to be the son of the age range
Speaker 1: we've been thinking about. So now now we had a
Speaker 1: whole new casting agenda, and I met every well known
Speaker 1: actor in that nineteen to twenty four year old range.
Speaker 1: Never felt really excited about anyone. And then Brian Hamill
Speaker 1: and David McLeod on the same day said you know,
Speaker 1: you should look into this guy, Robert Downey. What has
Speaker 1: he done? And I looked in five minutes in a
Speaker 1: little movie called Tough Turf, and a little bit more
Speaker 1: in one of those uh Rodney Dangerfield movies. And he
Speaker 1: was also a about to be fired sub regular on
Speaker 1: Saturday Night Live. In other words, he was a reject
Speaker 1: loser at that point and a drug addict, and a
Speaker 1: very clear drug addict. The minute you met him and
Speaker 1: he came in, and I said to myself, this is
Speaker 1: the guy. And I knew all the pitfalls right away.
Speaker 1: I could see he was a drug addict. I could
Speaker 1: see he was a liar. I could see he was
Speaker 1: in this horrible relationship with Sarah Jessica Parker, who was
Speaker 1: a big star. She had done Annie on Broadway, and
Speaker 1: he felt totally intimidated by her inferior. But there was
Speaker 1: something about him. I felt he had a kind of jerky, mercurial,
Speaker 1: unthreatening charm for who, well, like nobody, but like that
Speaker 1: character must no no, Well a little I felt yes.
Speaker 1: But I thought, what he can do is allow I
Speaker 1: can allow this character to cruise relentlessly and get away
Speaker 1: with it because he is who he is, and it
Speaker 1: was the personality he had, and I thought, this guy
Speaker 1: can make the movie work. I felt that he did
Speaker 1: the best he could given that he was an ongoing
Speaker 1: drug addict at the time, and he was lying about it,
Speaker 1: and and to my assistant, who was fooling me, because
Speaker 1: my assistant I really trusted, and she kept assuring me
Speaker 1: that everything was okay and he was only doing an weekends,
Speaker 1: and in reality she was getting drugs for him. She
Speaker 1: was later murdered by the way it was, and he
Speaker 1: was She became his assistant afterward. It was a very
Speaker 1: crazy story. Then we did Two Girls and a Guy
Speaker 1: years later, and that's when we reached our perfection of collaboration,
Speaker 1: where I feel it's the best work he could ever do,
Speaker 1: not only that he has ever done. I don't think
Speaker 1: he can do anything beyond that. Everything he can do
Speaker 1: is on display in that movie. They are not protestations,
Speaker 1: they are outright denials. It's it's beyond desires, beyond choice,
Speaker 1: it's fallacking capacity. It's an inoperative shaft. I'm telling you,
Speaker 1: if you were to put a gun to my head
Speaker 1: and say fuck her, she's gorgeous, she needs you, it's easy.
Speaker 1: No one will know. I'd say, pull, pull the trigger,
Speaker 1: empty the chamber into my head, because that's when you
Speaker 1: did Bugsy? What year was that? Okay, so over twenty
Speaker 1: years ago, and you're coming out of the eighties where
Speaker 1: you Bagelman and so forth and whatever other films you made,
Speaker 1: and you go and you're a pure writer. Now you're
Speaker 1: writing for baby big movie beat. He was still making
Speaker 1: big movies back then. Uh and uh. Levinson was at
Speaker 1: the top of his game and directing still then. Was
Speaker 1: that sort of the end of your career as the
Speaker 1: writer for hire? Did you just stop right then and say,
Speaker 1: I just won't do this anymore. I can't do it anymore,
Speaker 1: because you could have had a career there as well,
Speaker 1: where you could have been just tearing it up as
Speaker 1: a writer for hire. Did you decide I thought I
Speaker 1: was going to direct Bugs. I wouldn't have written it otherwise.
Speaker 1: I was hired by Warren where you would never give
Speaker 1: your films, as you said, as you would never orfer
Speaker 1: your children, so to speak, and give them to other
Speaker 1: people to direct. Why did you do it in the
Speaker 1: case if I didn't? He asked me. He owned the
Speaker 1: rights to a book about Bugsy See, and he wanted
Speaker 1: to deployent to play Bugs. He said, do you want
Speaker 1: to write a Bugsy Siegle movie for me. I said, yeah,
Speaker 1: he knew that. I knew that I wanted to direct
Speaker 1: the movie. He didn't promise me. He's very well as
Speaker 1: Warren as I. You and I both know, yes, is
Speaker 1: very very careful with his language. He will not make
Speaker 1: a promise he doesn't keep. So I was not naive
Speaker 1: he was not promising it. But I felt, when the
Speaker 1: time comes, my script will be so good, he'll be
Speaker 1: so excited, there won't be a problem. I'll be hired.
Speaker 1: I turned into script. He said, it's great script. I
Speaker 1: love it. I'm gonna do it. I said, well, um,
Speaker 1: should I come out today to l A? And he said,
Speaker 1: what do you think of Barry Levinson? And I said,
Speaker 1: as what? He said a director? I said, he's okay.
Speaker 1: Did you give him the script? And he said yeah
Speaker 1: I did. I said did he like it either? Very much?
Speaker 1: And I said did you offer it to him? He
Speaker 1: said I did. I said did he accept it? He
Speaker 1: said I did. I said, well, I'll tell you what.
Speaker 1: First of all, I'm never fucking spending one day on
Speaker 1: this movie. I can't believe you did this. I'm not
Speaker 1: coming out. I'm not going to help you. He's a
Speaker 1: wait a minute. Let me don't understand something. The only
Speaker 1: way you'll work on this movie is if you meet
Speaker 1: Barry and you get along with him, and he wants
Speaker 1: you to work on the movie. Now, I was so
Speaker 1: homicide early, enraged that I could barely speak. But I
Speaker 1: retreated emotionally and came up with a solution that enabled
Speaker 1: me to function. I thought, I will go out there,
Speaker 1: I'll get friendly with Barry, and then, in the spirit
Speaker 1: of Bugsy, I'll kill Barry during pre production. Warren will
Speaker 1: know that I did it, be so terrified, he'll hire
Speaker 1: me to direct the movie and everything will work. However,
Speaker 1: I immediately like Barry when I met him. We got
Speaker 1: along extremes or well, and it turned out that I
Speaker 1: thought this is gonna be a great three person collaboration.
Speaker 1: So it was you wouldn't be related to Bugsy Siegel,
Speaker 1: would you? Bugsy? I thank your pardon. A bug is nothing.
Speaker 1: A bug does not exist. The word has no meaning.
Speaker 1: It's only used out of ignorance or malice. Do you
Speaker 1: know what a bug is? A bug is a colloquialism.
Speaker 1: It has no basis in reality. Insects include a wide
Speaker 1: variety of living creatures. They fly, they crawl, They do
Speaker 1: many things, none of them can be called it. But
Speaker 1: are you following me? Because if you are in a
Speaker 1: min it James Tobak talks about the unlikely man who
Speaker 1: he says knows him as well as his wife, Mike Tyson.
Speaker 1: I'm Alec Baldwer. This is Alec Baldwin, and you're listening
Speaker 1: to here's the thing, my guest writer. Director James Toback
Speaker 1: first worked with boxing heavyweight champion Mike Tyson when he
Speaker 1: cast Tyson to play himself in his fictional film Black
Speaker 1: and White, about New York's hip hop scene. Nine years later,
Speaker 1: James Toback made Tyson, a documentary film about the former boxer.
Speaker 1: He approached Tyson at a time when the fallen icon
Speaker 1: had little to lose. Toback was also in need of salvation.
Speaker 1: My mother had died and I felt I have to
Speaker 1: get on and do a movie now because if I don't,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna go crazy. And Tyson had just gotten arrested
Speaker 1: again for drugs Arizona, and they sort of smuggled him
Speaker 1: into l A and rehab, and I thought he's gonna
Speaker 1: be like down. It's always best to get addicts and
Speaker 1: funk ups right after they've crashed, because well, because the
Speaker 1: all the all the veneer is gone, anything fake is gone,
Speaker 1: you get a sense of the truth of the person,
Speaker 1: and uh yeah, you want to get them when they
Speaker 1: are truthful. So I called him and I said, do
Speaker 1: you think it would be good for you? I don't
Speaker 1: forget me. If I could get you out for a
Speaker 1: week and shoot all day every day, he said, it
Speaker 1: would save me. I would love it. It It would save
Speaker 1: my life. So we talked to the rehab people. They
Speaker 1: said they'll let him out supervised every day, ten hours
Speaker 1: a day. I was no way going to be running
Speaker 1: around trying to get money for that because it would
Speaker 1: have wasted time. And I felt, whatever money I have
Speaker 1: has to go into this. So I had two million free,
Speaker 1: and I felt I can do it for two million.
Speaker 1: So I financed the movie myself. We made it right away,
Speaker 1: and then it took a year to edit because I
Speaker 1: had no idea what the movie was gonna be. We
Speaker 1: shot for about fifty hours and then I spent a
Speaker 1: year putting the movie together. I deal with a huge
Speaker 1: inferiority conflict as a little boy. I was fat and
Speaker 1: everybody picked onody picked on. So now I never back
Speaker 1: down from a fight when people because a person could
Speaker 1: say some infantile thing like you're stupid and you got
Speaker 1: your ass kicked in a fight, and I will strike him.
Speaker 1: You know, when you see Tyson on film, there's an
Speaker 1: innocence to him. Did you find that when you were
Speaker 1: around him? Because because in your film he goes to
Speaker 1: another level of vulnerability when he breaks down and realizes
Speaker 1: what a mess he made, I believe I have had.
Speaker 1: Do you think he is well? I know who he
Speaker 1: is because I I feel I know him better than
Speaker 1: anyone on earth knows him. And I feel he's been
Speaker 1: more open and honest with me than he has with
Speaker 1: anyone else. And I would have to say at a
Speaker 1: certain level, I have been so open and honest with
Speaker 1: him that only a handful of people in Looting beatty
Speaker 1: Harvey Keite tell and you and my wife and son
Speaker 1: know me as well as anyone can know me. And
Speaker 1: I would say with Tyson it's even more extreme because
Speaker 1: the areas where he and I have connected over the
Speaker 1: years are so far out there that some of the
Speaker 1: things we've said to each other I think we could
Speaker 1: only say because the other person is in a certain
Speaker 1: way on the same wavelength that intimacy, and that's what
Speaker 1: it is. That intimacy has resulted in his ability to
Speaker 1: show those moments, to show what he who he is
Speaker 1: in both black and white and certainly in Tyson. I
Speaker 1: watched the Spike Lee One Man Show Tyson movie being shot,
Speaker 1: and it's going to be an HBO, and it's hilarious
Speaker 1: and very well done. And Mike is a spectacularly energetic performer.
Speaker 1: But it's a different thing if that's the kind of
Speaker 1: entertain aiment. It's Mike entertaining, and he is a really
Speaker 1: good entertainer. Now, I you know, my my penchiant is
Speaker 1: to get people to be themselves, is to get people
Speaker 1: to drop the front that ultimately I find deters me
Speaker 1: and distracts me from any real interest in that risk
Speaker 1: into risk doing so absolutely the risk that's there. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I start to lose interest in a person as I
Speaker 1: see him or her putting up the protective facade that
Speaker 1: most people put up all the time. If you know
Speaker 1: someone well enough to call them on it, they'll either
Speaker 1: go with that or they want Do you have any
Speaker 1: idea why you succeeded in getting Tyson to drop that side,
Speaker 1: even momentarily a because of word, but you knew he
Speaker 1: wanted he wanted to. Tyson is a fascinating figure. Tyson
Speaker 1: as a personality is a complicated, fascining eating guy. There
Speaker 1: are great champions who are unbelievably boring as human beings.
Speaker 1: As you know, some of the greatest athletes ever are
Speaker 1: some of the most pitifully dull people who ever lived.
Speaker 1: Tyson happens who have been a great champion who was
Speaker 1: also a tragically fascinating, complex figure. And Tyson is also
Speaker 1: a figure like yourself, certainly from your own admission, who's
Speaker 1: a bit of a hedonist. I don't think that there's
Speaker 1: enough space in the digital universe to put down on
Speaker 1: fust record all of your all of your adventures. Shall
Speaker 1: we say? Well, you're only here for a split second
Speaker 1: and then it's over right. But but you are someone
Speaker 1: who has uh lived a particular life, going back to
Speaker 1: the days with Jim Brown. When you're living with Jim Brown,
Speaker 1: what does that tell us about you? You're a person
Speaker 1: who was who is aware he's gonna die, which happened
Speaker 1: after I flipped out an LSD when I was nineteen
Speaker 1: years old and a sophomore at Harvard. I'd been doing
Speaker 1: NonStop drug consumption, somehow managing to be a straight, a
Speaker 1: student of success, full athlete, editor of the literary magazine,
Speaker 1: all the stuff, running around with all these beautiful girls.
Speaker 1: But I was a drug addict. There was no other
Speaker 1: way of putting it. So happened something broken. It was hedonism.
Speaker 1: I liked the sensation of being high. However, I realized
Speaker 1: that I was no longer able to get high without
Speaker 1: taking two or even three times the amount of drugs
Speaker 1: that I used to need. And it was right, and
Speaker 1: I decided the way to get off drugs was to
Speaker 1: blow my mind out. So I researched LSD and wanted
Speaker 1: to take the largest dose ever on record, which I did.
Speaker 1: What happened was, nine hours into what was a spectacularly enjoyable,
Speaker 1: transcendent ecstatic experience, I snapped and went insane and I
Speaker 1: knew it right away, and I said, oh oh, And
Speaker 1: for the next eight days I was walking around with
Speaker 1: a loaded and now you're just a turn up. I'm
Speaker 1: nothing zero. So what I did was I decided I
Speaker 1: would kill myself, and every time I was about to
Speaker 1: squeeze the trigger, I was walking around Cambridge with a
Speaker 1: loaded twenty. I thought, what happens if I feel exactly
Speaker 1: the way I'm feeling after I'm dead? And that's what
Speaker 1: prevented me from committing suicide. I called my mother finally
Speaker 1: after eight days and said I'm gonna have to kill
Speaker 1: myself and explained everything. She said, don't do anything. Let
Speaker 1: me see what I can do. And my mother, who
Speaker 1: was the greatest human being I've ever known in my life,
Speaker 1: called me back twenty minutes later and said, LSTI was
Speaker 1: synthesized in Switzerland by two men at Sanders Laboratory, one
Speaker 1: of them who died recently the age of a hundred
Speaker 1: and six Hoffmann. The others Max Wrinkle. He's ten miles
Speaker 1: away in Newton, Massachusetts. He's the head of Massachusetts biochemical
Speaker 1: psychiatrist azization. He's at mass General. Here's his phone number.
Speaker 1: I'm flying up from New York. Three hours later, I'm
Speaker 1: in his house with my mother and father, and he is,
Speaker 1: after talking to me and diagnosing me, presenting me with
Speaker 1: a piece of paper which I've dramatized at Harvard Man.
Speaker 1: And harvard Man has this exactly as that happened a
Speaker 1: movie I did in two thousand and two. It says,
Speaker 1: in case I should die as the result of the
Speaker 1: medication and ministered to me by Dr Max Wrinkle of Newton, Massachusetts,
Speaker 1: I hereby absolved Dr wrinkle ball responsibility in my death.
Speaker 1: I said, what a chance I'm gonna die? He said
Speaker 1: very good? I said good, that I'm gonna live, that
Speaker 1: I'm gonna die, That you're gonna die like fifty fifty
Speaker 1: said more like ten to one. I said, well, why
Speaker 1: should I say yes? He said, do you want to
Speaker 1: feel like this for the rest of your life? I said,
Speaker 1: I can't stand to feel like this for another two seconds.
Speaker 1: He said, sign it and roll up your sleeve. I
Speaker 1: signed it. I rolled up my sleeve. He gave me
Speaker 1: a seven minute intravenous injection in the halfway point. I
Speaker 1: passed out. Twenty seven hours later, I woke up on
Speaker 1: his sofa, and I was a new person. And the
Speaker 1: difference was I was no longer afraid of death, and
Speaker 1: everything else in my life was different because I have
Speaker 1: been ready to die from that day for it. And
Speaker 1: that's subsequent. Replace that addiction with other addictions about food
Speaker 1: and women and but but they're not different. I mean
Speaker 1: that that's a whole other confort This is a whole
Speaker 1: other Give me a sentence or two about what gambling
Speaker 1: was to you, which has caused you a lot of problems,
Speaker 1: you a lot of troubles. Yes, let me say what
Speaker 1: is different. The addictions that are not to a physical
Speaker 1: substance enable you to continue to function in society as
Speaker 1: if you do not have that addiction. An alcohol or
Speaker 1: a drug addiction advertises to everybody all the time that
Speaker 1: you're an addict. That's a big different, Yes, in terms
Speaker 1: of consciousness in one sense, meaning one is far more
Speaker 1: clear and one is far more impactful. You can't well no, no,
Speaker 1: well well you h and you can't undo it until
Speaker 1: just by mere concentration you are disabled by the substance. However,
Speaker 1: drug time and alcohol time is not just the time
Speaker 1: you're inebriated with the substance. It's arguably the time you
Speaker 1: thought about it, but mean it took you to go
Speaker 1: score it, at the time it took you to recover
Speaker 1: from it when you were over the time it took
Speaker 1: you to earn the money to pay for it. All
Speaker 1: that stuff that could have is energy, and monetization is
Speaker 1: energy to go towards something else. The same is true
Speaker 1: of anything else you've done, all the time you have
Speaker 1: been enslaved, you or anyone else, to your sexuality, to
Speaker 1: your to food, to gambling. That's stuff that's taken away
Speaker 1: from the quality of your life now. But but I
Speaker 1: want to get to one thing, which is um, what
Speaker 1: did gambling do for you? Gambling enabled me? Two We
Speaker 1: talked about this once. I said, gambling, people gamble, and
Speaker 1: I had my answer I gave you, And you said,
Speaker 1: people gamble and risk all that losing because what they
Speaker 1: think what it enables them to feel that they are immortal.
Speaker 1: Because when you win, you think I actually defeated death.
Speaker 1: Losing is death. It's a metaphor. You are engaged in
Speaker 1: this ongoing struggle to stay lie. And my answer to
Speaker 1: you was that gambling provided you with the opportunity to
Speaker 1: prove that God loved you. That's right, with more spiritual
Speaker 1: that God existing. So if I want God loves me right.
Speaker 1: And the image and the gambler that says that is
Speaker 1: the image at Caesar's Palace with the arc of lights
Speaker 1: over Jimmy CON's head as he says to the dealers
Speaker 1: asking for a hit on an eighteen, which no one
Speaker 1: in his right mind would do give me the three,
Speaker 1: and the dealer gives him a three. And somebody says
Speaker 1: you're lucky, and he says no, but I'm blessed, and
Speaker 1: that's that's that's the illustration of that. Jimmy Tobec has
Speaker 1: won and lost plenty through gambling. He's the first to
Speaker 1: admit his obsessions have strained his relationships. Yet he's been
Speaker 1: married for thirty years and we've been through a lot.
Speaker 1: The main thing has been that there is a always
Speaker 1: has been a total understanding, for better or for worse,
Speaker 1: and it's been both of the domains of my personality
Speaker 1: in my life. And to be accepted and loved for
Speaker 1: who you are, even if certain things anger you or
Speaker 1: upset you, is something you can ask of nobody. If
Speaker 1: you get it, it's a gift. You might expect it
Speaker 1: from a parent, and I expected it from mine and
Speaker 1: I got it from mine, But you certainly can't expect
Speaker 1: it from anybody else. And even many parents don't do
Speaker 1: it if they say, get the hell out of here,
Speaker 1: you know, I don't care my son. Yeah, and you
Speaker 1: just crossed yours, you know. So I had it from
Speaker 1: my parents, but I really never. I certainly didn't expect it,
Speaker 1: and I wouldn't with a straight face have said it.
Speaker 1: But I've just been given it. And my son, who's
Speaker 1: now thirteen, I feel that in relation to him, I mean,
Speaker 1: he would even if he shot me, I would still
Speaker 1: love him as I was dying. You know, there is
Speaker 1: that I understand that emotion. I've never understood it before.
Speaker 1: There is nothing he could do that would make me
Speaker 1: say get out. I disowned and he certainly tries. Yes,
Speaker 1: he certainly, And I said to him, the problem is this,
Speaker 1: you will never be as lucky as I have been.
Speaker 1: I dodged all these bullets, not through skill, but through luck.
Speaker 1: I should have been dead at fifteen, at eighteen, at nineteen,
Speaker 1: and you will not be that lucky. You must be
Speaker 1: more careful. And it's like spitting in the wind against
Speaker 1: the wind. There's no way at registers any more than
Speaker 1: what my father said registered to me. Now, after you did, Tyson,
Speaker 1: I want to finish with this. After you did, Tyson,
Speaker 1: had you contemplated that you wanted to get back into
Speaker 1: the documentary film business. No, I thought, I never want
Speaker 1: to do a documentary again. It's too much work and
Speaker 1: too long and so essentially we did not make a document.
Speaker 1: No we didn't, but there are so many things. The
Speaker 1: thing about Seduced and Abandoned, which is the the net
Speaker 1: result is that people need only watch the movie. We
Speaker 1: don't have to talk about the movie now. But when
Speaker 1: you when you see the finished product, what were you
Speaker 1: proudest that when you saw that film? What appeal to you?
Speaker 1: First of all, I just find it immensely entertaining and
Speaker 1: enjoyable and visual really beautiful and musically beautiful. So as
Speaker 1: an aesthetic act, as a work of art, cinematic art,
Speaker 1: I think it's absolutely elegant and beautiful. The other thing
Speaker 1: is precisely what I said before, that it resembles no
Speaker 1: other movie ever made. I defy anyone to say it's
Speaker 1: like the minute you give me a movie, it's like,
Speaker 1: I will tell you why. That's a bogus analogy festival.
Speaker 1: As the words suggests, is to have fun. And I
Speaker 1: went there and I had a great time to be
Speaker 1: at the Calton Terrace. You'll be meeting all these different people,
Speaker 1: all kinds of you know, you know, it's like an
Speaker 1: all these interviews talk talk talk to everybody, Me, me, me,
Speaker 1: That doesn't the peak of my megalomania. If I see
Speaker 1: the movie again or a piece of the movie, I
Speaker 1: can see my sense. Isn't a kind of ocean of
Speaker 1: pleasure of one year shooting was in the time I've
Speaker 1: known you. You you certainly are the classic example of
Speaker 1: someone who in this business, who's never happier than when
Speaker 1: you're making a film. It's the highest I can get here,
Speaker 1: and and and and and it's it's safe to say
Speaker 1: that you're enormously frustrated because you don't get to do
Speaker 1: as much of it as you'd like to. And this
Speaker 1: is responsible, I think for your gambling issues and your
Speaker 1: emotional issues, eating food issues. Food is the simplest way.
Speaker 1: Stuff some food in your mouth and to medicate yourself
Speaker 1: in two seconds. And Andra, it's legal. You don't have
Speaker 1: to go to a dealer again, the dealers everywhere, just
Speaker 1: the dealers of golden arches and pick it up, open
Speaker 1: your mouth and put it in. And and and But
Speaker 1: for you, do you think that you you could have
Speaker 1: an easier time of it, You could have more comfortable experience,
Speaker 1: you could have a more uh healthy experience. Knowing that
Speaker 1: this is a is probably a more healthful path you
Speaker 1: to get on maybe because of these other demons. Do
Speaker 1: you think the television is something that's appealing for you
Speaker 1: in the near future? Now? Have you changed television? Only
Speaker 1: only if it's cable, only if it's with people like
Speaker 1: the people at HBO, whom I personally like. I'm not
Speaker 1: interested in whether it's television movies for that matter, in
Speaker 1: working for or with people who don't share my opinion
Speaker 1: of myself. And it's one of the reasons that I
Speaker 1: have worked as infrequently as I have, because you can't
Speaker 1: force people to do that. They either do or they don't.
Speaker 1: And I expect these people to say, I think you're great,
Speaker 1: and here's the money to prove it. Now do what
Speaker 1: you want to do. I have no say in this.
Speaker 1: You make the movie you want to make. I'm investing
Speaker 1: in your idea of you and what you want to
Speaker 1: do with the people you choose and you like. Those
Speaker 1: are very strict parameters. Most people making big, big budget
Speaker 1: movies would be shot down in two seconds if talk
Speaker 1: that way. You can't go into a studio and talk
Speaker 1: that way. I can't work any other way. This is
Speaker 1: it's not movies per se I want to do. It's
Speaker 1: movies that I want to do my own way that
Speaker 1: I want to do. I don't want to make the
Speaker 1: movies that are made. I can happily go in and
Speaker 1: enjoy for two hours something that if you put a
Speaker 1: gun to my head, I wouldn't want to spend a
Speaker 1: month making, let alone a year. But two hours, Yeah,
Speaker 1: that was fun. Particularly Goofball comedies that I love that
Speaker 1: are silly and stupid. I go with my son, We
Speaker 1: laugh like crazy. I can't to spend a year doing
Speaker 1: nine months doing one but for two hours great. But
Speaker 1: if I'm going to spend a year doing something and
Speaker 1: getting very little money for it, it's got to be
Speaker 1: something where I can say with a straight face, this
Speaker 1: is why I want to be alive. When I sat
Speaker 1: in the editing room with Aaron Jana's for ten months,
Speaker 1: editing and re editing and re re editing and trying
Speaker 1: every imaginable combination of editorial invention, seduced and abandoned, I
Speaker 1: loved all of it. That experience, to me, is what
Speaker 1: living is about. I don't consider it a job. I
Speaker 1: consider it oxygen and livelihood. That's why if if I
Speaker 1: die today and the last thought is it's okay, because
Speaker 1: probably because partly because it just happened, but also because
Speaker 1: it's valid. One of my immediate thoughts would be, it's
Speaker 1: okay to die because we finished. Seduced and Abandoned. Seduced
Speaker 1: and Abandoned premiers on HBO on October. Don't die, Please,
Speaker 1: don't that. I'm not you know. You know that I'm
Speaker 1: a fatalist, so you're not gonna die. Yetta, Alright, we
Speaker 1: have to make one more if if you have a
Speaker 1: direct route to fate, I'm all for it. I'm gonna
Speaker 1: work on that. Okay, this is Alec Baldwin and you're
Speaker 1: listening to here's the thing the company could make a