Can This Man Come Back?

Having seen Kaye filming "Lobby Lobster" at his Hollywood Hills home with a cast of unknowns, I have trouble imagining him getting a crack at "Charlie's Angels 2." For a while Kaye claimed that Brando would play a role in the movie as a female judge, but Kaye admits that's off now. He also claimed he had foreign financing for the project, but that's off now too. All along, Kaye's biggest problem has been his inability to complete anything longer than a 30-second TV spot. New Line took "X" away from him because he wanted another year to finish the movie. The abortion documentary remains unfinished, and it's hard to imagine "Lobby Lobster" will reverse the trend. Last year Kaye said the film was about a schizophrenic poet. Now it's a portrait of an actor who has a meltdown. Who knows what it will be in six months?

"You can always begin all over again," counters Kaye. "I go into something new, make all my mistakes right away and then come out ready to try something new. Da Vinci only finished a dozen paintings in his lifetime. Most of what we know of his work is only notes and rough sketches. But the stuff he did finish was amazing."

If only we could say the same about Kaye. He's a gifted artist with little focus or self-discipline, which in today's Hollywood is a prescription for disaster. As novelist Michael Cunningham recently put it, great artists are people who realize that their strangeness is part of their strength, that they must be willing to "court reputations as fools, romantics and hysterics." But the movies today are much more about business than art. So Kaye doesn't have to convince people that he has talent--he has to convince them that he knows what to do with it.

"The Big Picture" runs each Tuesday in Calendar. If you have ideas, questions or criticism, e-mail them to patrick.goldstein@latimes.com.