The bizarre way Tony Kaye tried to save his cut of ‘American History X’
Racism and antisemitism are topics that are just as pertinent within Hollywood as they are in the movies that they produce. As a director who owned a limousine with the number plate ‘JEW1SH’, Tony Kaye knew this all too well. So, when he set out to make American History X, an examination of racism in the US, he understood the responsibility involved.
This weighed heavy on the director’s shoulders, so once shooting had concluded on his film, he toiled endlessly on the edit in order to make it into the opus that such a subject demanded. But toiling takes time, and New Line began to feel that Kaye was growing fastidious. They had fronted the money, and they wanted to see some returns.
Similarly, Edward Norton felt that he had put in the performance of a lifetime, so he was keen to get his work out there before awards season commenced. So, the actor got hold of the raw footage in the can himself and made his own edit. When New Line Cinema were presented with this, they were happy to roll it out to the world. This enraged Kaye, who thought a shoddy piece of work was being snatched from the jaws of a masterpiece.
He needed more time and money to save the picture from a damning fate. While he was seemingly happy to front the finances himself, his mission was a more spiritual one: to stop the release at all costs. His last-ditch attempt was a breakfast meeting with producer Michael De Luca. Kaye believed that this would be the most important breakfast meeting with Michael De Luca in his entire life.
So, as John Ronson recalls in his book Them: Adventures with Extremists, Kaye decided that a spiritual crisis requires a spiritual solution. This resulted in a sudden brainwave as the clock was ticking on his moribund masterpiece. Kaye made a call to his PA at three in the morning. His decree was as simple as it was maddening: she had to summon a religious leader of every faith to accompany him to the meeting.
The premise of his plan was simple: “When spiritual people are around, it makes the atmosphere more spiritual, right?” He figured, with the awed atmosphere of religiosity filling the meeting room, De Luca would be moved enough to see the majesty of Kaye’s meeting, stop Norton’s edit, and grant the great director the time he required.
So, in the lobby of New Line, he assembled his team. It included a Roman Catholic priest, a Rabbi who kept mentioning his own screenplay, and a Tibetan Monk whom Kaye had flown in on his own dime from Tibet just in time for the grand mission. Although everyone in that room left it awed and aghast at Kaye’s own religious-like devotion not to be good but to be great, De Luca eventually approved Norton’s release.
In the months that followed, Kaye went on a sabotage mission. He tried to sue New Line, he tried to have his name removed and replaced with Humpty Dumpty, and he pulled strings with film festivals trying to get showings cancelled. In essence, he tried to kill his own creation. He failed in this, but his failure was a peculiar one because, despite his denigration spree, American History X was largely hailed as a masterpiece.
