Kaye Walks His Talk

After months of acrimonious wrangling with New Line Cinema over the fate of his film, “American History X,” director Tony Kaye says he has walked off the project and is taking his name off the picture.

“I’m distraught over what’s happened,” says Kaye of his yearlong post-production struggles on the film, which stars Edward Norton as a neo-Nazi skinhead who tries to put his past behind him after being imprisoned for the murder of two black men.

Kaye’s decision came after New Line said earlier this week that it would release the film this October in a version Kaye says he has not approved. “It’s a rape, a total abuse of creativity, it’s not my film anymore,” contends Kaye, who was in Toronto this week trying to persuade the Toronto Film Festival to cancel its tentative agreement to show “American History X” during the festival, which begins Sept. 10.

“If it was someone like Stanley Kubrick, they’d never try to put this out without the director,” Kaye says. “So I’m going for their throat. If New Line tries to show this version, I’ll hire protesters to go to every theater in America to say, ‘This is rubbish!’ ”

It would be tempting to dismiss this as typical Hollywood hyperbole, except that the events of the past few months rival the antics depicted in such movieland spoofs as “The Player” or “Burn Hollywood Burn,” which also was released with a pseudonym to signal the unhappiness of its director, Arthur Hiller, with the final version of the movie. The high points of this drama include:

* Kaye’s stepping aside while Norton spent nearly two months in the editing room, working on his own cut of the movie.

* A June 9 meeting over the fate of the film, which abruptly ended with New Line Productions President Mike De Luca’s storming out of the room after Kaye got into a shouting match with New Line Cinema Chairman Bob Shaye.

* Kaye’s responding to the confrontation by taking out full-page ads in the Hollywood trades, quoting the likes of Edmund Burke, John Lennon, Abraham Lincoln and Albert Einstein.

* A mid-July scoring session in London with a 50-piece orchestra at which Kaye became so enraged seeing New Line’s cut of the film that he hurled his wallet and an orange at the video monitor, then walked out of the session.

* A July 28 meeting with New Line executives to which Kaye, saying he wanted to add some “spirituality” to the meeting, came accompanied by a rabbi, a priest and a Tibetan monk.

* A subsequent phone conversation between De Luca and Kaye’s manager, Marty Bauer, in which, without Kaye’s knowledge, Bauer floated an offer that if New Line would repay Kaye $800,000 for expenses he’d incurred on the film that he would keep his name on the film.

The fracas with Kaye comes as a bitter blow to De Luca, a filmmaker-friendly studio executive who’s been an indefatigable supporter of such gifted young directors as David Fincher, Paul Thomas Anderson and F. Gary Gray. Impressed by Kaye’s award-winning work as a TV commercial director and self-proclaimed “hype artist,” De Luca personally hired Kaye to make his feature- film debut on “American History X,” allowing the 46-year-old director to serve as his own cinematographer and camera operator.

He also allowed Kaye to spend more than a year in post-production on the film, bankrolling an additional $1.5 million in post-production costs as Kaye shot additional film, including “witness-style” interviews with gangbangers and neo-Nazis as the director searched for ways to improve the film. In early June, when Kaye asked for an additional eight weeks to complete the film, De Luca gave him the time. But when Kaye returned to New Line last week, still unable to offer the studio “any kind of timetable” for completion, De Luca decided to go ahead and release the present version.

“I feel like I’m protecting a child from an abusive parent, except that the child is our movie and the parent is its director,” says De Luca. “I still believe Tony has made a brilliant movie. It makes too important a statement about hate and redemption to be tainted by a petty controversy that comes out of Tony’s desire for self-promotion.”

De Luca insists he hasn’t been angered by Kaye’s “hype art” stunts, saying he was amused when Kaye brought “his holy men--and of course, a video camera--to our meeting. But they were just another one of Tony’s gimmicks. I don’t think any of them knew who we were. When I saw the Tibetan monk rubbing his beads, I kept thinking, ‘I hope he’s praying for us too.’ ”

What did bother De Luca, he says, was the suggestion by Bauer that the dispute could be settled if New Line were to reimburse Kaye for the $800,000 he’s spent on the film--in return for Kaye’s dropping his protests. “It was a disgusting offer, and I turned it down,” says De Luca.

Bauer insists it was a misunderstanding. “I was doing what a good agent should do--start a dialogue,” he says. “I hadn’t talked to Tony about it. I was just trying to see if we had the beginnings of a solution.”

Kaye’s hype-art stunts--he has hired homeless people to roam the Tate Gallery in London and the Getty Museum here, serving as art installations--initially gave him a reputation in Hollywood as a refreshing eccentric. But his clashes with New Line have earned him little sympathy in bottom-line-oriented Hollywood, where he is viewed more as a publicity seeker than an imperiled artist. Kaye’s uncompromising stance on the film has also created a rift between him and the three producers of “American History X,” executive producer Steve Tisch and producers Larry Turman and John Morrissey, who he now dismisses as “the Three Stooges.”

Tisch says he still respects Kaye’s gifts as a filmmaker but wishes that his “talent and vision were directed toward finishing the movie instead of creating controversy.”

*

Morrissey is more blunt: “Tony is being a Judas to his own movie--we’re really protecting him from himself. If Tony had a vision we could understand, we would support him. But he can’t even tell us if he could finish the movie this year. He wants to make so many radical changes that it just wouldn’t resemble the film we all agreed was a good movie when it was made.”

According to Director’s Guild procedures, once Kaye views the finished film, he has 72 hours to notify New Line and the guild of his desire to remove his name from the film. (Traditionally, films that are released without a director’s approval display a credit with the pseudonym, Alan Smithee.) If New Line disputes the request, a guild panel would rule on the dispute, although it is rare, if ever, that a director’s wish to remove his name has been refused.

New Line knows it is difficult to market any movie with a pseudonymous director’s credit, especially a film with “American History X’s” potentially volatile subject matter. “On the surface, people will view Tony as being the one wronged,” says De Luca. “But he’s never given us a cut of the film we can release. All he’s been doing is riffing and shooting new footage.”

New Line had hoped that a successful showing of the film at the Toronto Film Festival would give it a critical boost before its October release. But Kaye beat New Line to the punch, traveling to Toronto on Wednesday, where he met with festival director Piers Handling, insisting that the film be ousted from the festival. A rejection from the festival would further damage the film’s artistic credibility.

Handling said he won’t make a final decision until next week. But when asked if he has ever exhibited a film with an Alan Smithee pseudonym, he replied: “We’ve never shown one. In fact, I can’t remember that we’ve ever been offered one.”

Kaye’s critics say that his very public campaign to tarnish the film may turn out to be a Pyrrhic victory, leaving his reputation as damaged as the films. But Kaye speaks in such hyperbolic language that it’s difficult to know for sure where the filmmaker ends and the hype artist takes over. In addition to calling himself “the greatest living filmmaker” since Stanley Kubrick, Kaye says he assured New Line that if they released their version of “American History X,” it would only make $30 million, whereas if they released his version--in whatever form it might eventually take--it would make $200 million at the box office.

“I’m this little person going up against an army of charming fools,” says Kaye. “The problem with Hollywood is that you’ve got all these very nonartistic people who want to be involved in the artistic world, but the first thing they do is make it very nonartistic so they’ll feel right at home.”

New Line’s De Luca sees the dispute from a different angle. “We’re not afraid of difficult material. It was New Line that released a two-hour and 45-minute movie about the porn world [“Boogie Nights”]. Tony has to remember that Kubrick has a four-decade track record of greatness. Even if he has a film that’s not ready yet, you know he’s going to deliver. Tony Kaye has a long way to go before he can prove that.”