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.
Director Victor Salva, who was convicted of child molestation, works regularly, having directed several films since news of his imprisonment surfaced. He has a new film, "Jeepers Creepers," due out in late August from MGM Films. "I had friends tell me they were shocked after I hired him," recalls Davis Entertainment Classics chief Todd Harris, who produced "Rites of Passage," a 1999 film Salva directed. "But Victor went to jail, paid his debt, and I felt he wasn't a danger to anybody. In fact, I've never worked with a more decent person. If artists weren't given a second chance in Hollywood, we'd have a lot of gifted people who could never work again."
