Tony Kaye’s campaign against Edward Norton: “He raped the film”
Orson Welles once said, “The notion of directing a film is the invention of critics – the whole eloquence of cinema is achieved in the editing room”. A great editor can elevate an average story into something special; in the same breath, a bad editor can destroy a movie. So, it’s no wonder that directors and studios have frequently battled over who gets to have the final cut of the picture over the years. One horror story that happened over the editing involved director Tony Kaye and actor Edward Norton, and things got so bad that Kaye took out ads in newspapers in a campaign against Norton.
In 1991, Tony Kaye had just shot his debut feature, American History X, starring Edward Norton and Edward Furlong. The movie follows Danny Vinyard (Furlong), a high school student on his way to becoming a neo-Nazi. His brother (Norton), recently released from a three-year prison term for killing two black youths trying to steal his car, grapples with the urgent task of pulling Danny away from the perilous path he’s approaching.
It was rumoured that Norton and Kaye had a frosty relationship during the shoot, but things worsened during the film’s post-production. Following the submission of a preliminary movie cut to the studio, Kaye expressed a desire to continue editing until the runtime was just under 90 minutes. However, Norton, along with some other production team members, believed that Kaye had made excessive cuts and was not happy with this edit as it stood. Norton then pushed for the opportunity to re-edit the movie himself and lobbied the studio to grant him that responsibility.
Norton got his wish and, along with editor Jerry Greenberg, began re-cutting the film to their vision. In its current form, the movie was submitted to festivals, leading to Kaye’s frustration and despair and a request to the Director’s Guild. He asked them to remove his name from American History X and replace it with “Humpty Dumpty”.
Norton’s version was 40 minutes longer than Kaye’s original cut. The new version of his movie clearly angered Kaye and, when speaking with The Guardian, revealed that Norton had given himself a lot more screen time, “I had done a hard, fast, 95-minute rough diamond of a picture. But the movie they put out was crammed with shots of everyone crying in each other’s arms. And, of course, Norton had generously given himself more screen time”.
Norton’s version of American History X became the movie that was released. This led Kaye to place multiple ads in Hollywood trade papers, where he openly criticised Norton. Kaye publicly referred to Norton as “a narcissistic dilettante who raped the film”. The method of directors turning to adverts to vocalise their frustration in the industry had been done before. Famously, Terry Gilliam took out an ad with Variety to publicly ask the head of Universal when he was going to release Gilliam’s, Brazil.
Kaye, however, took it to another level and took out over 40 adverts to display his anger toward the production of American History X and Norton. “I would say whatever I needed to say to them in a full-page ad in Variety or the Hollywood Reporter, sometimes quoting Lennon or Shakespeare; sometimes trumpeting myself as the greatest British director since Hitchcock,” said Kaye. “But I placed nearly 40 ads. In my eyes, it was the biggest, bloodiest fight in Hollywood since Citizen Kane.”
