Hollywood loves a comeback story. John Travolta got years of goodwill from his return in "Pulp Fiction." Francis Coppola has resurrected his career over and over. Charlie Sheen just went from a direct-to-video loser to the star of "Spin City." Sly Stallone seems to make a comeback with every movie. If nothing else, the back-from-the-dead angle is a great way to hype a new project.
But when Tony Kaye showed up for breakfast at the Four Seasons Hotel the other day, trying to sell me on his comeback story, he tried a different approach. "I think I'm dying," he said, pointing to a blemish on his cheek. "It's been bleeding. I must have some awful skin cancer."
Leave it to Kaye, best known as the conceptual artist turned film director who crashed 'n' burned making the 1998 film "American History X," to pitch a comeback story by announcing that he's dying. The cancer scare was a false alarm. But the British director's career in Hollywood remains on the critical list, the result of his legendarily bizarre behavior during a pitched battle with New Line Cinema over "American History X" that resulted in his berating the studio in a series of trade ads that quoted everyone from John Lennon to Patanjali, the Indian founder of yoga. Kaye unsuccessfully petitioned the Directors Guild to have the film released with a director's credit of Humpty Dumpty.
Since then, Kaye has been persona non grata in Hollywood. He fired his agent. He stopped eating in restaurants: He had black coffee at breakfast, saying, "I don't like having to choose things that take ages to come." Most bizarre of all, for a long time he stopped talking on the phone, forcing people to have conversations with him relayed through a personal assistant.
For example:
Me: "Tony, what do you mean you don't talk on the phone anymore?"
Kaye's assistant: "Tony, what do you mean you don't . . . "
Me (breaking in): "Tony, you've got to be kidding!"
Kaye's assistant (deadpan): "Tony, you've got to be kidding!"
As you can imagine, this Abbott and Costello-style routine quickly scared off all but the most ardent Kaye admirers, the ad agencies who still pay him millions to direct high-profile TV commercials largely shown in England and Europe. In fact, Kaye is going to Miami this week where he will receive the Clio Awards' first lifetime achievement award for his groundbreaking commercials.
But Kaye wants to be more than just a cult commercial director--he wants back into the Hollywood club. His talent remains unquestioned. Not long ago, when I asked "Pearl Harbor" producer Jerry Bruckheimer to name three directors he'd most want to work with, he immediately cited Kaye. The question is: Will today's no-nonsense Hollywood take him back?
In the 1970s, Coppola, Michael Cimino and William Friedkin were at least as outrageous as Kaye, in an era fueled by drugs and oversized egos. They made great movies, and the studio bosses of the day were willing to forgive almost any bratty escapade. Directors were treated like mad royalty.
"The business has gotten much more buttoned-down today," says Peter Biskind, who chronicled the '70s directors' outrageous antics in his bestseller, "Easy Riders, Raging Bulls." "In the '70s, the whole Hollywood culture indulged extreme behavior--Tony Kaye would have fit right in. It was almost impossible to be too crazy to work in Hollywood, unless you were Dennis Hopper and you were really crazy."
Bruckheimer believes he could hire Kaye and keep him on an even keel, but he acknowledges that in today's Hollywood, "it's all about attitude and how you present yourself to the community. Of course, success helps. After he made 'The Hand,' everyone lost Oliver Stone's phone number. He had a really rough reputation. Yet when he came back and won an Oscar with his next picture he was back in action."
Some transgressions are easier to forgive than others. Once on everybody's hot new director short list, Marcus Nispel was dropped by a leading commercial production company after he ran an ad during the recent commercial-actor strike that featured a bare-breasted elderly black woman with the declaration: "In South Africa, this is what SAG means." But popular actors Robert Downey Jr. and Matthew Perry have had little trouble working, despite repeated drug relapses. Roman Polanski still gets hired as a film director, despite having fled the United States after pleading guilty to one felony count of having sex with a minor.
