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.
