You know the story of the Buster Douglas vs. Mike Tyson fight? Probably you do. At least you know the general outline. In early 1990, Tyson was the unbeatable monster of boxing’s heavyweight division, not to mention an international superstar. The biggest threat to his pay-per-view numbers was that he routinely demolished his grievously outmatched opponents in less than a full round. I was 10 years old and couldn’t get my dad to buy us one of his fights for this exact reason. It was just a bad deal, in terms of the amount of boxing you got for your money.
Then he showed up in Tokyo and got his ass beat by Douglas, a massive underdog who managed to put it all together for that (and really only that) one fight. There’s a great book about the whole thing called “The Last Great Fight,” written by Joe Layden. The entire book is fascinating and I strongly recommend it, but one part that really stuck with me was the acknowledgements in the back, where Layden writes about the challenge of trying to get Tyson to agree to be interviewed for the book.
“A breakthrough came in late 2005 when I spoke with Tom Patti, one of Tyson’s oldest friends and a sometime advisor. I had heard that Patti was still close to Tyson, that their friendship had somehow survived the tests of time and turmoil. I had left messages for Patti at his place of business in California, and one day he called back and we chatted amiably for a while. I told him I was working on a book about the Tyson-Douglas fight and that I was wondering if he had any suggestions for contacting Tyson about the possibility of an interview. Patti said he might be able to arrange something, but that Mike typically received no less than $100,000 for participation in any project.
My counteroffer was zero. It wasn’t merely that a hundred grand sounded a bit steep, I explained to Patti; any exchange of currency would make Tyson a partner in the project and so compromise the book’s integrity. I told him that I planned to write the book with or without Tyson’s participation, but that I thought it would be a better and more fully realized story if he were to offer some observations about the importance of the fight and its effect on his life. My hope was that this might appeal to Tyson’s fondness for boxing history.”
Layden eventually did get to talk to Tyson, briefly, basically by getting Patti to pass the phone to Tyson one day while they were in a car together. Predictably, that didn’t make for the greatest interview, and Tyson abruptly cut it off once Layden tried to stray from the “established boundaries,” but at least it was something.
Still, I believe Layden meant it when he said he was going to write the book whether Tyson talked him or not. He could have done it, too. It’s totally legal to write about the public life of a public figure like Tyson. The trend of “unauthorized” celebrity biographies may have mostly fallen away (or maybe just moved to streaming TV – more on that in moment), but it’s still legally protected, as are “docudramas” like this one.
And from a practical standpoint, there was enough out there in the public record from all parties for Layden to work with. Plus, Douglas and his family were very forthcoming, which might be why the book feels like it’s more Douglas’ story than Tyson’s, but in a way that probably makes for a more compelling narrative, since most fight fans already know way more about Tyson’s life before and after than they do about Douglas’.
But I immediately thought of this note in the acknowledgements when I saw that Tyson was very much Mad Online this weekend about Hulu’s upcoming limited series about his life. “Mike” is set to premiere later this month, but Tyson already seems to know he hates it solely based on the fact that Hulu didn’t pay him for it. In a series of tweets, he called it a “slave master take over story” of his life, and added “Hulu’s model of stealing life rights is egregiously greedy #headswillroll”
What followed was a back and forth in the media about both the ethics and the business specifics, with a producer on the series saying Tyson’s life rights were already taken and Tyson insisting that was a lie.
“My life rights option expired years ago,” Tyson told ET via a representative. “Hulu nor any of their supercilious team ever tried to engage in any negotiations with this Black man.”
A lot of people in the fight sports world, where Tyson has become a sort of beloved grandfather figure with all his sins now magically forgiven and/or forgotten, have since rallied to Tyson’s side on social media. You can see how they must view the situation. How dare Hulu just steal his story like that without paying or even consulting him. Obviously, the people who made the show are hoping to profit from it. Cutting the man himself out of the deal entirely is just one more shameful instance of exploitation.
But there’s a flip side to that coin. As “Mike” executive producer Steven Rogers pointed out, there’s a certain one-sidedness that comes with paying a celebrity to tell us the story of his life.
“For me, as a writer, as a storyteller, I don't really like to be reliant on just one source,” Rogers said. “I really like to do the research and get all these different opinions and then put a story around all of that. I don't like to be beholden to just one person.”
And really? If you’re trying to tell us the true story and not some sanitized or romanticized version of it, that is the only way to do it. You wouldn’t write a 2,000-word profile of a fighter using only one source (well actually, lots of people would and do, but they shouldn’t), so why make a whole series or movie that way? Just like Layden said, if you pay the guy for his story then you make him a partner. And what if your partner doesn’t want you to dwell too much on the time he was convicted of sexual assault or his history of domestic violence?
You could also argue that if there’s one thing we already have enough of, it’s celebrity biopics made or at least overwhelmingly shaped by those celebrities themselves. From “Straight Outta Compton” to “The Dirt” to “King Richard,” it feels like we’ve seen a lot of famous people telling us how awesome they are with varying degrees of involvement and control over the projects. It’s gotten to the point where you can usually tell who wasn’t involved just by asking yourself who comes off looking the worst. (“The Dirt” is especially kind to Tommy Lee, who also has a history of violence against women, but is somehow portrayed as just a big dopey kid who this one time let his passionate feelings get the best of him – and his girlfriend was being a real bitch anyway, you guys.)
So do we really need another one of those, and this time about Tyson, whose image has already been pretty generously rehabilitated by so many aspects of pop culture? Then again, do we really need even more people making money off Tyson? Was the entire existence of Don King not enough??
It’s tricky, in other words. What makes it trickier is that Hulu isn’t exactly a lovable underdog. We’re not talking about a young Orson Welles trying to get “Citizen Kane” made and shown while William Randolph Hearst raged from his castle with all the might of his wealth and power. And with Hulu, these are the same people who already waded into this exact type of controversy with “Pam & Tommy,” another limited series made without the consent or participation of some the key figures. While that series portrayed Pamela Anderson in a pretty sympathetic light, it was also arguably doing the very same thing it was trying to depict – exploiting her, without her consent, for someone else’s financial gain.
But multiple things could be true at the same time. Tyson’s story might be better off being told by an independent party with no agenda, but Hulu and the producers of this series may or may not be that party. I realize this sounds insane, but we might have to actually wait to see what they came up with before we know whether it’s good or bad.
That’s the thing no one seems to be asking here. This Tyson series, will it be true? Will it at least get at the truth, the way good docudramas can even when they occasionally have to shrink a timeline here or compress a couple characters there? Is that even what we’re trying to do here, or are we merely sensationalizing the life of a man who is angry that this is one time he didn’t get to sensationalize it himself?
Again, we won’t know until we see the finished product. But the idea that it’s automatically a form of theft to make a movie about a very public person without paying or involving that person, something about that seems troubling to me. Seems like if we actually give a damn about some of these true stories being true, we have to also acknowledge that no one – not Tyson or Tommy Lee or Mark Zuckerberg – is the one and only judge of their own story. Though, of course, it doesn’t necessarily mean Hulu is either.
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