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