Xixax Film Forum

The Director's Chair => The Director's Chair => Topic started by: NEON MERCURY on January 10, 2004, 11:12:49 PM

Title: Tony Kaye
Post by: NEON MERCURY on January 10, 2004, 11:12:49 PM
...has he done a follw-up to American History X.......?


.
Title: .Tony Kaye..
Post by: MacGuffin on January 10, 2004, 11:14:53 PM
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0297400/
Title: .Tony Kaye..
Post by: NEON MERCURY on January 10, 2004, 11:18:51 PM
..hmm..Snowblind.eh?

has anyone seen this.....any good.....?....
Title: .Tony Kaye..
Post by: socketlevel on January 11, 2004, 12:34:03 AM
haven't seen it but i must be honest i'm surprised he got the chance to make another film, considering the whole mess that happened with American history X.

-sl-
Title: .Tony Kaye..
Post by: Pubrick on January 11, 2004, 01:40:41 AM
yeah he shot himself up the ass with am hist X.

it's a shame cos he's old, bald, and reportedly smelly. he really could use the work.
Title: .Tony Kaye..
Post by: mutinyco on January 11, 2004, 02:18:55 AM
Wasn't he calling himself the next Kubrick? Even invested some of his own money in X...
Title: .Tony Kaye..
Post by: socketlevel on January 11, 2004, 11:04:22 AM
i'm not sure but i wouldn't be surprised.  i must say i did get a laugh out of that whole "humpty dumpty" thing.  too bad that wasn't his credit.

-sl-
Title: .Tony Kaye..
Post by: NEON MERCURY on January 11, 2004, 07:38:11 PM
Quote from: socketleveli must be honest i'm surprised he got the chance to make another film, considering the whole mess that happened with American history X.

-sl-


care to explain....?.......i'm out of the loop.....as the saying goes......
Title: .Tony Kaye..
Post by: modage on January 11, 2004, 08:58:27 PM
the short version.  he was removed from the film in the editing room and edward norton assembled the film himself to his liking.  i forget the whole story though,
Title: .Tony Kaye..
Post by: NEON MERCURY on January 11, 2004, 09:03:32 PM
Quote from: themodernage02the short version.  he was removed from the film in the editing room and edward norton assembled the film himself to his liking.  i forget the whole story though,

hmmmm....

i didn't knnow that.....thanks.....

so really American History X was "An Edward Norton Film"?.....
Title: .Tony Kaye..
Post by: MacGuffin on January 11, 2004, 09:04:06 PM
Long version:
http://www.fadeinmag.com/kaye/interview1.html
Title: .Tony Kaye..
Post by: modage on January 11, 2004, 09:12:51 PM
Quote from: Tony KayeIn two or three years' time, Edward will look back – particularly when I have a body of work of movies I've made – and he'll really regret it. And his embarassment will increase with every film I make.
oops, i guess that didnt really happend did it?  since that would've been up in 01' and its now '04 and he has yet to make another film to see the light of day.  i guess he really fucked himself good with that one, didnt he? he seems like a prick.  this interview is full of contradictions and him blowing so much smoke out his ass he could be a locomotive.
Title: .Tony Kaye..
Post by: Pubrick on January 11, 2004, 09:23:16 PM
the dude is like 50 and hasn't done shit. he blew his one big chance and now he's a cautionary tale.
Title: .Tony Kaye..
Post by: NEON MERCURY on January 11, 2004, 09:25:11 PM
.damn.....that wild sh*t....thanks for the link Mac.....

.....he looks like the lead singer of tool.....
Title: .Tony Kaye..
Post by: Pedro on January 11, 2004, 10:57:57 PM
Quote from: NEON MERCURY.....he looks like the lead singer of tool.....
yeah, except uglier.
Title: .Tony Kaye..
Post by: Fernando on January 12, 2004, 10:25:11 AM
Quote from: mutinycoWasn't he calling himself the next Kubrick? Even invested some of his own money in X...

In the documentary Who is Alan Smithee? (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0279641/) someone mentioned that in some meeting Kaye said why he couldn't have more time to reshoot just like Kubrick had. I think they laughed and laughed in that meeting. Seriously, if he did say it, how can he really mean that, it was his goddamn first feature.
Title: .Tony Kaye..
Post by: socketlevel on January 12, 2004, 01:02:13 PM
This is the story as I heard it.  It might have been exaggerated a tad by the time it got to me, but who cares it's a good story nonetheless.  The legend can be much more entertaining.

Kaye was editing the picture and made a 2.5 hr cut of the film to show to new line.  The execs flipped over it, assuring Kaye they'd win Oscars.  Kaye was surprised by they're reaction because it was the first cut he made and felt there was much more to consider.  He told them he wanted to work on it further and they agreed.  They encouraged Kaye to not change it too drastically because it was near perfect for them.

So Kaye goes back in the editing room and works on it a bit, to say the least.  He screens his new 1.5 hr cut of the film and the execs were shocked.  It was the most trite, contrived piece of work they'd ever seen.  They didn't understand why he cut an hour out of the film.  They told him they wanted to see the original cut but kaye indicated to them that he made the current cut from the previous, the original cut didn't exist any longer (this was obviously before the majority of cutting was non-linear software based).  The execs didn't know how to react.  They were pissed.  Kaye assured them that he would have a cut they would be proud of.  So he went back the editing room.

So Kaye sits for over a month in the editing room without making any alterations to the film.  He was having a creative block.  On day he just didn't show up to work.  He went missing, the studio tried contacting him at his usual locations.  After trying to get a hold of him for a short while, and feeling the pressures of deadlines, they sought out a new editor to finish the project.  Edward Norton by this point had put a lot into the film, acting wise and the fact that he did a lot of physical training to be right for the role.  The execs agree to give Norton a chance in the editing room.  Norton then delivers a final cut in the vain of the original cut by Kaye.

Meanwhile Kaye was in Tibet talking to his spiritual advisor about how to cut the film.  He was searching spriritualy for the answers to his creative black.  He comes to a new understanding of the piece and makes his way back to the states to finish cutting the film.  When he gets back he finds out what has been occuring in his absence and flips out because the film is ready to be released.

He argues with the execs and feels he has been wronged but they don't seem to care.  They feel Kaye has become a liability to the project and decide to keep Norton’s cut of the film.

Kaye says fine, he wants an Alan Smithiesque credit.  He asks for his name to be known as "Humpty Dumpty."  The studio refuses, they have grounds to not oblige because of some stipulation in Kaye's contract.  Especially considering how the situation came to a head.

Kaye is furious and sues New Line for 200 million dollars.  They counter sue...

That's pretty much it, God I love Hollywood.  That's some crazy shit!

-sl-
Title: .Tony Kaye..
Post by: Alethia on January 12, 2004, 02:03:37 PM
tony kaye seems like a fucking moronic asshole
Title: .Tony Kaye..
Post by: pookiethecat on January 15, 2004, 02:28:51 PM
american history x was a trite, piece of shit, imo.
Title: .Tony Kaye..
Post by: meatwad on January 16, 2004, 10:38:00 AM
i remember hearing at one point that Tony Kaye was directing some sort of Acting Class for Marlon Brando. And that Kaye was dressed up as Bin Laden, and he fought with Brando the whole time and eventually walked out.

Did anybody else hear about this, or are these rumors false?
Title: .Tony Kaye..
Post by: Pubrick on January 16, 2004, 10:41:00 AM
i heard he mates with men, then eats them.
Title: .Tony Kaye..
Post by: MacGuffin on January 16, 2004, 10:53:20 AM
Quote from: meatwadi remember hearing at one point that Tony Kaye was directing some sort of Acting Class for Marlon Brando. And that Kaye was dressed up as Bin Laden, and he fought with Brando the whole time and eventually walked out.

Did anybody else hear about this, or are these rumors false?

FROM IMDB.COM

Brando is continuing to feud with American History X director Tony Kaye - and now the film-maker says he's getting nasty messages on his answering machine. The pair fell out earlier this year [2003] when Kaye was videoing Brando's acting master class "Lying For A Living." The bizarre shoot, which saw the rotund actor turn up to class in drag and dressed as a church minister, descended into a fight after a screaming match between the two men which concluded when Brando tried to attack his former pal. Now Kaye says he's getting nasty messages. He says, "I had one strange call on my answering machine. The voice sounded like the Devil. He said, 'I'm in your house. I'm going to kill you.' I was so frightened I didn't go back to my house for a couple of weeks. I went to the police with the tapes. They treated it as a joke."
Title: .Tony Kaye..
Post by: SoNowThen on January 16, 2004, 11:29:23 AM
I read that article posted on the page before. Even though he is a bit of an arrogant dickhole, you can't deny that a lot of what he says is true...

my favorite quote: "the standard, the acceptable standard, that the populace has reached in their movie appetites is a tragedy on the level of the AIDS epidemic."
Title: .Tony Kaye..
Post by: billybrown on January 16, 2004, 11:54:09 AM
Quote from: pookiethecatamerican history x was a trite, piece of shit, imo.

I couldn't agree more... save for a few select scenes and some of the performances (Norton's for example), it is quite the trite piece of celluloid cack. While some of Tony Kaye's points in that article do hold water, they are totally over-ridden by the fact that he's a complete twat of epic proportions.
Title: .Tony Kaye..
Post by: pookiethecat on January 16, 2004, 12:49:21 PM
Quote from: billybrown
Quote from: pookiethecatamerican history x was a trite, piece of shit, imo.

I couldn't agree more... save for a few select scenes and some of the performances (Norton's for example), it is quite the trite piece of celluloid cack. While some of Tony Kaye's points in that article do hold water, they are totally over-ridden by the fact that he's a complete twat of epic proportions.

yep.  i remember finding it very dull, in spite of the shocking and occasionally lurid subject matter.. you have to wonder if norton really did ruin a masterpiece.  or if he improved upon an already crappy product.
Title: .Tony Kaye..
Post by: godardian on January 16, 2004, 05:50:56 PM
Quote from: SoNowThenI read that article posted on the page before. Even though he is a bit of an arrogant dickhole, you can't deny that a lot of what he says is true...

my favorite quote: "the standard, the acceptable standard, that the populace has reached in their movie appetites is a tragedy on the level of the AIDS epidemic."

Those actually do sound like the tantrum-throwing words of an arrogant dickhole... or at least someone who has no connection to reality left. I bemoan daily the apparent lack of public intelligence or taste, but it's not exactly life-or-death.  :roll:
Title: .Tony Kaye..
Post by: Myxo on January 22, 2004, 11:04:37 PM
Quote from: Pthe dude is like 50 and hasn't done shit. he blew his one big chance and now he's a cautionary tale.

What a fucking moron. The guy speaks in third person for Christ's sake. He reminds me of that guy from the Budweiser commercials.

"So Tony Kaye and Michael De Luca have a conversation, and Michael De Luca smiles and he shakes Tony Kaye's hand."

True.

I saw a Charlie Rose interview recently with Alec Baldwin. They were discussing a great many things in the film industry. One of those things happened to be that, as a newbie to the industry there are two types of people:

A. Those who come in thinking they are going to add their own vision to the film and rock the boat whenever possible.

B. Those who do what they are told, and in turn gain the trust of the people who have real control over a film, the people who bankroll it.

He went on about how many people he'd seen go through Hollywood's grinder who might have made it if they'd shut their mouth for a couple of films. As a debut film director working on a project the scale of American History X, you'd think he would have been smarter.

"I'm not a writer – and there's always someone that can break the mold – but I don't believe writers can direct, and I don't believe directors can write. I think they're two very different jobs. And I think a lot of the problems, and a lot of the poor standards of filmmaking around right now, are because certain people are trying to do two jobs. However good Paul McCartney was and however good John Lennon was, they were never as good as when they were both...you know."

Fucking dolt..

"No, no. I'd really like to be the...Messiah. You know, that's a job that I'd really like. Right? If you're the Messiah, you have to get out a dialogue with the entire world. So it sort of dawned on me that I could have a dialogue with the world from paid advertising space. Actually, someone's doing it now in Florida. I did these things on behalf of God, and now there's a whole campaign in Florida that is on behalf of God – God talking. It was on CNN. They've completely been influenced by what I've done – you know, those little white lines out of big black areas of space. I just think I might be able to become the Messiah, if I can carry on with this stuff."

Haha.. This guy is a LOONEY!

"But it appears that you did sign a standard director's contract... That's what Marlon Brando says to me. He says, "Look, Tony, you gotta face the facts. You don't have final cut. You've got no rights. You've just gotta bite the bullet, and get on with it. And stop behaving like a fucking prick."

Amen Marlon. Amen.
Title: .Tony Kaye..
Post by: SoNowThen on January 23, 2004, 08:54:52 AM
Bullshit, if someone's gonna wreck your movie, you gotta defend it. Life's too short to be a pussy and just lie down. Now, we'll never know if they were ruining it or making it better, but a guy's gotta do what a guy's gotta do...
Title: .Tony Kaye..
Post by: Myxo on January 23, 2004, 11:16:30 AM
Quote from: SoNowThenBullshit, if someone's gonna wreck your movie, you gotta defend it. Life's too short to be a pussy and just lie down. Now, we'll never know if they were ruining it or making it better, but a guy's gotta do what a guy's gotta do...

He got his big break and he pissed it away. The guy is a moron. He said it himself in that interview. "I'm working on burning 98% of my bridges and closing 98% of my doors."

Thats a great idea in Hollywood.  

Oh, and on a professional note:

If he wanted control of the film, he should have fought for final cut. If he didn't get final cut, why is he so surprised that the studio tried to fuck with his film? If he's so smart, how come he didn't figure this out before he signed the contract? I know what he was thinking:

$$$

...and thats the truth.
Title: .Tony Kaye..
Post by: SoNowThen on January 23, 2004, 11:33:24 AM
I never said he was neither an asshole nor a moron. He seems like both.

But he has a right to be pissed that he couldn't get the support he felt he needed to get his vision on the screen.
Title: .Tony Kaye..
Post by: Myxo on January 23, 2004, 12:16:23 PM
Quote from: SoNowThenI never said he was neither an asshole nor a moron. He seems like both.

But he has a right to be pissed that he couldn't get the support he felt he needed to get his vision on the screen.

I totally agree.

I don't know all of the inside information into PTA's "Hard Eight", but I know he had control issues with the studio as well. I wish there was a similar article online that described how he managed to get his vision to the screen. I wonder if he compromised on anything.
Title: .Tony Kaye..
Post by: SoNowThen on January 23, 2004, 12:18:38 PM
Listen to the Hard Eight commentary. He talks about basically running off with the film and re-cutting it, getting money from Paltrow, sending his version to Cannes and having it accepted. Then he still had to give in a few things, among them the title, and some opening credits.


edit - hmmm, now I can't remember, is that all in the commentary, or is that culled from all the articles...???
Title: .Tony Kaye..
Post by: mutinyco on January 23, 2004, 03:18:18 PM
Just because somebody has a vision doesn't mean they deserve control. You're missing one REALLY IMPORTANT fact about movies: THEY COST A LOT OF MONEY TO MAKE! It's not like painting or writing. Movies require investors, and if they don't like what they see, they're going to exercise their privelage. You don't fly off unnanounced to meet your spiritual advisor, while you're supposed to be cutting. But in this case, I'm not sure recutting would've helped.
Title: .Tony Kaye..
Post by: SoNowThen on January 23, 2004, 03:23:00 PM
All I'm saying, is that in a case of filmmaker vs everybody else, I'm gonna give the filmmaker the benefit of the doubt. If you don't like the job I do, you shouldn't have hired me and put money on me in the first place. Let the artists do their job.

The only way I can try to make a go at this business is to maintain this idealistic hope.
Title: .Tony Kaye..
Post by: socketlevel on January 23, 2004, 08:57:07 PM
what about when you're acting like a crazy person?  should the studio just let this guy get away with this?

-sl-
Title: .Tony Kaye..
Post by: Myxo on January 24, 2004, 03:08:10 AM
Quote from: socketlevelwhat about when you're acting like a crazy person?  should the studio just let this guy get away with this?

-sl-

I'd call this a lack of good judgement on the studio's part.

:wink:
Title: .Tony Kaye..
Post by: socketlevel on January 24, 2004, 06:00:05 PM
what like waterworld?  200 million for that.

-sl-
Title: .Tony Kaye..
Post by: Stefen on July 30, 2005, 02:02:12 PM
I subscribe to this newsletter done by this guy named John English. He's just an everyday bloke who kind of compiles news and reviews and other tidbits into a newsletter a couple times a week and it's quite informative, and he adds a sense of humor that I enjoy. I've been reading it for years. Subscribe to it, it's good stuff. http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Jerms

But anyways. The other day he had a tidbit that said...

Quote- Tony Kaye (American History X), the director who once hired a private
investigator to find me, will next direct Reaper, a neo-noir thriller. (CS)

Then in the next issue a couple days later, I guess someone asked about that tidbit and he responded with....

QuoteTONY KAYE - Yes I was serious.  Back when American History X came out,
Entertainment Weekly had an interview with him and I wrote a letter saying
I was excited to see American History X (which made my top ten list for
1997) but that Kaye sounded like a nutball.  Something to that
effect.  They printed it.  A few weeks later someone asked me if I was the
John English that Kaye was talking about in an interview he gave, and they
sent me the link to Mean Magazine.  In the interview, the interviewer
brought up Entertainment Weekly's article on him and mentioned my
letter.  He said he'd hired a private investigator to see if I really wrote
that or if it was a plant by EW.  I called the editor of Mean Magazine and
assured him I was real and he didn't need a PI to discover this.  It made
me a bit nervous; if there was one director I didn't want hunting me down,
it was Tony Kaye.

haha, so Tony Kaye is quite nuts it seems.

Anyways, he's got a new project called Reaper it seems.
Title: .Tony Kaye..
Post by: Pubrick on July 30, 2005, 02:22:21 PM
haha, the stories just keep comin, he's like the bill brasky of crazy directors.
Title: .Tony Kaye..
Post by: Ravi on August 01, 2005, 12:43:18 AM
QuoteTONY KAYE - Yes I was serious.  Back when American History X came out,
Entertainment Weekly had an interview with him and I wrote a letter saying
I was excited to see American History X (which made my top ten list for
1997) but that Kaye sounded like a nutball.  Something to that
effect.  They printed it.  A few weeks later someone asked me if I was the
John English that Kaye was talking about in an interview he gave, and they
sent me the link to Mean Magazine.  In the interview, the interviewer
brought up Entertainment Weekly's article on him and mentioned my
letter.  He said he'd hired a private investigator to see if I really wrote
that or if it was a plant by EW.  I called the editor of Mean Magazine and
assured him I was real and he didn't need a PI to discover this.  It made
me a bit nervous; if there was one director I didn't want hunting me down,
it was Tony Kaye.

(https://xixax.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.freezedriedmovies.com%2Fnews%2FUploads%2FKaye.gif&hash=e923abb6b4c614718df2bbb1b8fd7b74d0216e9c)
"I'm gonna get you, John English.  You and your whole stinkin' family."
Title: .Tony Kaye..
Post by: 72teeth on August 01, 2005, 02:34:06 AM
looking at this picture and your avatar simultaineously make me fill awful. like i'm being belittled. please stop belittling me.
Title: .Tony Kaye..
Post by: Ravi on August 01, 2005, 11:51:41 AM
Actually, that picture isn't fulfilling its potential on this board.
Title: .Tony Kaye..
Post by: SiliasRuby on August 06, 2005, 12:07:27 PM
his picture really scares me.
Title: .Tony Kaye..
Post by: cowboykurtis on September 07, 2005, 07:36:49 PM
KAYE TO FILM IN NEW ORLEANS    

AMERICAN HISTORY X director TONY KAYE has switched the location of his upcoming movie to New Orleans in a bid to help the devastated city find its feet again.

The British film-maker had originally planned to shoot PARANOIA in Brazil, but in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, which has left much of the Louisiana city flooded, Kaye decided to bring his production to New Orleans early next year (06).

Producer MICHEL SHANE tells PageSix.com, "We were going to shoot it in Brazil, but we wanted to bring the project to New Orleans to do our little bit."
Title: Re: .Tony Kaye..
Post by: MacGuffin on November 06, 2005, 01:17:19 AM
'Reaper' Kaye's ticket out of 'Hollywood Jail'
Source: Hollywood Reporter

Tony Kaye, the director who fought public battles with New Line Cinema and Edward Norton over the final cut of "American History X" in 1998, is about to embark on the supernatural thriller "Reaper," his first feature since "History," for producers Media 8 Entertainment. "My intention is to redefine the genre," said Kaye, who is at the American Film Market promoting the project about a tortured man on his deathbed who is visited by the title character, a "messenger of death," who offers a chance at eternal life and time to find the man's kidnapped daughter. "The film will be shot as two journeys," Kaye said, with the lead character's path shot on HD video and the title character's shot on film. The "trapped souls" in the film's dark netherworld will be portrayed in black and white with a multilayered soundscape.
Title: Re: .Tony Kaye..
Post by: polkablues on November 06, 2005, 02:21:42 AM
For whatever reason, I'm more optimistic about this film than any I've heard about in the last few months.  If I just heard the story synopsis, I would go "eh", but hearing his vision of it, plus the fact he's going to be channeling seven years of pent-up filmmaking into this thing...

Now that I've said that, I'm sure it'll be awful.
Title: Re: .Tony Kaye..
Post by: SiliasRuby on November 07, 2005, 05:32:30 AM
Yeah the movie could be great or at the very worst-interesting.
Title: Re: .Tony Kaye..
Post by: Ravi on November 07, 2005, 12:03:50 PM
Or just okay or terrible.
Title: Re: .Tony Kaye..
Post by: Pozer on November 08, 2005, 11:55:37 PM
You know how when you were younger, and you had these ideas for movies that now are far from anything you would actually sit down and write?  Well I always had this idea for a movie based on the life of the Reaper himself to how he became 'the messenger of death.'  Before the bitter end, it would of course follow a love story through the early years but with his father, grandfather and greatgrandfather's abusive past always echoing within.  Eventually, his struggles give way, and he slowly becomes what the men in his past were.  And along the way, he of course has a son of his own who is born into a broken family.  Long story short, when he finally dies, the reaper torch is past on to him from his father, and he in turn watches over his son, insinuating that things will one day be made certain to turn evil.

Something like that. 

p.s. It would have been a period piece. 

p.p.s  Mine would have kicked Kaye's movie's ass.
Title: Re: .Tony Kaye..
Post by: cowboykurtis on November 11, 2005, 01:01:15 PM
Quote from: MacGuffin on November 06, 2005, 01:17:19 AM
"The film will be shot as two journeys," Kaye said, with the lead character's path shot on HD video and the title character's shot on film. 

This makes me want to vomit
Title: Re: .Tony Kaye..
Post by: SHAFTR on November 11, 2005, 03:48:09 PM
Quote from: SoNowThen on January 23, 2004, 03:23:00 PM
All I'm saying, is that in a case of filmmaker vs everybody else, I'm gonna give the filmmaker the benefit of the doubt. If you don't like the job I do, you shouldn't have hired me and put money on me in the first place. Let the artists do their job.

The only way I can try to make a go at this business is to maintain this idealistic hope.

On the otherhand, if you don't have final cut in the contract, don't get upset when the studios edit your film.
Title: Re: .Tony Kaye..
Post by: modage on November 11, 2005, 04:11:26 PM
Quote from: SHAFTR on November 11, 2005, 03:48:09 PMOn the otherhand, if you don't have final cut in the contract, don't get upset when the studios edit your film.
YEAH PT, you fucking baby.  SYDNEY was a stupid title anyway.
Title: Re: .Tony Kaye..
Post by: MacGuffin on February 19, 2007, 04:50:39 PM
Kaye making waves with 'Black Water'
Source: Production Weekly

Tony Kaye, ("American History X") is in negotiations to take over the directing duties from Samuel Bayer on "Black Water Transit," starring Bruce Willis and Samuel L. Jackson. The film will pair the "Pulp Fiction" collaborators for the first time since 1995's "Die Hard With a Vengeance". The production will still shoot in New Orleans, but has pushed principle photography until early April.

Doug Richardson, ("Live Free Or Die Hard") scripted the adaptation of the Carsten Stroud's novel which is a high-voltage tale of betrayal, revenge, and redemption — deeply rooted in the violent underworld of East Coast crime. Successful businessman Jack Vermillon, (Jackson) owner of a container ship company, is desperate to help his son, an ex-junkie charged with trafficking and armed robbery. Although Jack cannot get him out of jail, he might be able to get him moved from a maximum-security prison–if he can give law-enforcement officials something in trade. When tough-guy Earl Pike, (Willis) a military man with high-level CIA contacts, approaches Jack about shipping his personal gun collection out of the country–a highly illegal move–Jack figures he has something for the feds. The bust is set to go down, but all hell breaks loose, and when the shooting stops, three federal agents and a member of the NYPD are dead. Now the feds are interested in pinning the fiasco on Jack, and so is Earl Pike.
Title: Re: .Tony Kaye..
Post by: MacGuffin on April 24, 2007, 12:44:21 AM
Tony Kaye Directing Penitentiary
Source: Variety

In a Variety article talking about new film production company Reliant Pictures, the trade says that the company's first movie will be action-thriller Penitentiary, which MGM has already agreed to distribute.

Reliant is in discussions with Tony Kaye (American History X) to direct. The film, written by Carl Lund, is set to go into production this summer in New Mexico.

No plot details were revealed.
Title: Re: .Tony Kaye..
Post by: Pubrick on April 24, 2007, 10:48:02 PM
uh so when are all these films he keeps making actually going to be seen. :yabbse-undecided:
Title: Re: .Tony Kaye..
Post by: MacGuffin on June 12, 2007, 03:08:17 AM
(https://xixax.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.telegraph.co.uk%2Farts%2Fgraphics%2F2007%2F06%2F10%2Fsvkaye10.jpg&hash=494d0796c04cc739533fcbe01d373a5ec9e48dfb)


I did abominable things
Tony Kaye once called himself 'the greatest English director since Hitchcock'. Before long he was locked in the most ludicrous legal battle Hollywood has ever seen, his tantrums and excesses having proven too much for everyone around him - even Marlon Brando. Is he sorry? Deeply, he tells Adam Higginbotham

By 1998, barely two years after he started work on American History X, his first feature as a director, Tony Kaye had few friends left in Hollywood. He had fallen out with his star, alienated his producers and begun a legal battle with the Directors Guild of America that would become protracted and absurd; it seemed that wherever he turned, he faced furious executives.

Finally, he became so exhausted by angry phone calls that he resolved to stop speaking on the telephone altogether. His assistant spoke for him and relayed conversations.

'The big thing was not to have people shouting at me,' he says. 'I wanted to hear the content of what they had to say, but I didn't want to hear how they felt.' If he found himself alone on the street and needed to make an urgent call, he would dial the number on a payphone and ask a total stranger to speak on his behalf.

Such tactics became less and less necessary. Eventually, nobody in Hollywood would return phone calls made by Tony Kaye, no matter who was speaking for him. He spent nearly a decade in the wilderness of the movie industry. The world of television advertising - the industry in which he made his name and which continues to accord his past work legendary status - turned its back on him, too.-

'I was untouchable in all my film-making endeavours - television commercials, music videos, films, anything,' he says, 'I was a pirate. You know: "Don't go near that bloke" .' Even today, he doesn't think there's a single commercials production company in London that would represent him. When I ask how this happened, how someone who in 2002 was the recipient of a Lifetime Achievement Award for his advertising work could now be unemployable, Kaye tries a few explanations: 'People have short memories...' he begins; and then, 'I created ...'; but both times he trails off.

'Listen,' he says finally, 'I did a lot of very insane things. A lot of very, very, very insane things.'

At 54, Tony Kaye is tall, angular and twitchy, his shaved head emphasising the gaunt planes of his face. On his left wrist he wears an expensive-looking watch and the red string of the Kabbalah. His speech is nervous, halting and punctuated by silences and false starts - apparently as much a result of his determination to get what he's saying exactly right as of the stammer he's had since childhood. He leaves so many sentences unfinished that his conversation resembles an abstract jigsaw-puzzle.

When we first sit down to talk, he immediately expresses concern about how this story might turn out: 'This is a good thing, right?' he asks. 'It's not, like... make me look... because I'm terrible with these things, you know... So is it a nice...?'

We have come to the small Southern college town of Wilmington, North Carolina, because an arts club has invited Kaye to introduce a screening of American History X - 'which I'm not so comfortable about,' he says. Kaye's anxiety about the film goes back a long way. At the 1998 Academy Awards, the movie won a best-actor nomination for Edward Norton, who stars as the leader of a gang of Californian neo-Nazis, and has since gathered a strong cult following. 'It's No 16 on Best Dramas of All Time on the IMDb [Internet Movie Database]', he says. 'It's become quite a little classic in its own befuddled way.' But the battle over artistic control of the film, which has become part of Hollywood folklore, all but destroyed Kaye's career. He delivered his original cut on time and within budget - but when the producer, New Line Cinema, insisted on changes, the arguments began. 'I'm fully aware that I'm a first-time director, but I need the same autonomy and respect that Stanley Kubrick gets,' he said at the time.

The debate quickly escalated. Kaye spent $100,000 of his own money to take out 35 full-page ads in the Hollywood trade press denouncing Norton and the producer, using quotations from a variety of people from John Lennon to Abraham Lincoln. He attended a meeting at New Line to which (to ease negotiations) he brought a Catholic priest, a rabbi and a Tibetan monk. When the company offered him an additional eight weeks to re-cut the film, he said he'd discovered a new vision and needed a year to remake it, and flew to the Caribbean to have the script rewritten by the poet Derek Walcott. Finally, when the Directors Guild refused to let him remove his name from the New Line version, he demanded it be credited to 'Humpty Dumpty' instead and filed a $200 million lawsuit when it refused.

The changes Kaye objected to amounted to 18 minutes of footage added to his version; and yet he's remained so upset by their effect that the closest he's come to seeing the final cut of the film is when he was editing it, nearly 10 years ago. 'I was trying to make a much grander, epic film,' he says. 'Some people think it's a great film; I think it could have been better.'

And so, he admits, tonight's free screening - sponsored by the Wilmington YWCA, North Carolina, in a reclaimed industrial space before an audience of about 60 people - will be the first time that he has ever seen the film that bears his name. After the screening, he plans to perform some songs he's written ('It's just an experiment') and show half-an-hour of footage from a documentary he is making about the struggle over the film, composed chiefly of video he shot of himself at the time. 'It's a personal portrait of the process and the trauma that I encountered in my first experience as a Hollywood film-maker,' he says. He plans to call the finished film Humpty Dumpty.

Perhaps surprisingly, Kaye has found a theatrical distributor for Humpty Dumpty. More surprising, it is New Line Cinema. After a theatrical release, the company will include the film on next year's 10th anniversary DVD re-release of American History X. 'They're helping me with everything. That's amazing, isn't it?' he says. 'Them thinking it's great? And it will be when I've finished: a very interesting film, I think. Very interesting.'

The reconciliation with New Line is just one sign that Kaye's time in the wilderness may finally be over. At the end of last year, Lake of Fire - the documentary about abortion in America he has been working on since 1990 - received a rapturous reception at the Toronto Film Festival. The two-and-a-half hour film, shot in black and white, is a compelling exploration of both sides of the abortion debate, as merciless in its depiction of homicidal pro-life campaigners as it is of the abortion procedure itself.

'I was blown away by the film. I could not shake it,' says Mark Urman, the head of US distribution at ThinkFilm, which bought Lake of Fire and will release it later this year. 'Certain films make you think. A lot of documentaries are meant to make you think; this film makes you think again and again.'

When Kaye and I meet in Wilmington, he has just begun work on his first feature-film project since American History X: the New Orleans-set thriller, Black Water Transit. 'I'm sort of at the beginning now,' he says. 'At last I'm becoming a film-maker. I really feel now that I've begun the journey that I planned many years ago.'

Kaye has always wanted to be an artist. He grew up in an Orthodox Jewish family in Stamford Hill, north London, where his father worked in garment manufacturing - 'mass-market stuff... a very Jewish kind of occupation,' he says. By the age of 13, he had given up football and decided to become a painter; at 16 he left school and at 18 enrolled at Medway College of Design in Kent to study design and illustration. The college's commercial bias frustrated him and he tried to pursue his own fine arts course - few of his lecturers appreciated, for instance, his 'Brussels sprouts project', in which he attempted to 'scientifically study the dynamic of what a Brussels sprout was'.

After two years, aged 20, Kaye left Medway, returned home to live with his parents and took odd jobs in shops and pubs while trying to realise his artistic ambitions in his bedroom. Each week, Kaye took his efforts to the Sunday art market on the Bayswater Road. In two years, he sold just one piece of work - for £4. Fruitless applications for work in art galleries around the globe ended when he was given a job at a graphic-design studio. Kaye's fine-art ambitions dwindled and he took graphic design more seriously. He attended night classes at the ICA, moved to a small agency in the West End and began designing book jackets.

But Kaye remained crippled by his speech impediment - his stammer made him incapable of using the phone. To enable him to call friends, he prepared a tape of recorded phrases which he would play into the receiver, beginning with, 'Hello, this is Tony.' At work, things were more difficult: to commission illustrations, he walked to artists' homes to speak to them face to face; if he needed to ask directions, he pretended to be Russian and scribbled pictograms on pieces of paper. 'I think that helped me with the visual communication,' he says.

In 1979, Kaye was offered his first job in advertising as a junior art director at Collett, Dickinson and Pearce. At the time it was the biggest agency in London and, buoyed with confidence at getting the job, he found his stammer receding. He began to use the phone properly for the first time: he was 27. The agency was also the place from which the British admen Alan Parker and Ridley Scott had recently graduated to film directing; this knowledge had another, profound, effect on Kaye. 'I went in there on the first day, determined to make films,' he says.

At Jengo's Playhouse, in Wilmington, Tony Kaye takes a seat near the back as American History X begins. He stays just long enough to see the title sequence, then disappears into a back office for the duration. 'I just had to get out again,' he says afterwards, and makes a strangled noise. 'I had to duck out of it. I couldn't stand it. Just fled with demons in me. I couldn't sit through the whole thing. It was just too painful.'

Kaye doesn't find seeing himself on screen in Humpty Dumpty easy to take, either: 'It's pretty embarrassing,' he tells me. 'It's very difficult for me to watch. It's funny - it's a comedy, but it's very tragic.' He introduces the film to the audience of local cineastes and tattooed hipsters by announcing: 'This is a director going completely mad.' And there are many moments in the movie when this seems to be literally true: at one point Kaye films himself taking a call from the manager of the film's co-star, Edward Furlong, while simultaneously stamping a VHS copy of the film to pieces. In the next shot, Kaye drops the shattered fragments of tape and cassette into a lavatory and flushes it. 'You see,' his lone voice screams in the background. 'It won't even go down the toilet, it's such a piece of shit.'

The film closes with a sequence filmed in the living-room of Marlon Brando, who befriended Kaye at the peak of the chaos, inviting him to his house and greeting him with, 'I hear that you're as crazy as I am.' Kaye and Brando each hold a video camera and sit opposite one another, filming their conversation over a coffee table. Brando, carefully, reasonably, tells Kaye how foolish he's being: 'I pleaded with you not to make a spectacle of the events surrounding your taking your name off this picture and putting the name Humpty Dumpty in place of it,' he says. 'I reminded you that you had signed a piece of paper, as we all do in this life, requiring certain services under certain circumstances...'

But Kaye persists: he tells Brando that if the Directors Guild won't let him credit the movie to Humpty Dumpty because he must use his real name, then he has devised a simple solution: 'I will be changing my name... to that, for a while.'

'What did you say?'

'I'm saying I'm going to change my name.'

At this, Brando's paternal calm disintegrates. His enormous bulk shakes with laughter.

'You're going to officially change your name to Humpty Dumpty?' he chuckles. 'That's damned good!'

Almost from the outset of his career in advertising, Tony Kaye's behaviour was steered by that of the men whose work he wanted to emulate: 'The directors I admired, like Francis Ford Coppola and Erich von Stroheim - they were all nuts, kind of mad. So I just thought to myself, you've got to be eccentric to do well in this business.' The more mad he seemed, the better. A keen student of The Beatles, Kaye decided there was an important lesson to be drawn from their career, too: 'I've got to get in the papers every week.'

After three years as a successful - if conventional - art director, Kaye was anxious to get on with his Hollywood career and he announced that he was leaving to direct television advertisements. It was six months before Kaye was hired to direct his first advertisement, for Olivetti computers, but it won a prize at the Cannes advertising festival in 1983. 'Aha!' he thought, 'I've f---ing done it now! And that,' he says, 'is when I went round the bend.'

To solidify the kind of reputation he felt he needed, Kaye engaged in a series of stunts that infuriated the advertising community, including bursting into a meeting at Saatchi and Saatchi to distribute promotional leaflets about himself and, later, appearing in reception there, dressed in combat fatigues, and kidnapping a secretary ('A girl I was living with at the time...'). Afterwards, he was arrested.

Kaye started his own company and signed with a producing partner, announcing the deal with an ad in the industry magazine Campaign, which showed Kaye drinking a Heineken and then turning into Steven Spielberg. He bought an inflatable E.T. doll, which he took everywhere - at lunches with potential clients, E.T. was given his own chair and Kaye listened to music on headphones while his partner did all the talking. He ran a full-page ad in the Evening Standard that proclaimed: 'Tony Kaye Is The Greatest English Director Since Hitchcock.' It was hardly a winning strategy. By 1986 he had directed only a handful of commercials, his company had gone into liquidation, he was heavily in debt and his London flat had been repossessed; he took to living out of a carrier bag and sleeping on sofas. On the dole, he gave up meat, alcohol, tea and coffee ('I decided to become a passive Travis Bickle - a machine.') and spent most of his days at the National Film Theatre, watching one movie after another.

His big break didn't come until 1987, when he made two ads. The first, for British Rail, used clever animations to depict train travel as so relaxing that chess pieces yawn and the penguin on the spine of a paperback slides into a snooze. He shot for weeks and weeks, spending the entire £250,000 budget on making the 90-second spot: despite being penniless, he took nothing in payment. 'Not a dime,' he says. In the Real Fires commercial that followed, he persuaded a dog, a cat and a mouse to kiss on a hearth-rug. Both won a clutch of awards, and became among the most celebrated television commercials of the decade.

In the years that followed, Kaye became famous for his temper tantrums, his stunts and excesses: shooting more usable film for a 30-second Volvo ad than Woody Allen shot for all of Hannah and Her Sisters; having a bridge built from scratch across the Corinth Canal, in southern Greece, for one car commercial, and insisting on having 900 babies Velcro-ed to the floor for another; lobbying the Tate to exhibit his ad for Dunlop tyres; and each season buying one piece of every item in the Comme des Garçons menswear collection.

Yet his work, shot in black and white, luminous colour or soft sepia, helped define the visual style of the era and earned him an unprecedented total of 23 design and art direction awards - the Oscars of the ad industry. Kaye married a model he met on a shoot for Pepe Jeans, and in 1991 he moved to Hollywood. But he continued to court controversy. In 1995, after being fired from directing an ad for British Airways, he accused its marketing manager of racism and sued for more than half a million in unpaid fees. When BA settled out of court, Kaye exhibited his invoice for £714,421.12 in Charles Saatchi's gallery.

It was, he said, 'Hype Art': like the time he tried to hijack the opening of a Damien Hirst exhibition of medical equipment at the White Cube gallery by hiring ambulances to drive around the block with sirens blaring, in a work he titled Empty Vessels Make the Most Noise; or the stunt where he paid a homeless man to accompany him to art galleries around the world, and attempted to exhibit him as 'Roger, by Tony Kaye'. 'I was part of the BritArt, Damien Hirst thing,' he says now. 'I got left behind.'

None the less, by 1996, Kaye was reportedly the highest-paid director in UK advertising, commanding £10,000 a day. That same year - after rejecting other projects including 9½ Weeks II - he was offered American History X. He took the contract to a synagogue to have it blessed: 'I signed it in front of the rabbi. I thought it would make it good.'

Although the three-year fracas over the film made Kaye unemployable in Hollywood, he remained in demand for prestigious commercials work, for a while. 'Because I had this notion that I had to be - I had to appear - as insane as I possibly could. This time to frighten people away who were gonna waste my time.'

With this in mind, Kaye's behaviour became more extraordinary than ever. He argued with the agency McCann Erickson over the last few seconds of a Bacardi commercial. When they hired another director to reshoot the ending, Kaye sent his staff to the Dominican Republic to hide the people he'd photographed on the other side of the island. When the new director returned empty-handed, Kaye flew the Dominicans to the UK and paraded them outside McCann's London headquarters on a flatbed truck, accompanied by a 10-piece reggae band. 'I mean, mental. Mental... I'm very embarrassed. I did abominable things.'

By 2000, Kaye couldn't get any work of any description, and his production company in London went bust. 'I went bankrupt because I became so difficult and uncontrollable that nobody would work with me,' he says. He began work on a film without a script he called Lobby Lobster - which he tended to describe differently every time he talked about it - and he continued putting together the abortion documentary he had been filming on and off since arriving in the US. But nothing ever seemed to get finished. At one point, Kaye's agent began sending him to castings as an actor.

Marlon Brando tried to help bail his friend out, inviting him to direct a series of DVDs entitled Lying for a Living, in which Brando - and a workshop class that included Sean Penn, Jon Voight, Michael Jackson and Leonardo DiCaprio - taught people how to use acting in everyday life. 'How to ask your boss for a raise. If you get home late, how to deal with your other half. How to act, how to get through life easier. And Marlon's teaching it. That's a massive best-seller, right?' But Kaye couldn't help himself: on the first day of shooting, in November 2001, he turned up dressed as Osama bin Laden; on the next, he argued vehemently with two of the student actors, took his camera, and walked out. Brando never spoke to him again. 'I phoned him several times and he never took my call. I was really stupid. I was so stupid to do that. So, so stupid... very bad.'

It took years for Kaye to begin to undo the damage he had done to his career; he was eventually offered two feature-film projects to develop, but was fired from each. On one, Reaper, he got as far as a meeting attended by the prospective star, Liv Tyler, but in the middle of it lost his temper, banged the table and accidentally knocked over his glass of orange juice. 'It went near the writer's computer, so it seemed like I was throwing it. And that was the end of that one.'

So he went back to where he'd started, taking whatever commercials work he could get. He avoided getting involved in the creative side and did what he was told. Last year, Kaye made a video for the Red Hot Chili Peppers' hit single Dani California, which won seven MTV awards. More recently, he directed a clip for Johnny Cash's God's Gonna Cut You Down, with a cast that included Kate Moss, Justin Timberlake and Bono. When I ask him if people now expect him to be mad, he thinks for a long time. 'I don't know, to be honest,' he says finally. 'I mean, I know I'm not.'

These days, Tony Kaye lives in a sprawling 1960s house in the hills of Bel Air, with his second wife, Yan-Lin, an artist from San Francisco, and their baby daughter, Shanghai. The internal walls have been torn out, so that the house resembles a serpentine studio, curled around an ornamental pool. Outside, giant abstract canvases lean against the wall, daubed with phrases that have overflowed onto nearby objects; two television sets sit beside a wall, their screens obscured by coats of yellow ochre.

Inside one canvas lies flat on the concrete floor, covered with everyday objects - mobile phones, spectacles, a plastic alligator - glued down and painted over. As Kaye sits eating his breakfast - a large tumbler of raw oats topped with chocolate soya milk - he points out a small, gold canvas beside his desk: 'That goes back 20 years. But it's not anything yet. All this stuff is, like, five years away from...' He trails off, chewing his oats. 'Some of the stuff outside is getting to look quite interesting - the more it gets knocked about by the weather, you know.' Kaye went back to painting in 1987. 'I don't exhibit, and I don't sell anything. I'm not very good, I don't think.'

He's been involved with the Kabbalah centre in LA for a few years, and credits the cult with helping him calm down. 'It was the missing pieces of my puzzle,' he says. 'I mean, listen, I'm a human being. I still lose my temper, but nothing like I used to. I'm aware of it immediately - that the devil is taking over the more rational side.' He says he's making a documentary about the Bergs, the family that founded the Kabbalah centre, titled I Hope We Never Have To Say Goodbye; it isn't finished yet.

In reflective moments, Tony Kaye will tell you that he thinks the American History X debacle was good for him: 'In the long term,' he says, 'it was one of the best pieces of education I ever had.'

I ask Kaye how he would describe himself. 'At this point?' he asks, glancing at the stacks of canvases. There is a long pause. 'I would describe myself at this point... as a desperate man.' He laughs.

What makes you say that?

'Because there's only so much time in a day and so many days in a year and so many years in a lifetime. And I've got so many things I have to finish that it's a scramble. The older I get, the more I see how to complete things - and I have so much work to do. So that's why I'm a desperate man.'
Title: Re: .Tony Kaye..
Post by: Pubrick on June 12, 2007, 08:37:43 AM
best article in this thread (so far).

i hav to say, i love his titles, i love the premise of his unfinished projects, and i think the dude is up for a great redemption story if all that stuff gets made/released, beginning with Lake of Fire. he reminds me of the KLF in a way, and how they (jimmy cauty and bill drummond) regret a lot of the craziness they did back in the day like burning a million quid.

but no mention of Paranoia, Reaper, or the schizo stunt man doco. looks like the most interesting part of this dude's output will be his life story, and not his work. and he knows it.
Title: Re: .Tony Kaye..
Post by: MacGuffin on June 19, 2007, 11:08:11 PM
'Transit' begins filming this week
Fishburne to star in Kaye-directed pic
Source: Variety

"Black Water Transit," a crime drama once in development for Bruce Willis at Revolution, begins lensing this week with a new cast of characters.

Tony Kaye is helming the adaptation of Carsten Stroud's novel of the same name for Capitol Films. About a shipping company owner who tries to get his junkie son freed from prison, the pic will star Laurence Fishburne and Brittany Snow. Karl Urban has also been cast.

Matthew Chapman wrote the screenplay. Pic is being produced by Robert Katz.

Willis and former producing partner Arnold Rifkin had been developing the project under their Cheyenne banner, which was based at Revolution. Musicvid helmer Samuel Bayer was slated to direct Willis two years ago (Daily Variety, Nov. 4, 2005). Vin Diesel and Samuel L. Jackson had been mentioned as potential stars after Willis moved on.

Kaye, who squabbled with Edward Norton while directing "American History X" almost a decade ago, has been working on indies.

Fishburne, who recently appeared in "Bobby" and provided vocals for "Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer," stars in "21" for Columbia.

Snow next appears in "Hairspray" and recently wrapped roles in indie "Finding Amanda" and "Prom Night" for Screen Gems.
Title: Re: .Tony Kaye..
Post by: MacGuffin on October 15, 2008, 11:02:29 AM
Watch This: Tony Kaye Directs Banks and Rogen in 'This Is Not Sex'
by Erik Davis, Cinematical

"Honestly, if you had to have an orgasm in front of a room full of random strangers you've never met and screamed really really loud at the top of your lungs, you'd probably cry. " -- Elizabeth Banks

I'm not entirely sure what is going on in this video, but I'm oddly attracted to it. Apparently, the controversial (and hard-to-handle) Tony Kaye (American History X) directed this short experimental film for Mean Magazine starring Seth Rogen and Elizabeth Banks called This Is Not Sex. And what we're looking at is an assortment of scenes connected through famous quotes about sex in which both Banks and Rogen do some pretty strange things -- like, say, have an orgasm while working a hula hoop ... or, um, wear a noose and hang themselves. Yeah. Exactly.

Here's the description from the site: "Sex sells. Sex kills. Sex thrills. This Is Not Sex pays homage to the subject of the upcoming Kevin Smith flick, Zack and Miri Make A Porno, whilst taking you through a ride of sexual misperception through the lens of director Tony Kaye." So there ya go. Zack and Miri Make a Porno hits theaters October 31.

I've included the video after the jump since I feel like it might be somewhat not safe for work. Enjoy?


http://meanmag.net/?p=199
Title: Re: .Tony Kaye..
Post by: Stefen on October 15, 2008, 04:31:26 PM
Tony Kaye and Kevin Smith are hanging out now? What the fuck? Imagine having a sleepover at that tree house. You'd be exhausted by the end of the night from rolling your eyes and dodging knives.
Title: Re: .Tony Kaye..
Post by: MacGuffin on October 22, 2008, 10:28:05 PM
ROLE IS MADE FOR DUSTIN
Source: Page Six

DUSTIN Hoffman, a hard-drinking womanizer? Sources say the Oscar winner wants to play Maynard Nottage, a Hollywood publicist from the Roaring '20s who toured with Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show and liked his booze and babes. Nottage, who died an outcast from the Hollywood studios in 1965, had been largely for gotten when his granddaughter gave his collected papers to Mark Borkowski, who wrote "The Fame Formula." Director Tony Kaye ("American History X") is said to be interested in adapting the book as a vehicle for Hoff man. "Nottage is very colorful," Borkowski said.
Title: Re: .Tony Kaye..
Post by: MacGuffin on June 09, 2009, 11:39:13 PM
(https://xixax.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Flatimesblogs.latimes.com%2F.a%2F6a00d8341c630a53ef01156ff29060970c-500wi&hash=1386499a965a30f39de7de37349a23330e6e31b0)


Tony Kaye: Art! Art! Get your free art!
Source: Los Angeles Times

If you passed by CAA this morning and saw a painting sitting outside the talent agency, it was an original piece of art by Tony Kaye. In fact, you could start your own Kaye art collection just by roaming around town, looking for stray paintings leaning up against the doors and windows of various local art galleries, Disney Hall and the L.A. County Art Museum. It's all part of what Kaye is calling his "Left Lying Around Painting" series, the latest oddball enterprise in the eccentric artist turned movie director's oddball career.

When it comes to artistic loopiness, it's hard to top Kaye, the crazy-like-a-fox filmmaker best known feuding with Edward Norton over the release of 1998's "American History X" (Kaye tried to take his name off the film and substitute the pseudonym "Humpty Dumpty"). Kaye has been out of the mainstream for years, having spent most of his time directing music videos and finishing up "Lake of Fire," a nearly three-hour-long documentary about abortion. He's also recently completed a film with Laurence Fishburne and Stephen Dorff called "Blackwater Transit." It's still waiting for a release.

With deep roots in the British art scene -- one of his good pals is the artist Damien Hirst -- Kaye has gone back to his first love, painting and conceptual art, with the emphasis on concept. (When Charles Saatchi's ad agency refused to pay him for a British Airways ad Kaye had directed -- before he was fired from the account -- Kaye photographed all of his outstanding billing invoices, smuggled them into Saatchi's posh London art gallery and hung them from the wall.) Now he's producing batches of paintings every day, leaving them around town and photographing them. Earlier today he propped up five paintings on a ledge outside the Larry Gagosian Gallery in Beverly Hills.

"I do them really quick, 15-20 minutes at most," he told me today over the phone, having just returned from a jaunt with his pal Mickey Rourke, who's working on a script with him. "They're my Twitter paintings. Just a quick message on a canvas. My wife thinks I'm mad. My plan is to do a thousand of them and leave them in front of galleries, synagogues and mosques, in front of trees and on bus benches, because in L.A., bus benches are the best advertising going."

I had only one question: Why? "It's entertaining -- well, let's say it entertains me," he explains. "I love the idea of leaving the art around, having people stop and stare. They're not graffiti. Their gifts. I suspect in years to come they'll be really valuable because there will be a story behind each one of them. Look, an artist has to be entertaining, even if you have to chop your ear off the way Van Gogh did -- not, mind you, that I'm going to do that."

Kaye says his biggest triumph, so far, is the painting he left at the L.A. County Art Museum. "I think it was the best one," he said with a laugh. "Some of the others, I admit, are pretty awful. I sat on a bench, painted a picture of the devil -- well, a person with horns -- and put it at the entrance and within minutes  someone took it inside. It was great! I mean, I'm sure it's in a dustbin somewhere, but at least now I have a painting inside the L.A. County Art Museum. Not everyone can say that, right?"
Title: Re: .Tony Kaye..
Post by: Stefen on June 09, 2009, 11:42:16 PM
lol
Title: Re: .Tony Kaye..
Post by: socketlevel on July 23, 2009, 01:21:37 PM
seems like there is some serious Tony Kaye hating on this thread.  i always found the whole American history x thing kinda funny and crazy like everyone else, but i never thought he sucked as a film maker.  while i do think he was crazy and stupid to take on the studio like he did, i don't exactly find myself thinking he's a hack.  i'm not surprised no studio wanted to work with him after the whole humpty dumpty thing, and i don't blame them.  it's just that i knew he had a couple good films in him, and he should just get his head fixed or ego checked.

about a year ago i rented "lake of fire" Tony Kaye's black and white documentary about abortion.  rather than just depicting a knee jerk left wing pro choice film or inversely an overly spiritual pro life piece, Kaye really found a mature approach to the material.  he depicts both sides of the debate, with interesting examples of each.

this really is a masterpiece, and criminally underappreciated.  I'm sure it's been talked about it elsewhere on the site, and once again i can't seem to find the thread, but here is a link to the imdb for anyone interested: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0841119/

If you think Kaye is a joke, you should check it out.
Title: Re: .Tony Kaye..
Post by: MacGuffin on July 23, 2009, 01:27:01 PM
Quote from: socketlevel on July 23, 2009, 01:21:37 PMI'm sure it's been talked about it elsewhere on the site, and once again i can't seem to find the thread

http://xixax.com/index.php?topic=9886.0
Title: Re: .Tony Kaye..
Post by: socketlevel on July 23, 2009, 01:29:07 PM
how do you guys find this shit, seriously lol.  every time i use my search bar it says nothing found or database error.
Title: Re: .Tony Kaye..
Post by: Fernando on July 23, 2009, 01:38:16 PM
mac is the Neo of xixax, he knows and sees everything.
Title: Re: .Tony Kaye..
Post by: MacGuffin on April 01, 2010, 12:23:38 AM
Aramid wins injunction halting film auction
'Black Water Transit' part of David Bergstein's assets
Source: Hollywood Reporter

A day after a local bankruptcy court put David Bergstein's main movie companies under the control of a trustee, another federal court in Los Angeles granted Aramid Entertainment Fund an injunction to stop another entity controlled by Bergstein and his show business partner Ronald Tutor from auctioning off the movie "Black Water Transit."

The U.S. District Court of California issued an order Wednesday for a temporary restraining order to stop TFC Library from selling rights to the crime drama, which stars Laurence Fishburne, Brittany Snow, Stephen Dorff and Aisha Tyler and was directed by Tony Kaye.

Noting that Bergstein's attorneys Tuesday told a bankruptcy judge that a key part of his business is foreclosing on distressed film libraries, Aramid managing director David Molner said, "It would seem the courts are disrupting that business model."

Based on the novel by Carsten Stroud, the movie was long in development and went through several cast changes before it was produced on location in New Orleans early in 2009. Capitol Films financed the $23 million movie and made foreign sales on it.

After it was edited by Kaye, Bergstein apparently was unhappy with what he saw and deemed it unreleasable. Bergstein took legal action against the competition bond company, which settled with him.

The movie was also the subject of a lawsuit in 2008 brought by Ascendant Pictures and its principal Chris Roberts, who charged Bergstein forced him out of the project and did not pay him a producing fee. That suit was settled in January.

According to the TRO filing, the sale was planned for April 1.

An attorney for Bergstein and Tutor did not respond to a call for comment.
Title: Re: .Tony Kaye..
Post by: MacGuffin on August 10, 2010, 03:32:22 PM
Adrien Brody attached to 'Detachment'
Thesp joins Tony Kaye-helmed pic
Source: Variety

Adrien Brody is set to topline as a transient high school teacher in Paper Street Films' "Detachment."

Brody will star opposite Marcia Gay Harden, Christina Hendricks, Blythe Danner and James Caan in the pic that depicts three weeks in the lives of high school teachers, administrators and students through the eyes of substitute teacher Henry Barthes, played by Brody. Tony Kaye helms the pic, now lensing in Queens and Long Island.

Paper Street's Austin Stark, Benji Kohn, Chris Papavasiliou and Bingo Gubelmann are producing, with Greg Shapiro and Peter Sterling as exec producers.

ICM packaged the pic and is handling North American rights.
Title: Re: .Tony Kaye..
Post by: polkablues on August 10, 2010, 04:43:24 PM
Quote from: Variety
Adrien Brody attached to 'Detachment'

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Title: Re: .Tony Kaye..
Post by: MacGuffin on December 13, 2011, 02:42:48 PM
Tony Kaye To Direct Thriller 'Attachment'
Source: Playlist

We've said it before, but the post-"American History X" career of director Tony Kaye has been bumpy at best. Not counting the turmoil he went through on the Edward Norton movie, his next films were either ignored ("Lake Of Fire"), stuck in legal limbo ("Black Water Transit") or crucified by critics (his recent high school drama "Detachment"). So who knows what might befall his effort.

Kaye is now set to take on "Attachment," a thriller penned by actor Christopher Denham (who wrote and directed the POV horror flick "Home Movie"). We have to say, the premise sounds pretty rote if not somewhat teen soapy. The story will center on a married woman who has a one night stand with a student, but things get out of hand when he returns, dates her daughter and begins stalking her. We've seen variations on this kind of thing plenty of times before but Kaye is certainly never predictable and we'd guess there's more going on here than meets the eye. At least we hope.

No word yet on who will star, but Kaye still carries some cachet as he was able to round up folks like Adrien Brody, Christina Hendricks, James Caan, Marcia Gay Harden, Blythe Danner, Tim Blake Nelson and Bryan Cranston for "Detachment." It will be interesting to see who he gathers up for this effort that is aiming to go in front of cameras next spring.
Title: Re: .Tony Kaye..
Post by: Pubrick on December 13, 2011, 08:35:19 PM
Haha he's just trollin' now with these titles.