Fighting for recognition: 'Tyson' at Sundance

PARK CITY, Utah — The Sundance Film Festival always has much on its plate. And one of the jobs served up this year involves feeding Mike Tyson.

On Saturday night, John Besh, the New Orleans restaurateur, was preparing to do exactly that at Bon Appetit's temporary supper club, which is perched on a slight rise above the party tents on Main Street here.

The menu was built around Kobe beef short ribs stripped from the bone and cooked for 26 hours at precisely 141 degrees. "Since we're cooking for Mike Tyson, I wanted big blows for the palate but also some food for the soul," Besh said, shortly before pouring the soupe de poisson with blue crab and tapioca.

The idea is not so much to sate the appetite of Tyson, a 42-year-old former boxer who has been in and out of jail, as to create a bit of theater around a documentary film about him.

The movie, "Tyson," directed by James Toback, was screened earlier on Saturday to a packed house of about 450 at a the town library. Tyson spoke briefly afterward, but the real event was simply his presence.

"Mike Tyson's coming in!" Pierce Brosnan said as he left the supper club from an earlier dinner honoring his own movie, "The Greatest," shortly before Tyson walked in through a crowd of gawkers.

The new film tries mightily to find a redemption story in Tyson's rise, fall and reconciliation with his demons. "The regeneration, reconstruction and rehabilitation of a great spirit is always possible," Toback said, summing up his movie's moral during cocktail hour at the supper club.

Still, Tyson appears to remain more spectacle than morality tale, which is not altogether a bad thing as far as Sundance is concerned.

One of the festival's jobs, bluntly put, is to sell documentaries. In one of the "Storytime" memory reels attached to the beginning of each screening here, Robert Redford, the festival's patriarch, muses of documentaries: "What if we use the festival to promote them on an equal footing with theatrical films?"

The key word is promote, and it is not necessarily a dirty one. Despite a supposed marketplace surge that came with the runaway success of Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11" in 2004, documentaries generally remain a poor relation at the box office.

Many of the art form's bigger box-office hits have been political. Those include Moore's "Sicko" and "Bowling for Columbine," as well as Davis Guggenheim's "Inconvenient Truth," the global warming film with Al Gore.