Can This Man Come Back?

So where does that leave Tony Kaye? He seems intent on orchestrating his comeback on his own terms, which appear as bizarre as ever, though he has started talking on the phone again. He recently approached UTA, his old talent agency, about working with him again. He even went to Cannes last week--the mecca for all publicity seekers--where he played a late-night set at a local club with TKOH, his new rock band that features Kaye on rhythm guitar. He even has an agent who's been sending him out on auditions as an actor. He recently tried out for a part as a mentally retarded man, saying, "I think I pulled off the retarded part really well, but I couldn't do the American accent."

He claims he's looking for a "proper film with a real script," but for now, he's been putting all his time into a pair of personal projects; "Lobby Lobster," a film Kaye describes differently every time he talks about it, and "The Lake of Fire," a documentary about abortion he's been shooting for the past decade. He also recently told the London press that he and his pal Marlon Brando paid 350,000 pounds (about $500,000) for long-lost footage of the Angel of Mons, a ghost that appeared to British troops during World War II. But it turns out the ghost footage doesn't exist--it's a hoax Kaye cooked up for a conceptual art project.

Kaye's fondness for pranks got him in trouble in the first place. When New Line tried to make peace with Kaye during his battle over "American History X," he showed up at a high-level studio meeting accompanied by a rabbi, a priest and a Tibetan monk. Kaye's behavior has earned him little sympathy in Hollywood, where everybody feels once burned, twice shy. When Kaye approached UTA recently about repping him again, the agency passed.

"Tony's incredibly talented, but I told him that until he could prove that he was willing to skip the stunts and be an adult that people weren't going to take him seriously," says UTA's Dan Aloni. "As an agent, my job is to make people comfortable. I knew when he called me up and asked if we wanted to represent him as an actor that nothing had changed."