American History X

LOS ANGELES--If you were a first-time director in Hollywood and the studio yanked your movie away, there are a lot of things you might do to express your displeasure.

They probably would not include taking out full-page newspaper advertisements quoting John Lennon and Abraham Lincoln.

They also probably would not include giving interviews in which you refer to your producer as "Pompous Pilot," your studio executive as "the baggage man" and yourself as "the greatest living film director."

And you probably wouldn't accuse the Directors Guild of America of denying your right to free speech for failing to support your use of the pseudonym "Humpty Dumpty."

But then, Tony Kaye isn't like most people.

American History X -- a serious film about racism in America, the seductive nature of white supremacy and the destructiveness of blind hatred -- was to be Kaye's feature film debut.

"My plan was to blow the world away with the level of craft I thought I could bring to cinema," he says.

But now that the film, starring Edward Norton as a charismatic skinhead, is set to open across the country on Oct. 30, Kaye has embarked on what some see as a kamikaze campaign to win the right to refashion the movie -- which was shot by Kaye but edited significantly by Norton -- or, at the very least, to get his name removed from the credits.

Kaye has badgered, implored and bewildered the studio, New Line Cinema, by taking out cryptic advertisements in the industry trade newspapers ("Always/ Know sometimes/ Think it's me. John Lennon." And: "Always bear in mind that your own resolution to succeed is more important than any one thing. Abraham Lincoln."); he showed up to an eleventh-hour face off with the producers accompanied by a priest, a rabbi and a Buddhist monk, videotaping the entire encounter. Now he has hired colorful Washington attorney Mark Lane to help him accuse the studio and the Directors Guild of breach of contract.

It is easy to see Tony Kaye as a crackpot, and plenty of people in Hollywood will tell you that he is on a mission of personal promotion and professional suicide. They believe Tony Kaye is completely terror-stricken, unable to finish this film or any other. But other people who know him say he is a committed artist and a visual genius reacting the only way he knows how. They say Kaye is absolutely fearless and on the brink of a brilliant directorial career. In support of the director, three editors have removed their names from the film and two actors registered their displeasure by failing to show up for post-production voice-overs.

For his part, Kaye says he intends to win 11 Academy Awards. Someday.

As Hollywood stories go, it would be easy to cast this as a tale of David vs. Goliath, of art battling commerce, of willpower struggling against real power. Or perhaps it could be a story of Hollywood's twisted hierarchy, where a studio offers the editing process to its media-savvy movie star at the expense of its unknown, non-media-savvy director.

But the truth is almost simpler than that. At some level the whole mess over American History X is about ego and ambition, about the skewed expectations fostered by an industry where many smart, talented people are hellbent to succeed, and not everyone will.

For of all the passion that went into American History X, who can say whose passion was most pure? Because here's the strangest part of all: Most of those who have seen the film think it is very, very good. That's something that even Tony Kaye does not deny.

To which he says this: "Good is the enemy of great."

Cut and Dried?

Kaye is pacing his suite at the Chateau Marmont hotel, where he has been holed up for months now, waging his battle with New Line. The room looks like a high-tech nerve center. Video cameras are scattered about; stacks of video and audio cassettes are piled in corners; cables, tripods and treatises on Chinese philosophy lie hither and yon. On a coffee table is a book called "The Art of War."

Otherwise there is little in the room but a television, broadcasting a football game, and a few chairs. The rangy 46-year-old director, dressed in a silky purple shirt and purple velour pants, asks if it's all right to videotape our discussion. Sure. Thereafter his hand-held camera obscures his face, leaving only his shaved skull in view.

"The day before yesterday I had an epiphany," he says. He's been talking about how he successfully lobbied the Toronto Film Festival to remove American History X from the lineup this fall and how he intends to deal with New Line from now on.

He continues: "I thought, 'How depressing to have to spend your whole life being friends with people you hate. And who hate you.' So I've decided that if I don't like somebody, I'm not going to talk to them." He lets this sink in, then adds: "I know it's childish, but it's because they have upset me. So I'm not going to talk to them. I'm going to imagine a world in which they are not even there." He will call this little piece of performance art -- let's see now, how about, yeah, that's it -- "Ignore."

Right about now you are looking to write Kaye off as a monumental moron.

Kaye's enemies -- and he's got quite a few -- like to say that the director is incredibly skilled at manipulating the media, that he's a slick salesman when it comes to peddling his ideas. But Kaye is anything but smooth; he stutters and speaks in elliptical concepts. His grandstanding is annoying, like his advertisements -- they appear to be publicity stunts.

His work, however, is extraordinarily eloquent; what Tony Kaye says so badly in words he says with uncommon grace and clarity when using the camera.

To explain: Kaye is not really a film novice. He has had a decade-long career in the advertising world, where he is a major talent known for his stunning visual gift. Kaye has created cutting-edge ads for clients including Volvo, Nike and Reebok, ranging from glibly humorous messages to surreal visual tapestries. He has created moving public service announcements for causes such as AIDS and Partnership for a Drug-Free America. In all, he has won a dazzling number of awards that fill eight single-spaced pages on his resume.

But Kaye has always considered himself an artist first, and denounces his commercial work as something "I'm embarrassed and ashamed I ever made.

"I never wanted to make TV commercials," he says. "I wanted to make films. I thought I could skirt through commercial work without any dirt sticking to me. Unfortunately I became tremendously successful." Kaye, it should be noted, has another incarnation as a force in the world of "hype art," a self-conscious, self-referential genre: He once paid a homeless man to be a work called "Roger." Another time he placed ads in newspapers trying to sell a "Jewish car" to see what reactions would be.

But he's not all hype. Underneath the preening exterior is a different Tony Kaye. Talk to him for a (long) while, and another person begins to emerge, eventually undermining his own braggadocio. "Right now I'm only saying I'm the greatest living director. I haven't proved it," he says.

Many in Hollywood were anticipating Kaye's first feature project. "I have a lot of respect for Tony. I was elated when he agreed to do the movie," says Mike De Luca, the head of production at New Line and the man Kaye now refers to as "the baggage man." "But I didn't know he'd come to reject the script he signed on to make."

Says executive producer Steve Tisch (Forrest Gump, The Postman): "What I loved about working with Tony is what I love about Tony. He's extremely eccentric in the way he processes information, the way he communicates; I could not have been more excited about his involvement."

Norton, of course, was another major boon to the project; the actor is considered among the most talented of a rising generation of stars, nominated for an Oscar for his first film role in Primal Fear. He, too, was passionate about American History X and agreed to cut his fee in half to fit its budget.

But there was tension practically from the time Kaye was hired in 1996. Screenwriter David McKenna and producer John Morrissey (Booty Call) didn't appreciate Kaye's approach. "I use a script as a ticket for a journey, not as a road map," says Kaye. "I thought I could get in there and rewrite the script and turn it into something. The tragedy is that even against all odds, I almost did it."

Morrissey sees it differently. "First he was recalcitrant. Then he was problematic about bizarre script issues." He and McKenna took some of Kaye's suggestions, but Morrissey came close to firing him, relenting at the urging of New Line and Norton.

Things seemed to fall in place during the shoot. Kaye was, everyone seems to agree, supportive and open to suggestions from the entire cast. They included not only Norton but up-and-coming actor Edward Furlong (Pecker) and veterans Beverly D'Angelo and Elliot Gould. In a style practically unknown in feature film, Kaye acted as his own cameraman, shooting and lighting every scene himself. His method allowed him to try myriad approaches in each scene; it also produced about three times the amount of footage usually shot. Kaye paid for the cost of extra film stock and developing.

The serious problems began after Kaye delivered his first cut of the movie last fall; that version was screened for a research audience and was well received. But Kaye resisted the studio's suggestions for fleshing out the film, continuing to tighten it when the studio asked him to use more of the vast footage he had shot.

After a couple of months, a dissatisfied studio invited Norton into the editing room to give his opinion, or "notes," on the film's progress, and when the actor's ideas jibed with New Line's, he was invited to help edit the film. For several weeks Norton worked while Kaye paced in the back of the editing room.

Norton's sense was that Kaye was grateful for his contribution. "When I came back in the spring . . . and gave notes on the performances, Tony was consistently saying, 'Thank you, bless you, thank you, I'm so excited, it's getting better every day,' " says Norton, mimicking Kaye's British accent. "He would constantly say, 'I don't have an opinion about the narrative. If it looks right, that's all I care about.' "

Kaye says: "It was insane. I was horrified at the work he was doing." At one point Kaye punched a wall in frustration and broke his left hand.

Most everyone else seemed to know that the director was unhappy with the actor's involvement. "He was going along with this on the promise that he'd have his chance to go off with his editor by himself and do his version," De Luca says.

Unfortunately for Kaye, that version became ever more elusive. The studio tested its (and Norton's) version in June and received a good response. De Luca tried to talk Kaye out of continuing work on a different cut. At a meeting with top studio executives, Kaye wept in anger and frustration at being, he felt, undermined by his star and then denied by his producers.

So New Line relented, giving Kaye eight weeks to work on a new cut, but proceeding with marketing plans for its own version. By this time Kaye had had a radical new vision for what the movie ought to be -- "he kept saying the word 'radical,' " recalls De Luca -- a complete departure from the original script. He went out and shot footage of black gang members and collaborated with Nobel-winning poet Derek Walcott on new narration.

New Line was nervous. But after the eight weeks, Kaye wasn't done -- and couldn't say when he would be done. In an episode that has already passed into the lore of Hollywood, he showed up for a meeting at the studio and brought along the three spiritual advisers.

"At first I thought he had screened the movie for them, and they were there to convince us," says De Luca. Not at all; instead, Kaye -- in typically off-the-wall fashion -- said the clerics were there to keep the peace, and that he couldn't say when the film would be done.

Kaye argued that if Stanley Kubrick could take as much time as he needed, that he deserved the same consideration, says De Luca.

After taking a beat to reflect, the studio declined.

Were they wrong to cut Kaye off? That's the way it works in the movies, say De Luca, Norton and Morrissey. "At what point does Tony have to deal with practical limitations?" Norton asks. "He wants complete indulgence for an ad infinitum process."

But Morrissey thinks that Kaye is actually unable to finish the film and just panicked. "What sent Tony round the bend was the idea that he had to finish the movie. He's terrified -- he comes from fear a lot -- and he went into a kind of panic. He stopped eating; he started getting up at 3:30 in the morning. . . . Tony could be a successful director of features if he weren't in the grip of the neuroses from which he suffers."

De Luca's view is more charitable: "Some directors get into post-production and decide, 'I need to redo this entire thing.' Woody Allen has reshot entire movies after seeing the first cut. Kubrick does it, certainly. For Tony it will be a legitimate methodology. I totally think he's of that caliber. . . . But we don't want to put a film on the shelf while he tinkers indefinitely. I regret it wasn't a film where I could indulge him to that extent."

Forget all that, says D'Angelo, who plays Norton's mother in the film; she and Furlong ducked a voice-over session in August until the studio threatened to sue them for breach of contract. "What I really believe is that Tony Kaye is in a position where he's been victimized by his innocence," she says. "He could not imagine that anybody would ever want to release a film that wasn't everything that everyone wanted it to be, including him."

Pure and Simple?

Last week Tony Kaye launched a new broadside, this time against the Directors Guild, a group to which he belongs and that arbitrates disputes between directors and studios. The guild so far has denied Kaye's request for a pseudonym on the film he no longer supports. Of course, the first pseudonym that Kaye proposed was Humpty Dumpty. By the time he got around to proposing another, Ralph Coates, New Line said it was too late. The guild also cautioned Kaye that he was violating its rule that prohibits a dissenting director from criticizing his film in public.

What kind of rule is that, Kaye wants to know. "An artist can't explain why he's removing his name from his work?" he fulminates.

More stress. Why didn't New Line just fire Kaye? Says De Luca: "The movie still reflects Tony's vision before he had this radical new vision." Sighs Morrissey: "I wish we had."

At a certain point, around June, Kaye made a rational decision to stop playing by the rules. It was a liberating, if terrifying, choice.

"I felt every ounce of the intimidation to that point, all my fear of Hollywood, all my fear of being crushed by the power of this machine -- and it's immense -- and I decided I couldn't give a damn," he confesses, hours into a conversation. He has set the video camera down. The stutter has subsided. "I went into a mode of 'I do it my way or it's not mine.' Otherwise, let me go and let me get on with my life."

He continues: "I know I'm alienating 95 percent of the community. But I know I couldn't work with those people anyway. I know that 5 percent, or maybe even 2 percent, understand what I'm about, and respect what I'm trying to do. To have respect for this craft. To do unto others.

"The film is not right. It's not good enough. It doesn't need to be flawed."

It is possible to argue that Hollywood is not the place for a man like Tony Kaye, although Morrissey, interestingly, disagrees. He says Hollywood is the perfect place for a self-centered, publicity-seeking sort like him. "He's not a purist. He's a pure promoter," says the producer. "He is not Don Quixote."

And for once, though for different reasons, Kaye concurs.

"I like this place. I like the people," he says. "I like the insanity of it. Just because I don't walk to the same beat as everyone else doesn't change that."

A few days later he calls back, screaming and raging once more: "I have made no money. I have jeopardized my business, my family, everything. I've walked away. That is a purist gesture like you'll rarely come across. I will do everything in my power to keep my name from theirs. I do not want to be part of that club. I do not want my spirituality to be associated with theirs. To them it's a game. To me it's life and death."

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