Tom Sizemore has been called many things. Brilliant. Brutal. Fiercely talented. Angry. Drug addicted. In reality, heās all of them. Heās a survivor of the Detroit ghetto, the fifty-year-old father of twin boys, and a veteran of dozens of movies. Heās also now sober, after his addiction took his life just about as far down as any human being could go.
Through screen-stealing performances in the 1990s movies True Romance, Heat, and Natural Born Killers, Sizemore was so in demand that even when it was widely known that he had a drug problem, directors like Steven Spielberg were offering him roles and begging him to stay sober for them. Robert De Niro personally recruited him for the role of Michael
Cheritto in Heat after asking him to dinner and expressing his admiration. Jack Nicholson, Robert Downey, Jr., and Johnny Depp each went out of their way to befriend him. But this same man went from romancing Elizabeth Hurley and Juliette Lewis to being accused of domestic violence by the worldās most famous madam, and moved from a Beverly Hills mansion to a solitary-confinement cell at Chino State Prison and later a desolate, abandoned cabin in a town best known for being where Charles Manson hid Rosemary LaBiancaās wallet.
For years, Sizemoreās days were filled with overdoses, suicide attempts, and homelessness. The simple fact is that people donāt come back from where Tom Sizemore landedāyet miraculously, he did. By Some Miracle I Made It Out of There is a harrowing journey into the heart of addiction, told in riveting and often shocking detailāa terrifying cautionary tale for anyone whoās peered over the abyss of drug abuse. By turns gritty and heartbreaking, it is also one manās look at a particular moment in entertainment historyāa window into the drug-fueled spotlight that sent Robert Downey, Jr., to jail and killed River Phoenix, Heath Ledger, and Chris Farley and many others far before their time.
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āI CANāT TELL YOU WHAT IāD GIVE TO BE THE GUY YOU DIDNāT KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT. . . .
IāVE DONE A LOT OF THINGS THAT WOULD MAKE THAT IMPOSSIBLE, AND I KNOW THAT TELLING YOU ALL ABOUT THEM WONāT HELP ME TO BECOME AMERICAāS FAVORITE SON.
BUT IT MAY HELP YOU TO UNDERSTAND HOW EVERYTHING HAPPENED THE WAY IT DID. . . .ā
āTOM SIZEMORE