X MARKS THE SPAT

Could you look into the camera and state your name and the date?" the man with the minicam asks the reporter with the tape recorder. "I'm documenting everything." No, he isn't a special prosecutor. His name is Tony Kaye--"the greatest English filmmaker since Alfred Hitchcock," if he does say so himself--and the reporter he's videotaping in his Hollywood hotel suite this afternoon may end up as footage in his next cinematic opus: a documentary on how his first feature film, American History X, was "raped" by New Line Cinema, how star Edward Norton ("a narcissistic dilettante") ruined the film in the editing room, how producer John Morrissey ("Pompous Pilot," Kaye calls him) also betrayed him, and how the "Dinosaur Guild of America" (as he dubs the Directors Guild of America) trampled his First Amendment rights by refusing his request for a pseudonym in the credits (he wanted Humpty Dumpty). In short, it's a behind-the-scenes "making of" film that will trash pretty much everyone and everything involved in the making of X. Just another Hollywood diva diving off the creative deep end--except for one bizarre detail: The movie Kaye is so desperately trying to take his name off of may actually be a minor masterpiece. In fact, X (opening Oct. 30) could be the most fascinating film a director has ever attempted to disown. A dark, button-pushing race-relations drama set in L.A., it has Norton playing Derek Vinyard, a working-class fireman's son who becomes a disturbingly articulate--and horrifically violent--local hero to a gang of neo-Nazi skinheads. Showcasing a performance by Norton that will surely generate a major Oscar campaign, it's an astonishing directorial debut for a guy whose previous professional experience behind a camera was making tire commercials for European TV. "Well, it's good enough to fool Hollywood," Kaye says, focusing his minicam. "It's good enough to fool New Line. And it's certainly fooling Edward Norton. But it doesn't fool me. My standards are a lot higher." "I'm as proud of this film as anything i've ever worked on," says Norton. "It started as a gritty drama. But by the time we finished, it was a tragedy in the classic Aristotelian sense. It grew to epic proportions." You could say the same thing about Norton, who added some 25 pounds of muscle (not to mention a swastika on his chest) to play X's heavyweight antihero. Months later, brunching on eggs near his West Hollywood home, the 29-year-old actor looks more like his old self, the skinny Yale grad who was anointed the next Sean Penn (or was it the next Dustin Hoffman?) after his Oscar-nominated turn as a psycho altar boy in 1996's Primal Fear. Norton has been flush with offers ever since--Woody Allen picked him for his young alter ego in Everybody Says I Love You, and Milos Forman cast him as a porn lawyer in The People Vs. Larry Flynt--but he had to lobby hard to land the lead in X. He won over New Line quickly enough, especially after offering to take a pay cut (getting only "about a fifth" of his then $1 million asking price, he calculates). The producer was an easy sell as well. "I knew we had a movie the minute Edward's manager called," Morrissey says. There was only one person who was dead set against him. "When I met Edward, I told him he wasn't right for the role," Kaye says. "He's a very privileged, well-educated young man playing a part that he is absolutely not right for. But the studio only gave me five weeks to find someone better. And in five weeks I couldn't." Norton has a slightly different recollection of how he ended up with the part. "If Tony Kaye hadn't wanted to make the movie with me, the studio wouldn't have made the movie with Tony Kaye," he says coolly. In truth, the studio was more nervous about Kaye--and not just because he'd never directed a feature before. Imposingly tall, eccentrically dressed (today's shimmery outfit looks like it was picked up at the Lost in Space sample sale), with a shaven head and a subtle stutter that gives his English accent a distinctive lilt, he'd make an awesome Austin Powers super-villain. His reputation for being arrogant, undisciplined, and shamelessly self-promoting put New Line off as well. But he also had a reputation for being a genius behind a camera--at least for 30 seconds at a time.

AHX director Tony Kaye Edward Norton in American History X Edward Furlong American History X Fairuza Balk and Edward Norton Edward Furlong and Edward Norton Tony Kaye

At 46, Kaye has amassed a fortune as one of Europe's most daring commercial directors, lensing groundbreakingly gorgeous ads for Guinness, Reebok, Volvo, and Dunlop. Over the past couple of years, he's also become well-known (although not well received) in the art world, where he's pioneered his own school of so-called Hype Art with headline-grabbing conceptual works like "Roger," a homeless man he "exhibited" at London's Tate Gallery (wearing a BY TONY KAYE sign around his neck). "An investigation into the value of art," Kaye calls it.

New Line hired him anyway.

Despite their rocky start, the director and star learned to live with each other. Norton calls their early relationship "an incredibly fruitful, satisfying, healthy, and positive collaborative dynamic." With Kaye's blessing, the actor and X's screenwriter retooled the script, sharpening its shocking ending and fleshing out characters--like Derek's worshipful skinhead-in-training younger brother (played by Edward Furlong), their bewildered, chain-smoking mom (Beverly D'Angelo), and the black high school principal (Avery Brooks) who tries to set the Vinyard boys straight. Norton's character was also tweaked, especially in the IQ department.

"We wanted him to be a kind of Uber-neo-Nazi," Norton says. "We wanted him to be everything a skinhead might dream himself to be. That was the trap we were setting. We wanted the audience to find itself disturbingly compelled by what this guy has to say, to catch themselves thinking 'Jeez, there's a certain sense to that.' And then very suddenly and horrifyingly watch those thoughts be transmuted into a bottle being broken over somebody's head."

Kaye wasn't wild about the final script--he describes it as "a very poorly developed piece of work"--but hoped for the best once the cameras started rolling. "I have a very anarchic style of filmmaking," he says. "Basically, I have absolutely no idea of what I want, but a total understanding of what I don't want. I use a screenplay as a ticket to a journey, not a road map."

Ignoring such bourgeois techniques as planning and rehearsal, Kaye pretty much winged the entire production. He was his own cinematographer. He gave the actors total freedom in crafting their performances. ("Tony wasn't really specific about what he wanted," recalls Furlong. "It was just him holding the camera and doing, like, a million takes.") He solicited suggestions from everyone on the set--and a few people off the set (like the Venice Beach homeless man he set up in a nearby hotel and paid to take notes on the script).

After 43 days, Kaye had shot nearly 200 hours of footage--enough to give even Stanley Kubrick a migraine. Still, he managed to splice together a rough cut in about 10 weeks. New Line was delighted. "People cried at the screening, it was so emotionally affecting," remembers studio president Michael De Luca. "We gave him a few notes, but we thought he had really executed the script in a great way."

Kaye was less pleased. He felt he still hadn't found his movie in all those thousands of feet of film. He disappeared back into the editing bay for a major rethink. Then he started slashing, ultimately chopping the movie down to a mere 87 minutes. "That's when we started to worry," De Luca puts it mildly. Norton was especially concerned. "It was an after-school special," he says of Kaye's shorter cut. Kaye agreed to let Norton join him in the editing room to help reassemble a longer cut. Others started turning up as well--including suits from the studio. "I had all these bozos, this eclectic crew of McDonald's chefs in there," Kaye sneers. At one point, Kaye became so furious he smashed his hand through a wall, breaking several knuckles.

Exactly how much editing Norton did on the film is a matter of some debate. "I didn't do any editing," he insists. "I just helped reassemble a rough cut." Still, he drove Kaye nuts. "No matter what Norton did, the studio was going to love it because they were worried about upsetting him," he says, fuming. "They would come up to me and say, 'Tony, it doesn't matter what the cut is, it's all your stuff. What difference does it make?' That's the level of ignorance I was working with."

"Oh, I don't know," De Luca responds. "There were notes from Edward that we said no to as well. There was stuff Edward wanted longer in the movie that ended up shorter."

Kaye continued to work with Norton on "the Edward cut"--as the longer reassemblage came to be known--and continued to steam. In a fury of rebellion, he paid for a series of full-page ads in Daily Variety and The Hollywood Reporter that cryptically attacked Norton and New Line with John Lennon quotes ("I'll scratch your back and you knife mine") and other esoteric insults. He clung to only one hope: He had asked New Line for eight "unmolested" weeks to edit his own director's cut after the studio's version had been completed. The day before the first of his anti-X ads was due to appear, he got his answer. New Line said yes.

"I called up Variety and tried to pull the ads," Kaye says. "But it was too late."

A priest, a rabbi, and a tibetan monk walk into a studio chief's office. There is no punchline. Last July, after his eight weeks were up, Kaye really did show up at De Luca's office with three holy men. "The monk and the priest didn't say anything at the meeting, but the rabbi asked a couple of stupid questions," Kaye remembers. "I'm not sure why I did it. It was insane."

"Maybe he felt we would talk to each other in a more civil way in the presence of spiritual people," De Luca speculates. "It was pretty funny. But basically he came to say he didn't have a cut ready in the time we had given him. He couldn't tell me what he was going to do with the movie or how long he would need."

In fact, Kaye had done almost no editing during the eight weeks. Instead, he'd jetted down to the Caribbean to consult with Nobel Prize-winning poet Derek Walcott. "I was bombarded by inspiration," Kaye says. "We came up with these amazing ways to radically reinvent the film. But it left me in the position of going back to New Line and telling them I needed even more time." Those radical ideas--like inserting testimonials from real-life skinheads into the film--didn't wow De Luca. "Tony was pretty vague," he says. "And he kept saying 'If Kubrick gets the time he needs, I deserve the same.'" De Luca told Kaye he was releasing the studio's cut. It would screen at the Toronto Film Festival in September.

Kaye responded by shifting into Hype-erdrive. He flew to Toronto to demand the film be scratched from the festival (New Line ducked the battle by pulling the movie on its own). He heated up his X-bashing ad campaign in the trades (New Line responded by running its own, even more cryptic ad, quoting Dr. Seuss). He replaced his publicist with a "crisis expert" (an affable chap named Steve who sits in on Kaye's interview with his own microcassette recorder, taping the reporter as he tapes the director as he videotapes the reporter). And he applied for an Alan Smithee credit on the film, the official pseudonym the Directors Guild grants to members who feel they've been artistically abused.

Turns out, though, the guild has rules about the Smithee credit: To get one, a director has to agree not to bad-mouth his movie in public. Kaye had already blown that clause; his request was denied. He suggested other pseudonyms, but Humpty Dumpty ("It's about the fall of mankind and his subsequent biblical revenge," he elucidates) and Ralph Coates (he won't explain what it means) didn't go over any better. Ultimately, the studio and the guild told Kaye he was stuck being the director of American History X, whether he liked it or not.

"At the end of the day, Tony Kaye is not interested in much other than Tony Kaye," Norton says, stabbing into his eggs angrily. "You're dealing with someone who has a compulsive need for external melodrama. He's taken a very normal level of collaborative interaction and turned it into a melodrama of creative abuse because he needs to paint himself as an oppressed artist. Because he's more interested in people's perceptions of him as a fully formed Kubrick-like maestro. But let's not make any mistake: Tony Kaye is a victim of nothing but his own professional and spiritual immaturity. Period."

Morrissey arrives at similar conclusions. "He began to treat the movie like Hype Art," the producer says. "And like all of Tony's work, he was its subject. The ads in the trades and all the controversy he created--it was all a giant conceptual art piece about him."

Of course, there is another possibility: Given more time and money (he had already poured nearly $1 million of his own into the picture, on top of New Line's $9 million budget), perhaps Kaye could have carved an even more impressive movie from his mountain of footage. Whatever else you can say about him, he's no hack. Even Norton concedes his talent: "Tony's visuals in this movie are wholly unique, really stupendous," he says.

But if vindication is to come to Kaye, it will have to wait until his next feature--if there is a next. He says he's planning a big-screen adaptation of Tennessee Williams' One Arm with Marlon Brando (they bonded instantly, videotaping each other throughout their meeting), but so far no studios have rushed forward with financing. Meanwhile, Kaye has much to keep him busy, including his threatened lawsuits against the DGA and New Line. He is also contemplating a Hype Art-style protest at X's premiere, although he "hasn't thought of an appropriate concept yet." At some point he'll presumably return to England, to rejoin his Romanian wife, Eugenia, and their two children.

And, of course, there's the documentary he's taping on the making of X, which he hopes to premiere at the Sundance Film Festival next year. As it happens, the drama playing out in his hotel suite right now would make an excellent final scene. "In two or three years, these people are going to be humbled into oblivion by me," Kaye rants. "All of them will crawl and beg to work with me again. But my door is closed to them. I will crush them. I will decimate them!"

Waving his minicam around the room, seething at Hollywood, as sincere and spontaneous as he is completely nutty--it's a riveting performance piece. The Hype Artist at work.

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