WHAT WENT WRONG - American History X

Episode Date: March 23, 2026

'American History X' was a tough sell on paper, though that didn't stop up-and-coming star Edward Norton from fighting for it. But what started as a promising collaboration between Norton and first-time director Tony Kaye would soon explode into one of the most infamous behind-the-scenes battles in movie history.This week, Chris and Lizzie break down how tensions that started brewing on set spiraled into an all out war in post-production. Discover how Kaye got completely shut out of the edit, and find out why he decided to spend $100K of his own money to retaliate... in public. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Nicholas Holt, Daniel Radcliffe, Ryan Gosling, Tofer Grace, who are four actors who went full white supremacists for potential Oscar glory. And what movie were they inspired by? That's the movie we're talking about today. Welcome back, guys, to another episode of What Went Wrong. Your favorite podcast, Full Stop, that just so happens to be about movies and how it's nearly impossible to make them, let alone a good one. Let alone the equivalent of blunt force trauma, audio visually to the head. As always, my name is Chris Winterbauer, joined by Lizzie Bassett, being led by Lizzie Bassett, into a very controversial, interesting, oddly prescient, maybe weirdly relevant today.

Film, Lizzie, what have you picked for us this morning? I've picked a movie that is more of a horror movie than I remembered, and that is American History X. This is a really interesting episode. I'm very excited to talk about both this movie, because I think it has aged not necessarily badly, but interestingly, and also the story behind it is really fascinating. Before we dive in, though, I do want to say we've gotten a lot of emails that, you know, say they love how well researched the show is. And if you're new to the show, I just want to call out. That's because we have wonderful researchers who help us. We have Jesse Winterbauer and we have Laura Woods. Laura researched this episode. She did an amazing job. So I just want to always want to shout out the help that we have because we have. literally couldn't do it without them. So with that being said, I thought you were going to say, and this episode will be the exception. In this episode, I'm flying off the handle. No, Chris, what is your experience with American History X? So I saw this movie for the first time,

I want to say like freshman year of high school. I know it came out in 98, but I don't think I saw it until I was about 13 or 14. You shouldn't. Yeah. Yeah. I think this movie was most known for the curb stop moment. Yeah. At least in my friend, and people I knew that there's one of the most horrific acts of violence put to film in the 90s, which was a period with some pretty horrific acts of violence put to film. And I remember thinking, oh my God, this movie is so powerful. I've never seen Edward Norton like this. I had seen seen him in things like Rounders and Primal Fear or even Fight Club, but he'd obviously bulked up for this. It's a very different role. And I'd not seen it in full between then and now. I'd seen

scenes from it, but it's not a movie I felt a need to go revisit. No. Yeah. And on the one hand, watching it now, it does feel very prescient. My first thought was, is this about Stephen Miller? Yeah, seriously. Because it takes place where he, more or less, where he grew up. But on the other hand, and again, I just want to be clear.

I know this movie, a lot of people really like this movie. I do know that a lot of people find it very powerful and I don't mean to dismiss it. But while I think it is effective in conveying its messages, I do. do think, again, a blunt instrument can be effective in conveying its messages. And I found myself consistently frustrated with the filmmaking. And I have a suspicion that certain things that I thought were very avant-garde as a kid feel actually more like they're trying to fix things in post, watching it as an adult. So like the non-linear editing, for example, felt far more messy and somewhat confused than it did as a child.

when a lot of things were, I was experiencing nonlinear editing for the first time and, you know, Memento and Pulp Fiction, et cetera. And I guess what it brings me to is I kept thinking as I was watching it, that the screenwriter had seen Malcolm X and thought, but what if it was a white guy and decided to make that movie with a white supremacist, which again, there's nothing wrong with that, but what Spike Lee does with Malcolm X so well is he injects that movie with a lot of warmth and humor, and then the violence is very shocking as a result. This movie opens with just the most, sorry, but the most pretentious, stylistic, candidly film-schooly choices, in my opinion, like the use of operatic black and white, high-speed photography, the ridiculously over-the-top string

score. Yeah, the score is rough. It just, like, bludgeon's you and tells you, this is how you should feel, this is how you should feel. Yeah. The reason I find that frustrating is that the moments when the movie lets you breathe in a scene, I actually think work really well when Derek first comes home from prison and they're just hanging out at the house and then Seth shows up, that's a great sequence. I really like the

wide-angle cinematography. I think the performances are really grounded. Similarly, when he is in prison and he's speaking with his friend, who's, you know, friend to be in the laundry, those scenes really sparkle and crackle because there's a real human warmth to them. And it just allows me to observe these characters. And so that's my frustration is that it's a movie that has a lot of really great moments. And I do believe in the intention behind it. messaging, and again, I do think it's ultimately effective, but it also can feel like the Tracy Jordan hard-to-watch greatest hits, you know what I mean, sort of thing where it's like... What's the full title of that?

Yeah, the full title, hard to watch based on the book Stone Cold Bummer by Manipulate, which I do think captures the way I felt during a few moments in this movie, which is that it was a stone-cold bummer and a little bit manipulative. But I guess the exposition can feel so clumsy, like the FBI. scene to give us the random background on, like, this principal shows up. I don't know if it's the LAPD or the FBI office in L.A. or whatever. And it's like, who? Cameron, here's the binder. Let's read from it. I know. But then there are other moments that I think are actually very subtle. When Edward Furlong, when his mother says, like, when are you going to grow out that beautiful hair?

And he says, when you stop smoking and we're actually talking about each of their self-destructive habits without actually talking about it. And like, oh, that's a nice scene. And so again, like things, like the black and white, I'll bring it back to two big points and then I'll let you go. So number one, I understand, I think, what they're trying to do with the use of high-speed photography in black and white in his past, which is he lived in a black and white world. Okay, like that's very obvious. Chris gets it. But also maybe, yeah, these scenes are somewhat told from the perspective of the kid who's

idolizing him, right? And so that's the slow motion. That's the music. And I can't remember which film critic or film theorist said this. someone at some point said that it's impossible to make an anti-war film. Like, inevitably, you always in some way sensationalize war. And my frustration with those flashbacks is that I understand the POV that they're trying to ground us in, but it felt in so many instances like we were sensationalizing Edward Norton's

body and his physique and his menace and his masculinity in a way that, I don't know, it just rubbed me the wrong way. It didn't feel like it was matching the intent of the filmmakers necessarily or it wasn't fully thought out. And then similarly, I didn't feel that his turn. turns were effectively executed in the movie. I did not feel that we were given enough of a window into why this guy went down the road of race hatred. And I didn't feel like we were given a compelling window into how he turned away from it while he was in prison. I thought that moment felt very

forced and it was not earned despite a good performance from Edward Norton. And so if this movie is supposed to ultimately be about overcoming the hatred that can define us and that we can fall into, in a weird way, it doesn't fully capture those causal traps, you know, those moments that I think you really need to. So maybe I can end with, there's this quote I like from James Gilligan, who's a psychiatrist, who's done a lot of work on violence and young men. The quote is, all violence is an attempt to replace shame with self-esteem. And I just think that it's a flaw in this movie that we do not bear witness to the shame that begets his journey down this violent path at the beginning of the movie. And in a weird way, we're just given the shame that he experiences post. rape in jail that maybe allows him to return to the good side. It felt confused. It felt a little

bit like the causal order was reversed in some way. But I'll just say, I don't think it's a bad movie. But I think it's in a weird way, kind of like the TV movie almost quality version of what could have been a much more effective movie. I agree. And I am coming to this with obviously knowledge that you don't have in terms of what happened behind the scenes on this. I know there was some scuffle between Norton and the director. That's all I know. And I didn't look up anything else. So that's all I know. We're going to get into all of it. But point being, a lot of what you just called out, I think will be addressed over the course of this episode. I feel similarly about the turns not being earned. But to be honest, I would have preferred that

they didn't flash back to him being a child and just focus on the prison. Because you could have spent more time in prison with him and Guy Tori as Lamont, who turns in a wonderful performance. Yes, he's really good. That's the better half of the movie, too. It is. And that could have been the time when you learn about Derek Vineyard and maybe there are things revealed about his past. Maybe there is something revealed out his father. Like, fine, but spend the time there and best it there. I don't care about the earlier stuff. But I had the same experience as you. I watched this when I was probably 14, which is too young to understand what you're looking at. And I thought it was same thing. I thought it was incredible. I thought Edward Norton's performance was

incredible. And I did not watch it until I watched it again for this podcast. And I was shocked at how uneven it is. Yeah, it's very uneven. It's really uneven. There are moments of brilliance in this, I think. One of the things this movie does the absolute best is that Derek is smart. And the stuff that he's spouting, particularly outside of the grocery store before they go in and wreck it, and you could literally pull that from Stephen Miller, from James, Lady Vance at this point. That was very prescient, and it makes it scarier because he's not stupid, and he understands how to convince people. So that, I think, the movie does an incredible job of. I think Edward Norton does a really good job of that, and he had a lot to do with that,

so we'll learn more about that. I think, honestly, one of the most successful performances in the film, although still uneven, is actually Edward Furlong. He's very good. He's very good. He's very subtle. I could have used less voiceover. The voiceover is rough. I don't like the voiceover, but I thought, and my parents were watching it with me. And my mom was like, who's this? He's really good. You know, who's this boy? Because she had not watched Terminator 2, I don't think, in decades.

Well, he's amazing in that. But yeah. He's supernatural. Yeah, he is. And that works the best in this world, I think. Edward Norton, I was surprised, yes, very uneven on revisiting this. I think he has moments in this movie where he is absolutely transcendent. And, you know, God bless him for really throwing himself at.

this because this was quite risky and he did it. But the moments that are supposed to appear the most, like, sincere and pure really don't work very well. He plays very, very well when he is a super scary skinhead. Nails that. I have a hard time with him in the flashbacks. They're pretty bad. Well, the flashbacks are, again, hello, my fellow kids, a little bit with his wig. But... It's rough. And literally a backwards ad. I mean, we didn't mention this in our coverage. I mean, I got to say like, sorry, Brad Pitt and F1, that's the worst I've ever seen in terms of playing yourself when you were young. And this doesn't come close to that. Lizzie, you mentioned him being scary. The one of the moment I want to mention is the moment when he looks at Elliot Gould at the dinner table

with that nasty look about basically like, you know, he's admitting to him, I am deeply anti-Semitic without saying it in that moment. That was one of the best moments in terms of his performance in the whole movie. That scene is maybe the best scene in the entire movie. And we're referring to the dinner scene where Elliot Gould, who is dating their mother played by Beverly D'Angelo, is there at the time. And again, what's so effective about that scene is that he has such a command over that family and that table. And that's one of the sequences where the height of violence that it gets to, I think, is very much earned over the course of the scene. Everyone does a great job. It's really scary. So yeah, this is an interesting watch. I highly, highly

recommend that people watch it because boy did it predict an awful lot of what we currently see in terms of the political landscape and how people are justifying things. It does a pretty incredible job of that. And I think it was shocking at the time because we didn't have access to the internet in the same way that we do now. And then in the almost 30 years since this movie came out, people developed an anonymity online where suddenly you could say these things in a much more casual way. And then that's spread and spread and spread. And now you can stay them on national television. And I do think this is worth watching for that alone, because it is shocking and it's really scary. And it's important because you're seeing someone with a gigantic swastika tattooed on

their chest saying these things and not somebody in a button-down shirt, you know, in a position political office. So watch it, but it is a, it's weird. It's really weird. So let's find out what happened because I think there could have been a version of this movie that transcended most, if not all of the problems that we have raised. And the other big problem I think we have to raise is the turn of the kid who kills Danny, of the black teenager who kills him. That makes almost no sense. It's just dex machina at the end. Yeah. There's like, what would be the most impactful? Right. Like, what if we killed Edward for a long? Right. And it does a disservice to that character, this movie feels extremely

uninterested in most black characters with the exception of Guy Tories. And even then, he's there to serve Edward Norton. So that's a big problem with this movie that I think could have been addressed and could have solved some plot holes, to be honest, things that just don't make sense.

All right, let's dive in, Chris, because this is a story of two very passionate, hot-headed and talented artists who were possibly both gigantic pains in the ass. The only difference is that one knew exactly how to work the system, and the other tried to dismantle it. So here are the facts, as always. American History X is directed by Tony Kay with a screenplay by David McKenna, cinematography by Tony Kay. It was released by New Line Cinema. It had a

budget of about $20 million, and it starred Edward Norton, Edward Furlong, Beverly DeAngelo, Avery Brooks, Elliot Gould, Ethan Suppley, Guy Torrey, Faruja Bach, and many more. And the IMDB logline, as always is. A white supremacist is released from prison, a changed man, and hopes to prevent his younger brother from following in his footsteps. Let's dive in, Chris. Let's roll it back. At the end of April in 1992, a young screenwriter named David McKenna stayed locked in his Hollywood apartment while Los Angeles burned. One year earlier in March of 1991, four police officers had severely beaten an unarmed black man named Rodney King following a high-speed car chase. The beating resulted in broken bones, skull fractures, and permanent brain damage. It was hardly the

first time this had happened, but thanks to an unseen bystander, with a camcorder, it was one of the first times it had been caught on video. Just two weeks later, a 15-year-old girl named Latasha Harlins had been murdered by a shop owner in South Central who thought she had stolen a bottle of orange juice. She'd been holding the cash for it in her hand when she was shot. And the woman who shot her didn't even do prison time. On April 29, 1992, all four of those police officers who beat Rodney King were acquitted of felony assault and all hell broke loose. Looting, violence, and fires erupted across Los Angeles for five days before finally beginning to calm down around May 4th. And all this time, David McKenna had been

furiously writing a new screenplay. So McKenna had grown up in Southern California, more specifically San Diego, and then most of his childhood was in Newport Beach, where he reportedly watched hardcore punks and mods get into fights at the Balboa Pier, which if you've been to Newport Beach, I don't understand what happened because they're not there now. There was a big punk scene in the 80s down there and in Orange County in general. Yep. And And there were a couple comics, I know, that came out of there that kind of documented that. And there's a, if you go inland in Orange County, you get into some gnarly territory. Well, yes. Inland and Orange County is a different situation. But Balboa Island, Balboa Pier is literally

arrested development. So just to keep in mind, that's what it came. Now it is. Yeah, exactly. Yes. And to your point about Orange County, he also did have a memorable interaction with a skinhead while in high school, which, again, if you know Orange County, it is not like what you see on the O.C. And that is very much believable. He had long been. very fascinated with where hate comes from. Is it learned or is it inherited? Now, you may see online that this movie is based on the life of Frank Meink, who was a former neo-Nazi, who went to prison for three years for assault and attempted kidnapping. He did leave prison reformed and did not go back to his former life, but he went to prison at 17 in 1992, which was the same year David McKenna wrote American History X,

so I could not find any credible sources saying that there is actually a connection between the two. But fun fact, Frank Meink, who is a very active activist and public speaker, is now married to Allison Mack from Nexium. Really? Really. But married before all of the? No, married after. All right. I mean, well, the charitable view, perhaps, you know, she's changed, reformed.

And if there were ever somebody who could appreciate or understand the power of reformation, that would be him. I think that hopefully is right. All right. So McKenna took up screenwriting in college, moved to L.A. after graduating, and then waited tables for a few years. And because this was the 90s, managed to get one of his customers to read his screenplay. That customer was producer Nick Grillo, who helped get McKenna an agent. And I don't think this happens anymore, but then he had, he was a professional screenwriter. But his agent did struggle to sell any of his scripts.

And so with nothing to do but watch L.A. Burn, McKenna wrote what would become American History X. And he finished the first draft in six weeks and called it two brothers, which is interesting. I think unsurprisingly, no one wanted to buy this. either. It wasn't until 1995 that producer John Morrissey optioned the script, which did bring attention to it, but everyone was still too scared to buy it. Gee, Chris, why?

I mean, you know, it's tough to cast brothers. It's hard to get people that look alike. No, yeah. I mean, I'm guessing, explosive race relations, neo-Nazis, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Teddy Z and exec at Sony actually really wanted to buy it and argued that if they had made Boys in the Hood,

which they, of course, did in 1991, that they should be able to make this, but his boss read it and said, Teddy, you've lost your mind. Yeah. Those are not two sides of the same coin there, Teddy. So the script was submitted to New Line Cinema twice, who said, Hard Pass, until finally it was bought by Savoy Pictures and things were really looking great, until 97 when Savoy, of course, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

But New Line Productions, President Mike DeLuca came back around to American History X, and at 26 years old, David McKenna sold his first script to New Line. Now, their first choice for director was actually, he's mostly known as an actor, but he has directed things as well. He was big in the 60s and then became an excellent villain in the 80s and 90s. Any guesses? He was big in the 60s, became an excellent on-camera villain. Well, originally, I was going to guess Sidney Pollock, but... Oh, that would be interesting. No.

Yeah. No. Who? Dennis Hopper. Oh, I never would have guessed Dennis Hopper. I guess, yeah, he has directed. Yeah. Interesting. That could be an interesting energy for this. It actually kind of could, you know, if you think about some of the stuff he's done. Yeah. Well, he wanted a million dollars, and the entire budget was initially set at nine million, so he was out right away. Yeah. But Mike DeLuca had two more affordable directors in mind. One was Larry Clark, who had made kids. He

directed and co-wrote kids, co-wrote with Harmony Corinne, and then Tony Kay. Now, DeLuca had David McKenna meet with both, and McKenna liked both very much, but sounds like they did go to Clark first, and Clark was booked. So Tony Kay got the job. But unlike Clark, Tony Kay had never directed a feature film. According to McKenna, quote, Tony had only done commercials, but his reel was like nothing I had ever seen. And I liked the fact that he was British and somewhat insane. I just didn't know the extent of his insanity. So Chris, let's plumb the depths. Please. I don't think I know anything about Tony Kay. He's a very interesting man. He's a man who's full of contradictions. So Tony Kay was raised in an Orthodox Jewish family in North London. And from a very young age, he had a pretty massive stammer. He could not speak without a stammer. It was actually so bad that he refused to talk on the phone and started calling friends only when he'd made recordings of himself saying things like, hello, this is Tony. So he could literally just play the recordings back into the receiver.

Now, it should be noted that sources differ kind of a lot about his early life and education, even his own version of events, is adaptable, let's say. But here's basically what we know. He wanted to be a painter. So he enrolled in art school, but he didn't do very well. thanks to his aversion to the more commercial elements of the curriculum. According to one source, he went completely off it and decided to scientifically study the dynamics of a Brussels sprout instead. And according to another, he left with one GCSE grade one in art, which is not good and then wasn't accepted to any other art programs. So at 20, he returned home to work odd jobs and make his own art, but eventually he found a job at a graphic design studio. And his stammer continued to be a problem until he was at least 26, but he started to find more clever ways,

around it. If he needed to ask directions, he would pretend that he was Russian and couldn't speak English, so he would communicate visually instead of verbally. He also apparently still wouldn't use the phone, and he actually went to artists' house to commission work from them face to face for the graphic design job that he had. But right around 26, he landed a job as a junior art director at the same advertising agency that had launched the career of another famously grumpy British director we've discussed here before, Ridley Scott. And Kay had pretty much zero passion for advertising, but he did have a passion for filmmaking and a slightly overblown sense of entitlement. He started demanding a company car daily, even though there were many senior people above him

who were still waiting years for one. But he was really good at his job. And three years into a successful career as an art director, he decided he wanted to direct TV commercials because he felt this was the next stepping stone on the path towards filmmaking. In 2012, he told campaign live, quote, around this time I started to think of myself as a director. I had to find work somehow. I had no regard as a film major. I had been thinking in terms of slogans and words and headlines, and of course, pictures for the previous four years. I was also a massive fan of Cassius Clay and then Muhammad Ali. So in 1983, Chris, he took out an ad in the London Evening Standard. And Chris, I'm going to send this to you, and I would like you to read it. One of my favorite parts of this show is when the creatives take

out ads and things, like the Salkinds with Superman, which doesn't exist. And they're just saying, Superman is coming. You're going to love this episode. Go ahead and read this. I just text it. it to you. All right, let's read this. Tony Kay is the most important British film director since Alfred Hitchcock. Great. Which makes Oasis's claim that they were going to be bigger than the Beatles seem reasonable by comparison. Yeah, because Chris, how many films do you think Kay had directed at this point? Well, I'm guessing zero since American History Act was his first. That's correct, zero. But six months later, it worked. He was hired to direct a commercial for Olivetti computers, which actually won an award at the Cannes International Film Festival.

So he's basically Marty Supreme. He's literally Marty Supreme. Just wait until we get into this. It's around this first brush with real success that Kay started to take the idea of following in your hero's footsteps a little too literally. In 2007, he told The Telegraph, quote, the directors I admired,

like Francis Ford Coppola and Eric 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. to which I say, sir, you're already there. You just, you don't need to, you just took an ad out saying you're the biggest film directors in Alfred Hitchcock.

You can stop now. But he left the ad agency world and went freelance as a commercial director before eventually launching his own production company, which he announced with a magazine ad that showed him drinking a Heineken and then turning into Steven Spielberg. Like animorphs, but becoming the director. He proceeded to perform a series of stunts that he felt would help bolster his reputation, they included, but were not limited to, bursting into, bursting into a bit. bursting into a meeting at Sachi and Sachi to distribute promotional leaflets about himself,

appearing in reception there dressed in combat fatigues and kidnapping a secretary, who reportedly was a girl he was living with at the time. He was arrested for that one. Okay. Buying an inflatable E.T. doll, which he took everywhere at lunches with potential clients. E.T. was given his own chair. And then the grossest one, he paid a homeless man to accompany him to art galleries, attempting to exhibit him as Roger by Tony Kay.

He kind of fits in more with the fine art, like the absurd. grotesque nature of the fine art world, I feel, more than the filmmaking world. A hundred percent. Now, surprisingly, this didn't work. And by 1986, his company had gone into liquidation. He was in massive debt and his London flat had been repossessed. But to get through these rough times, he turned to the source of inspiration that I think we all turned to, Chris, and that is Travis Bickle from Taxi Driver. Oh, boy. He said, quote, Taxi Driver holds a monumental importance for me in my life because about 40 years ago,

I stood in the unemployment line in England. I was trying to be a commercial director. I couldn't get any work. I gave a very long impassioned speech to the lady behind the glass window about the British film industry and how hard I was trying. And she told me to go away, find myself a job, and not bother her. As I walked out of the labor exchange, I happened to have been watching taxi driver on a loop.

Don't do that, sir. I still remember vividly to this day as I crossed the street walking out of the office in Soho, London. I thought, I'm going to be Travis Bickle. and I'm going to become a machine. Sorry, last tiny thing, it's so interesting how that continues to be such a driving force in like the manosphere right now.

This idea of like the ultimate self-optimization, you have to turn yourself into a robot and perfect yourself, like looks maxing, all of these things. I just found out about looks maxing and I spent like an hour just glued to my computer. You haven't noticed me looks maxing for the last five years, Lizzie? I've been looks minimizing. I'm about to start looks maxing. We've been doing it to women for years. Why, you know, why do they get a name for it? That's true. That's true. That's fair. For women, it's just existing. But for men, it's been looks maxing. For men, it's like a special fun thing. Fuck you.

makes me mad. I don't think anyone's having fun. Anyway, I'm going to go get Botox. All right. So, thanks to Travis, one year later, Kay had turned things around with two massive commercial spots that won him major awards. And by the way, I'm laughing a lot at Tony Kay now. I think he's a very interesting person. So please reserve some judgment. Yes. And obviously, I mean, he's clearly very artistically talented. It's crazy. Yes. By the way, I mean, American History X, I think the cinematography is really good in that movie. I don't don't love certain choices. He was his own DP and cameraman. I know. That's what I'm saying. That takes a lot of talent to pull off. Yes. All right. So in 1990, at the peak of his success as a British commercial director, he said, bye, and left London for Los Angeles with dreams of directing

features. I think he did keep working on commercials to pay the bills. But by 1996, he was the highest paid UK commercial director commanding over 10,000 pounds a day. And so when Mike DeLucah and new line offered him American History X, he jumped at his chance to finally break into feature film. And everyone was very happy with his hiring, especially Mike DeLuca, who had really fought for him, even making it possible for Kay to serve as his own DP and camera operator, which is very unusual. But there was just one problem. It seems that Kay also expected to add screenwriter to that list. He said, quote, I use a script as a ticket for a journey, not as a roadmap. I thought I could get in there and rewrite the script and turn it into something. The tragedy is that even against all odds,

I almost did it. Now, David McKenna, the screenwriter, and his producers were already not very happy about this approach. In fact, at one point, producer John Morrissey tried to fire him during pre-production, but he kept him at the behest of both New Line and Edward Norton. Meanwhile, New Line Cinema was concerned about the script for different reasons. They had shown the script to several African-American directors, Mario Van Peebles and Rusty Kundeefe, both responded with complaints, focusing on what they saw as a one-sided depiction of racial,

conflict. Yes, big time. Rusty said, quote, I didn't call them up and say, hey, guys, you have a racist script, but I did say there was a problem. Not being black, the screenwriter may have had trouble sitting the black character's point of view. He's created a powerful character, but when you make the film from the point of view of a character who's evil, you have to walk a real tightrope or the film could really misfire. So let's talk about this. Chris, do you think it misfires in this department? Yeah. And so the way I would describe it is, the only characters who are allowed to change in the movie are the white characters, right? Like Edward Norton's character and Edward Furlong's character, they are allowed to arc with Edward Norton, obviously, toward

racism and then away from it, whereas the black characters in the movie exist in very static forms that are designed to repel or attract the white characters towards their specific the needs of the screenwriter. So you have good black characters who are the morphieuses, you know what I mean, of the movie, who are teaching Edward Norton the thing? He's literally stuck in prison. He literally doesn't get to leave, yeah. Exactly. And then you have bad black characters who are just gangbangers and they're violent and like maybe they don't deserve what's coming to them, but like, you know, they do a lot of bad stuff in this movie. So yeah, I just, again, not a lot of nuance, not a lot of complexity is lent to these characters. And they clearly exist to serve one narrative. That's right. So meanwhile, with the director in place, casting was underway. Now, I've seen in a few places that

Joaquin Phoenix was under consideration for the role of Derek Vineyard and turned it down. Oh, interesting. I could not confirm that, and I kind of don't believe anyone other than Edward Norton was ever seriously in the running. So let's talk about him. Norton was a Yale grad whose feature film debut was Primal Fear, which is pretty crazy. It had earned him a Best Supporting Actor nomination. I love that movie. I know it's like peak 90s thriller cheese. It's so good.

It's really pulpy, but it's fun. He's like a good gear performance. He's great in it. Yeah, Richard Gear is great in it. Yeah, doesn't Aaron Stampler? And Laura Linney, that was like one of my first. first Morrillini experiences. Doesn't Aaron Stampler the character he plays? I believe he, when he's faking it, I believe he has a stammer. He does. Part of how he was just interesting with the Tony K

component to it. But yeah, I mean, it's an amazing debut. It's like, it's not a great movie, but it's a really fun movie. And it's an amazing debut. Yes. He is really good. So from there, he moved on to everyone says, I love you. And more critically had played the young lawyer in the People versus Larry Flint, which had gotten him even more attention. He's great in that. He was up for the role that would eventually go to Matt Damon and the Rainmaker when he got some advice from Francis Ford Coppola, who was directing that film. So here is Norton on Joe Rogan. When I was talking to him about it, he was like, well, what, you know, what are you what are you working on? What are you interested in? And I was telling him about my friend David,

who had written this American History X and that we were working on. I was kind of telling him what we were trying to do with it and how we wanted to make it is this kind of like, guerrilla, you know, thing. And he was like, you should do that. You should do that immediately. And I was like, well, I was like, don't, don't, I was like, don't, I was like, don't cancel. Don't, don't, you know, I still want to do this with you. He's like, no, no, I think you should do, like, the way you're talking about that. And he said, if you do that now, they'll never, they'll never know what to do with you. I think it's interesting advice.

Interesting that he would go on to star opposite Damon and Rounders, like right around this time too. Yes. So, they shared the screen. So one thing it's interesting is he refers to David McKenna as his friend. here, and he does that across most interviews, and definitely gives the impression that he had been at least discussing this movie before being officially attached. That's not quite how McKenna tells it, so I'm not really sure. But regardless, he was definitely involved in some development of this. And he campaigned pretty hard for American History X. You might wonder why did he have to campaign

when he had a pretty impressive resume at this point. Part of the reason is that Tony Kay didn't really want him. He thought he was too slight, not imposing enough. He didn't think he had enough screen presence. He's like a little wormy in the stuff that he's played so far. And he was expensive. But Norton was like, I really want this. I will cut my $1 million rate in half, at least. He actually may have cut it more than that.

And Tony Kay eventually admitted that he, quote, couldn't find anyone better. So Norton got the part. The amount of Tony K dunks on Edward Norton in this is like. Yeah. Well, it's interesting that like you mentioned the slight in one The parts that, though, as you mentioned, he's most effective in, are the more menacing portions. Yeah.

I actually think because of maybe primal fear in this movie, but also Rounders, I always think Norton is best when he has a slimy, villainous quality to his characters. Like, those are my favorite performances of his. He's a little slimy and villainy and Frida, too. Yeah, he's good in that as well. Yeah, he's always, I like that more. Got a touch a slime to him. Like you mentioned, Guy Pearce has a weasily quality to him.

He does. I love him. And so, yeah, it's like that. All right. There was also, you know, we're talking around this, but there was a lot of concern that he didn't look right because he was quite scrawny. But he went and put on 30 pounds of muscle. And I do just want to call out, I miss the days when actors were getting like normal yoked, not steroids yoked. Like he's obviously in incredible shape in this. He's got a ton of muscle on him, but it doesn't look like he's used, you know, performance enhancing drugs to get there. Now, part of the reason that Kay says he agreed to Norton's casting is that he thought Norton shared his vision of the script. which Kay felt was deeply flawed. I want to hold what I think Kay's problems with the script were until we get to post-production.

Okay. But I do have reason to believe that the concerns that were raised by Mario Van Peoples and Rusty Condif may have been shared by Tony Kay along with some others. So the role of Danny Vineyard, as we said, went to Edward Furlong, who had, of course, broken out in Terminator 2 Judgment Day. He was discovered at a boys club in Pasadena. He was not an actor at all.

and he got thrust into the Hollywood machine very fast and very young. He is unfortunately a pretty tragic character that we do not have enough time to get into, but since it did happen chronologically prior to making American History X, I do want to mention that at 15 years old, he entered into a relationship with his tutor who was 29. Of course, that's not a relationship that is statutory rape, and he was still in that relationship at the time of filming this movie. The relationship would end shortly after the release of this film. Very badly, the woman accused him of domestic violence, which is something that he would go on to be accused up by other partners. And he struggled quite a bit after this film with alcohol and drug use.

I think we'll dive into him quite a bit more when we cover Terminator 2 Judgment Day. But this is kind of the peak of his career. Yeah. Now let's talk about the way that they round out the rest of the cast, because they do it with mostly comedy actors, which I actually think is really smart. You have Guy Torrey who plays Lamont, and he was cast on the spot after a casting scout came out to see the show that he hosts,

and produced at the comedy store, they'd actually come to see Tommy Davidson, but they cast Guy Tori instead. Of course, Beverly DiAngelo, best known for National Lampoon's Vacation, Faruja Bok, not a comedian per se, but can be very, very funny. At this point, probably best known for The Craft. She'd been a child actor, and of course, you end up with the water boy, and many more, Vicki Valancourt. You've then got two actors from Boy Meets World. Chris, who are they? William Russ. Yes, the father. Who's the second actor from Boy Meets World? Ethan Suppley. Oh, Ethan Supply was in Boy Meets World?

He shows up like two seasons in, and he has like a pretty long arc on the show. I think that was one of the first big things he did. I don't remember him. William Russ, I thought, was actually the brilliant one because that I thought was very effective. Stacey Keats is the guy you assume is going to be a Nazi. But William Russ does a very good job of he seems like this wholesome, All-American Firefighter, who obviously harbors very deep prejudices. I think this casting was intentional.

Boy Meets World was a big show. It was reaching the end of its time when this movie came out. That's what I'm saying. I think it's really smart casting him. It is smart. And I think it was smart to cast comedic actors around Norton and Furlong, too, because, again, they cast people, particularly with the neo-Nazis, who maybe come across less serious in some ways, which makes their turns scarier, I think.

Like, Ethan Supply is really good in this. He's very menacing. Farooja Balch is absolutely terrifying in this. Yeah, she's hardcore. I do not want to run into her in the dark alley. She is so scary in this. Okay, so on March 17, 1997, filming began around Venice Beach. And any tensions that had been simmering about the script

seemed to melt away when they got to set because by all accounts, Kay was very collaborative and seemed to welcome suggestions from the cast and crew. As we said, he functioned as his own DP and cameraman. He shot nearly 200 hours of footage and paid for the cost of extra film stock and developing it. And everyone who saw The Dailys seemed to agree that Kay had shot a really excellent movie.

And for the most part, things also seem to be going well with Edward Norton. His then-girlfriend Courtney Love was welcome to visit set. He has a very interesting taste in girlfriends. He was also allowed to help rewrite portions of the script while on set, most critically, I think. Well, if you had to guess, Chris, there's one speech in this movie that Edward Norton rewrote pretty heavily. It's either got to be the recruitment speech or the dinner table speech, I feel like, right?

What would qualify as the recruitment speech? I was thinking it's the speech outside of the grocery store. That's the one. That's the one. Originally, it was really short and kind of just a lot of swear words, but Norton and by McKenna's account, also McKenna, rewrote it to pull in a bunch of statistics that were actually from then-Governor Pete Wilson's office.

McKenna admits that he and Norton probably rewrote something like 25% of the script on set, but he caveats that by saying they always did it together. Edward Norton is a really good, I do think he did a lot of this. And people seem to like Tony Kay, even though he was a little weird. Kay would arrive for work in his hype art car, which was a Lincoln Town car with a chauffeur, four cell phones, a fax machine, and a California license plate that read Jewish. During the Passover holidays, he had boxes of Mata delivered to the set. And when he was filming one day on Venice Beach, he started talking to a homeless man, and then he brought that guy to a hotel room, gave him

the script, and asked him for notes. But they were able to film quite a bit in Venice Beach. There was actually some concern about gang activity there at the time. So they did also film in North Hollywood, Van Nuys, Mid City. I will say, I think this movie does an excellent job of capturing what L.A. actually looks like. I think so generally, I think, again, for a lot of the interior scenes, especially, I think this movie's, it's like, we tend to overlook this, but it's very well blocked. Yeah. The movement of the actors feel really natural within these spaces. I think whatever the vibe was on set, it feels like they got to a place where everyone felt pretty organic around each other, which is, that's very hard to do.

Yeah. The white power tattoos did prove problematic at times. In fact, one night after filming Ethan Suppley, who plays Seth, went into a convenience store and he had forgotten to remove the white power tattoo that was painted on his upper arm. He got yelled at by all the people there saying what a jerk he was. And I'm sure he was like, I know. I'm sorry. It's not me.

But there was another kind of tension brewing. Here's Guy Torrey who plays Lamont in the film in an interview with Vlad TV. First day on the set, you know, we had a director, Tony K. who was this was his first film he came from videos and commercials and things and he's from Australia and he goes he goes guy you have the green light

bring to this role whatever you want to bring to this role I was like thank you said but let me warn you I'm a director and he said Ed has a tendency to want to direct you know actors don't do it don't listen to him and I'm green you know and got on the set and lo and behold

Ed was doing that he was you know an actor should never direct another actor unless y'all are boys or unless he's an actor and director but an actor should never direct another actor there's a chain of command and i say it is misunderstood because what i got from that was that he cared about the entire film he cared about the process his his way of going about it may have been wrong but uh i understood why he was doing the things he was doing and there would be battles on the set. You guys have arguments.

Not me and him, but he and the director. And the producers were on Ed's side because he was the star, he was, you know, a film. And he's very, very... I learned so much from Ed shooting that movie. I learned about, you know, filmmaking. By the way, Guy Tori,

great source for this episode. Thank you, Guy. He's right. Just leave aside his geographic mistake of... Yes, he's not Australian. He's British. Yes, yeah. Yeah. But, uh, He's right. If you're not the director, you shouldn't be directing people. I mean, you're a director, Chris. Maybe you can speak to that a little bit if one of your actors was doing that. How would that make you feel? I mean, obviously, it would be very frustrating. I think it would be more frustrating as the scene partner, as the other actor. Because to have another actor step on your choices or decision, you know, I'm sure you could always offer a tip or something like that. And that may be appreciated. But ultimately, the problem becomes, the director's job is kind of to control the tone of any given scene, right? And you can do that in any number of ways through the performances or the art direction or the cinematography and all of it needs to be considered. And the problem is like, Eddard's

Norton's in the scene. Right. And it's like, also, is his direction serving the movie? I mean, Guy Taur is saying it is. Or serving his own performance. Or is it serving his own performance? And so that can be tricky. I think that right there is the question that we are going to be asking ourselves for the

rest of the episode. Was he serving the movie or was he serving himself? All right. That's all the time we're going to spend on filming because this episode is about the shit show that began in post-production. So filming wrapped in May of 1997. and in mid-97, Tony Kay delivered his first cut. It was screened for a test audience,

and it actually got a pretty positive reception, but it was very tight, like 90 minutes tight. And New Line was like, sir, you shot 200 hours of film. Where is it? Fluff this out a little bit more, please. But Kay said, no, this is my cut, and this is the runtime. Now, according to a 1998 Washington Post article

by Sharon Waxman, which is a great article to read if you have time, here's what happened next. Newline invited Edward Norton into the edit bay to see what he thought. When Edward Norton's notes aligned with New Line and not Tony K, they brought Norton in to help edit the film. But this depends on who you ask quite heavily, so let's hear the other versions. According to that same Vlad TV interview, Guy Torey said Edward Norton wanted to be in the editing room, I'm inclined to believe that. Tony Kay seemed to agree with this narrative. He said he wouldn't have minded if he had had final cut, but he didn't.

So this put him in a bad position because he knew Norton was going to side with New Line. And according to the L.A. Times, Mike DeLuca does say that he brought Norton into the edit, but Edward Norton gave him a little push. He essentially refused to do press for the film if he felt he couldn't stand behind it. To hear Edward Norton tell it, also to the Washington Post, quote, when I came back in the spring and gave notes on the performances, Tony was consistently saying, thank you, bless you, thank you, I'm so excited it's getting better every day. He would constantly say, I don't have an opinion about the narrative. if it looks right, that's all I care about.

To hear Kay tell it, quote, it was insane. I was horrified at the work he was doing. Kay also described Norton as a, quote, narcissistic dilettante. And listen, Tony Kay is a bonkers man, who is not a reliable narrator at all, as we will continue to get to.

But Edward Norton does have a history of rewriting scripts and clashing with directors. He very frequently argued over the script of Red Dragon with Brett Ratner, Rat Ratner, the worst, but, you know, whatever. Of working with Norton, Ratner said, quote, he likes to challenge the director. It's all about intellectual debate.

Edward's instinct is going to be, I have to take over this film. He's going to try and rescue the film. That's both a blessing and a curse. He also rewrote parts of The Incredible Hulk, and famously, he did do an uncredited rewrite of Frida with Julie Tamer that most people seem to agree massively improved that movie. He's a small part in that.

I believe he was dating Salma Hayek at the time. And that's an interesting one maybe we could cover at some point. He's a really smart guy. I think he's probably a really good writer. I think he's also, as we said at the top, a giant pain in the ass, at least at this point in his career. But again, really talented, really smart. I think all of these things could be true, right?

Yeah. The movie probably tested pretty well, I believe that. But New Line says, well, where's the rest of it or we want it to test even better? Kay is not agreeing. Maybe Norton's been itching to get into the editing room. So they say, great, two birds, one, We bring him in. It's possible that Kay was actually saying to Norton, brilliant, fantastic, because he knows he

needs to stroke his ego. Yes. And behind the scenes, he's saying, this guy's a nut. I got to get him off of this movie. Yeah, I don't think Edward Norton's just bald-faced lying about that at all. No, I don't think any of these things necessarily conflict, but I think there is a lot of maneuvering behind the scenes that is happening here. Yeah, nobody's communicating clearly.

And also, no one is actually willing to work with each other, which is the biggest problem. And that includes Tony Kay. Right. So Kay got more and more upset by the edits he was watching Norton make. At one point, he actually punched a wall and hit a hidden nail behind it, causing him a trip to the hospital in several stitches. But he kept going along with it outside of casual wall punches because he was always under the impression that New Line would still let him cut his own version of the film.

However, his fights with Norton were intensifying. According to Kay, quote, whenever I argued with Norton, I didn't have a leg to stand on. He could wipe the floor with me because he's a great articulator. My problem all through American History X was that I could never tell anyone what I wanted to do with the film. Sometimes I didn't even know myself.

More often, I was so intimidated by the process that I went into meltdown if I wasn't left alone to work things out. Of course, if you actually listened to what Norton was saying, you could hear that none of it made sense in filmmaking terms. That's not his forte,

as you'll know if you saw the movie that he directed Keeping the Faith. Pretty fucking awful. Hardly covers that one. That's rude. Keeping the Faith is cute. That's not a bad movie. But, you know,

he makes a good point, which is, you know, on the one hand, you have a director who has, I think, probably gravitated towards a visual medium in part. He had a stammer. He had a hard time communicating with other people. He was using a voice recorder, you know, to pre-record his messages and get his intent across. And he's going up against somebody who is very smart and also a very gifted performer. And that's not a level playing field.

No. And then in June of 1998, the shit hath hiteth the fan. New line called Kay in to tell him that they had tested. Norton's cut of the film, and it had performed well, and they were leaning towards that one. They asked Kay to stop pursuing his own cut of the film. And Kay was understandably quite furious. He openly wept, unable to contain his frustration that his debut feature had been taken away from him by a star, and his producers weren't doing a damn thing about it. Okay, the argument seems to have focused on the length of certain sequences.

Again, Kay wanted everything much tighter. Based on interviews that happened later, I think this a lot of the more emotional stuff. He referred to it as people crying in each other's arms. I think he didn't want any of that. The placement of the dinner scene flashback with Derek's dad, I couldn't confirm whether he wanted to completely remove it or move it up, but he wanted to change, at least change the placement of that. And then here's the big thing, the end of the movie.

So you may see online that there was, oh, there's an alternate ending to American History X And what it was is that after Danny gets killed, Derek goes into the bathroom and you see him take a razor and he trips off his shirt and he's looking at his swastika and he shaves his head and he smiles and holds a gun and because he's going back. That's not true at all. Thank you Reddit for helping me dig out an interview with Tony Kay where he confirmed that that was never, ever a possibility. And that would be a totally different and very depressing movie. No, but what he actually wanted to do, which I think is really smart, is he wanted to save the reveal. of what put Derek in prison until the last scene of the movie. So he was saving the curb stomp. And part of the reason he wanted to do that was because he felt the fact that Derek was in

prison for three years was an enormous plot hole, which I agree with. Like, you would not be in prison for three years for murdering two people. And I think it does something very interesting. Because what he wanted to do was play, I think, more with the nonlinear editing to the point where you're never quite sure what Derek did to land himself in prison. Like, was it the grocery store incident? Was it something else that he just beat somebody up? And then you still see Danny get killed. But the final sequence is the curb stomping sequence.

And the movie actually ends on you watching Danny watch his brother do this. So I don't know. I think that's much better. But what do you think? I don't know. I mean, it may be. but I also completely understand why the studio shied away from it. It could be very confusing if it's not done, right?

Not that it's confusing. It is bleak. Like, that is a brutal, tough ending, right? I like this, but I can understand why they shied away from it, which is, we're going to get you to buy into this guy's redemption, and then we're going to show you the absolutely heinous, almost unforgivable thing that he did. But that's smart.

I'm not disagreeing with you. I agree. But what I'm also saying is, I can see a studio head. saying, uh, we can't do this. Like, we're going to have no word of mouth. Like, nobody's going to want to go see it after the first weekend. It's just too brutal, even though it's maybe more honest and it's more interesting. Yeah.

So, again, I don't know if it would have answered all of my questions, you know, about the movie, but I do think it certainly presents a more complicated portrait. Yes. And I think that was his goal. But Kay said, if you won't let me cut my movie, then take my name off of it, which would force New Line to release it under the pseudonym Alan Smithy. Can you explain? Alan Smithy, Chris.

Alan Smithy is a universal pseudonym that is provided by the director's guild when directors want to remove their name from a project because they feel like they actually did not have sufficient authorship over this project. And therefore, it would be a misrepresentation to have their name on the movie as director. It's a bad look for a movie. It generally indicates it was a mess. It's probably not very good. Do you want to avoid this at all costs?

So New Line was like, fine, you can have eight weeks to finish your cut. And Kay came up with what he called a radical new version of the film. He went out and shot additional footage with Black Gang members, actual interviews, and a narration from Nobel Prize-winning poet Derek Walcott. So this is what makes me think he was trying to address some of the plot holes that we have been discussing. Mike Toluca did his best to keep accommodating Kay. He bankrolled another $1.5 million of footage that included interviews with actual neo-Nazis. But Kay was still furious at everyone.

So while he worked on his own version of the film, he did something a little strange. He spent $100,000 of his own money to take out a series of advertisements that were basically just advertising his rage. Some of the ads were intended to shame New Line Ann Norton. On June 11th, an ad ran in the Hollywood reporter

with a quote from Edmund Burke that said, quote, all that is necessary for the forces of evil to win in the world is for enough good men to do nothing. The same day, an issue of Daily Variety, ran a full-page ad, quoting John Lennon, quote, everybody's hustling for a buck and a dime, I'll scratch your back, and you knife mine. And of course, each ad was signed off Tony Kay. According to Guy Torrey, Kay also dedicated the back pages of variety to individual cast members, asking them personally, please take my side and

help him preserve the integrity of his vision. Tori said that he and his castmates felt that they were really put in a bad position by all of this. But sometimes the ads were nice. On June 15th, after reaching the agreement with New Line to get eight extra weeks, he ran a new ad. He quoted Pan Tanjali, the Indian founder of yoga, and said, quote, when you are inspired by some great purpose, some extraordinary project, you discover yourself to be a greater person by far than you ever dreamed yourself to be. And it said, thank you, thank you, Tony Kay. It sounds like he's having a manic episode. He is. And he also is someone who has massively struggled with verbal communication, in his entire life, and he's kind of trying to do it.

I think in his head, he's justifying it by like, well, I know how to make ads. I know how to communicate visually. Maybe this is how I get a hold of them. New Line tried to counter this with their own weird ads, quoting green eggs and ham and yellow submarine. That's actually kind of a smart tactic in that, like, let's play up the absurdity of it to try to defuse it in some way, to de-escalate. But they also continued simultaneous work on Norton's cut of the film, even completing orchestration sessions.

But everyone has their limit, and it seems that New Line had reached theirs with Tony Kay. So when the eight weeks were up, they said, what do you got, Tony? And he said, I don't know. And I don't know when I'll be done. But in order to say this, he had actually showed up to the meeting

with a priest, a rabbi, and a Buddhist monk in tow there to keep the peace. He told the executives, I'm fully aware that I'm a first-time director, but I need the same autonomy and respect that Stanley Kubrick gets. If Stanley Kubrick could take as much time as he needed, he deserved the same consideration.

Is that where Ed Norton got the idea for keeping the faith? Actually. It was missing a Buddhist monk. There we go. As you can imagine, New Line said, no. They were sticking with their planned October-wide release of the film and had a premiere screening planned at the Toronto International Film Festival of Edward Norton's cut.

So clearly, like... Yeah. And they're gearing up for award season. That is the classic Toronto into the festival run into award season. That is poll position. They're saying, like, this will be his next acting nomination. They're building it around Norton. The movie is built around Norton's performance.

They're building the movie around Norton. Well, Tony K flew his ass to Toronto to meet with the president of the festival in person and to lobby him to refuse to screen the film. It worked. New Line pulled American History X from the festival lineup before. the president could do anything. And Kay viewed this as a success. He also threatened to pay protesters to rally outside screenings if the film was released as planned. He said he was, quote, going for their throat. In late August, the debate about his name on the film had gone to the DGA, and they denied his

request for Alan Smithy. Do you know why? It's something he did. Something he did. Was it the advertisements? Was it? Yes. Oh, okay. So you actually cannot use Alan Smithy if the director has publicly disparaged the film. Yeah. But they said, look, if you and Newline can agree on a pseudonym that's not Alan Smithy, then fine. So Kay requested, Humpty Dumpty, to which they said, no. And by the time he'd requested a more reasonable name of Ralph Coates, Newline said,

it's too late, my guy. We are releasing the movie, and your stupid name is going to be plastered right on the front of it. And Kay was devastated. Sharon Waxman, who I mentioned was working on that Washington Post article, said she received a call directly from Kay, and this is before the movie was released, and he told her, or rather screamed at her, quote, I have made no money, I have jeopardized my business, my family, everything, I've walked away. This is a purest gesture like you'll rarely come across.

I will do everything in my power to keep my name from theirs. I do not want to be part of that club. I do not want my spirituality to be associated with theirs. To them, it's a game. To me, it's life and death. In an interview just a few days after the film's eventual release, Kay explained that this had hurt him so deeply because unlike his work in the advertising world, his name was plastered all over this. This was really the issue for him. I think had they let him remove his name, he would have dropped it. Now, everyone had a different take on what had happened.

Producer Morrissey believed that he had simply panicked at the prospect of having to finish the film. He said, quote, what sent Tony round the bend was the idea that he had to finish the movie. He's terrified. He comes from fear a lot, and he went into a kind of panic. He stopped eating, he started getting up at 3.30 in the morning. Tony could be a successful director of features if he weren't in the grip of the neuroses from which he suffers. I think that's probably true. According to Beverly DiAngelo, quote, what I really believe is that Tony Kay is in a position

where he's been victimized by his innocence. He could not imagine that anyone would ever want to release a film that wasn't everything that everyone wanted it to be, including him. According to David McKenna, quote, here's the deal. Tony shot a terrific movie. I had seen all the dailies. I know what we had. I was on the set every day, and he and Edward had a solid relationship. Tony simply couldn't find

the film in the editing room, and as we gave him notes, it only got worse. A screenplay is like an architect design, and once a builder, starts moving around bathrooms on the fly, bad shit is going to happen. Edward simply went into the editing room at everyone's behest, cut the film according to the script with Jerry Greenberg and rescued our child from an abusive father. Or as Edward Norton put it, quote, at what point does Tony have to deal with practical limitations? He wants complete indulgence, for an ad infinitum process. Now, it's worth noting that three editors did take their name off of the movie in support of Tony Kay, and at least two unnamed actors refused to show up for any ADR or VO in post-production

as a form of protest. So he wasn't completely on an island. But on October 30th, 1998, American History X was released in a limited theatrical run, followed by a wide theatrical release on November 20th. opening weekend, it garnered $156,000. Its worldwide gross would top out at $23.8 million. So it lost money. Yeah, I know.

It's always interesting that this movie has had such staying power kind of in the zeitgeist when it was a bit of a flop when it came out. But it's also, it's one of the only, you know, when we had video stores, this movie has a swastika on the cover of it. Oh, it's got a crazy cover. Yeah. You would walk by and what is that? It was very shocking to see, you know, as a kid.

Well, I think it does come back to Tony Kay has an amazing eye. Like, the footage that he shot is impressive. It is shocking. And the production design is great. So speaking to The Guardian in 2002, Kay said the release version was 40 minutes longer than his cut. He said, quote, I had done a hard, fast, 95-minute rough diamond of a picture. But the movie they put out was crammed with shots of everyone crying in each other's arms. And of course, Norton had generously given himself more screen time.

Other people, though, said that it was not as big a difference as he is making it out to seem in terms of the two cuts. His was just shorter. I'm not sure if I buy that. He was unapologetic about his hatred for the film, saying, quote, well, it's good enough to fool Hollywood. It's good enough to fool New Line, and it certainly fooled Edward Norton, but it doesn't fool me. My standards are a lot higher. Norton was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actor. He did, of course, lose to who, Chris?

The Oscars were 99. It's Roberto Benini. Oh, that's right. Climbing over the chairs. Life is beautiful. Yes. And then everyone thought, why did we give it to this guy? He's climbing on our chairs.

He ran down, very unsafe to collect his Oscar. That footage is pretty insane when you watch it. Yes, it is. He's like remarkably, has a swift foot as he runs across those seats. He does. Yeah. All right, on November 23rd, shortly after the release, Tony Kay filed a $200 million lawsuit against the studio and the DGA.

This all revolved around the fact that the DGA and the studio would not let him take his name off. But the suit was thrown out by a judge in 2000, siding with the studio and the union over Kay. But Kay wasn't done with his ads. In the late 90s, in the middle of this chaos, he took out an ad in variety that read, to Marlon Brando,

have you read One Arm, the Tennessee Williams screenplay yet? Tony Kay. So they end up becoming friends. Brando actually said he's open to doing the screenplay. And according to Kay, he invited him to his house and greeted him with, I hear that you're as crazy as I am. I mean, Brando was interesting,

is he had been in a movie a few years prior with New Line. That similarly, I mean, Richard Stanley was ejected off of that movie off of Island of Dr. Moreau much earlier than Tony Kay had been. But Brando was the one actor who kind of was standing by Stanley through most of that process. So if ever there were a kind of spirit to find, it would be Brando. Well, yeah, and he tried to help out his newfound friend. He hired Kay to direct a series of DVDs called Lying for a Living that would be a documentary

about a 10-day acting workshop in which Brando taught people how to use acting techniques in everyday life. The project brought together around 20 young acting students alongside many established stars, including Sean Penn, Nick Noltey, Edward James Olmos, Whoopi Goldberg, and Harry Dean Stanton. I mean, can I be 100% honest? Masterclass is just a gussied-up version of what you just described, in my opinion. Just throwing it out there. Well, keep that in mind when I tell you how Tony Kay showed up. This was in November of 2001, and on the first day of shooting, he showed up dressed as any guesses.

Osama bin Laden. Osama bin Laden, that is correct. Yeah. Osama bin Laden. Yep. All right. He walked out, and according to him, Brando never spoke to him again. In 2002, he wrote an op-ed for the guardian that I strongly encourage listeners to read.

it's alternatively incredibly eloquent and self-aware and also just like stunningly oblivious to the point that it is hard to believe it's written by the same person he seems to entirely understand how he mishandled new line and mike deluca he is able to articulate why he behaved the way that he did you know he says basically he's saying like my body felt that this was a situation of life and death and so that's how i was reacting to it but like it was stupid i was you know that's not what it was And then he goes on to have zero understanding of why everyone wasn't stoked on his Osama bin Laden comedy bit and also takes every opportunity to say what an untalented moron Edward Norton is when it comes to filmmaking, which we know is not true. So he's just, he's a really interesting guy. I don't totally know what to make of him.

I think he's very smart. I think he's probably very hard to work with. I think the same is probably true of Edward Norton, right? Yes. He seems very smart. He also definitely seems a little tricky. He's going to have a lot of opinions about a lot of things. I'm not saying he shouldn't, but that's just another thing you have to manage. And there are a lot of things you have to manage as a director. So that could be challenging.

Yeah, absolutely. Back in 2007, Kay watched a theatrical release of American History X in a theater for the first time. And at this screening, he referenced that he was working on a documentary about the making of it that would be titled Humpty Dumpty. It still has not been released. In that 2002 Guardian op-ed, Kay said, quote, four years ago, I made my first movie, American History X. that might have been caused for celebration had I not been preoccupied with destroying myself, my career, and my chances of ever working in Hollywood again. I thought I was upholding the old movie industry traditions of strutting around, picking fights with the studio, and being the fly in everyone's ointment. I don't buy this narrative that he has spun in the years since this,

that he was trying to be as crazy as the directors that he admired. That doesn't quite add up for me. I think he's letting himself off the hook there. I don't know. What do you make of it? I don't know is the truth. There was definitely a period where that was the case where you had your Coppolas and your Lucases, all those. I think Spielberg was much more a company man, you know, than we maybe like to think. And so I just can't tell. It seems like he was a person in crisis, clearly.

And maybe remains so. I'm sympathetic towards that. I have had one or two moments where I really felt like my brain was going to break or I was going to, you know, I needed to go do something drastic to get off of, you know, a movie I was on or something like that. Yeah. Generally speaking, this movie, what you've explained to me really makes me think about, you know, we were talking about Casablanca, right? For example, this is a movie that had so many authors, had so many people vying for credit at the end.

I really think, broadly speaking, as much as I believe in Auteur cinema, and as much as I selfishly am like, yes, you need to have one person guiding the ship at the end of the day. The version of this movie that sounds the best to me is the version that's halfway between Tony Kay's version and Edward Norton's version. A hundred percent. Had they been able to work together, it would have been excellent. If Kay could have healed or curbed in some of Norton's excesses, because Norton is, oh my God, this movie can become sentimental quicksand and it can be portentous and completely self-important. And it gets in the way of the message. But at the same time, I do think you need some of that emotional ballast. Otherwise, you're going to be, you know, it's going to be so bleak that you're just going to leave the movie thinking, Jesus Christ, we're screwed. And I don't think that's ultimately. the goal of the film. That's exactly right. Neither of them could get out of their own way to actually

make the best product, which would have been a combination of both of their skills. And I believe that thoroughly. Yeah. So he has gone on to make a couple of other films. Blackwater Transit is actually an unreleased crime drama, which found him again in arguments over final edit. And there was a bunch of litigation following this. They said that it was unreleasable. But he's also directed a documentary about abortion in America called Lake of Fire. That was well received. It made the Academy Award shortlist. He directed the music video for Danny California. Johnny Cash's God's going to cut you down. He directed Detachment in 2011 with Adrian Birdie and Christina Hendricks. And then in 2025, he premiered his latest film, The Trainer, and it was released at the Tribeca Film Festival. So he is

still working and, you know, hopefully has learned from this experience. Let's end with Edward Norton in his reputation. Because as you pointed out, he and Tony Kay, not that. dissimilar. They're kind of two sides of the same coin. Edward Norton just was able to facilitate himself better. In a 2019 New York Times interview, he was asked directly about his reputation for being difficult on set, which Norton traced back to American History X, and I think that's fair. He said, quote, people take things that happen between fervent people who care about the work and who end up shaking hands with each other, and they make it into drama. Now, the reporter does not let him off the hook here. He's like, sure, but I'm not just talking about American history.

X. Your reputation of this, it's not a one-film reputation. To which Norton said, you're not reading anything that's any more authentic than people reading a Russian trollbot story about Hillary Clinton and a pizza parlor is authentic. You're going, there must be something to this, just like some guy in the MAGA hat is being engineered by the GRU into feeling antagonistic with liberals. You're wasting your time engaging with the matrix that's trying to foment negativity. The fact that there's a certain credence to it in your mind, is it possible that there's literally nothing to this? When I read this, I was like, holy shit. I was like, that's what Tony Kay was describing on the movie. Yes. You said a whole lot to not say that much. I don't want to argue with you. That's for sure. The reporter said,

that's what I want to understand. I'm trying to get at what it actually means for someone to have this reputation. Does it mean an actor who pushes back with directors? Does it mean someone who adjusts the screenplays? To which Edward Norton said, honestly, I find the whole line a little boring. You're pulling on a narrative from things when I was 28 years old. That's not even a contemporary meme around me. I'm scared of Edward Norton. He's very smart. Get ready for the best email of your life. No. This message comes out. Look, he's so smart. He's so smart. And I reading this interaction, that's exactly what I felt is like, boy, does he know how to, like, he knows how to argue. But I think it's, like you said, it's such a double-edged sword. I think if your incentives are

aligned, Edward Norton would be the best, best person to work with. a movie, right? If you think, if we're making the same movie, I want this guy. Not only do I know he's going to be great, he's a great actor. Yes, he is. But I know he is going to help me fight for everything that I, you know, that I want or that we want and he's going to be effective. He's smart as shit and he knows how to work the system. I'm sending a studio wants to talk. I'm sitting in Ed, you go do it. And he's going to be perfect. But it's actually just, it's really about knowing who you're working with because you should not try to go make a movie with somebody that, you know, is trying to make a different movie with you because that's going to become the fight of what

you're trying to do. And this is a perfect example of why not to do that. And I'm guessing Edward Norton is, again, very good at defeating people in getting to make the movie he wants to make. You know, again, it would be that thing where if you're aligned, I bet you it would be an absolute dream to work with him. And he'd bring you ideas on scenes and, you know, could give you hints on working with other actors. I'm sure he's great at, you know, giving notes to other. But if you can facilitate that through yourself as a director, I bet you would be a an absolute dream, unless you're trying to make a different movie. In which case, it might be hell. Yeah. Well, what went right, Chris? You know, I'd like to give it to Edward Furlong. And again,

I think in some ways he's a little misused at times in this movie. I just, I love Edward Furlong. I like how unassuming his performances are. They're very natural. He has a very nasally, somewhat, grading's the wrong word, but just real teenager voice. I think that's tricky in voiceover. And I wish they hadn't deployed it in this movie in that way. But he really was such a talent. And I think, again, Hollywood is just a place that does kids such a disservice. And I know it's more complicated than that. And I know there's a lot about his home life that we need to talk about. But I feel for him. And I do think he's very good in this movie. And the scenes with Edward Norton, who again is really one of the best actors of his generation, I think, in many senses, furlongs totally fine opposite

He does not miss a beat. He feels completely unaffected, you know, opposite him. So I'd give it to Edward Furlong. And also, you know, Guy Tori, there's some great supporting performances in this movie. I agree. I think Furlong, Guy Tori, Faruja Bok, Ethan Suppley, Beverly DiAngelo is really wonderful in this. She's really good. She's done some dramatic stuff. She's known for the comedy stuff, but she's done some dramatic stuff and she's really good. She's great. And I do also want to call out Elliot Gould. He's only in like maybe two scenes of the movie. He's wonderful. Yes. That dinner scene again, I think is the best in the movie.

and the way that he handles himself. Because obviously, Edward Norton is flying off the handle in that scene. And, you know, his sister is two to a certain degree. And Elliot Gould really just is watching so much. Yeah, he doesn't play fear. He plays almost regret, which I think is so much more effective. He pities this man. Yeah, and his mother.

And the way in which his world has been reduced to just skewed hatred. And I think that's a more effective condemnation of Norton's perspective there than if he had played fear. I agree. I will say, I think, what went right here in a lot of ways is what we're talking about,

and it's the casting. The casting in this movie is really quite pitch-perfect. Because the tone is so weird, had the casting been off, had anybody turned in a not-great performance, this would be unwatchable,

but nobody does. Every single person in this is really, really wonderful, whether they're given a lot to do or very little. And so I want to give it to casting director, Valerie McCaffrey, you did an absolutely bang-up job on this movie. I think it's amazing,

and it's kind of an amazing ensemble piece for a movie that seems to be a star vehicle. So shout out to you, Valerie. All right. Well, Chris, I never want to watch this movie again. What can people do if they would like to support the podcast? First of all, just thanks for listening. We love making the show for you guys. All right, on to the more formal ways. Number one, leave a rating and review on whatever podcatcher you're listening to us on. Number two, make sure you hit subscribe on those podcatcher. So we are dropping in your feed every Monday, occasionally Friday. Number three, if you would like more from us, you can sign up for our subscription feeds. Those are available on Apple or Spotify. For $5 a month, you get at least one

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Patreon subscriptions also come with an ad-free RSS feed. You can also visit our website, What Went Wrong Pod.com, for more info. What Went Wrong is a Sad Boom podcast, presented by Lizzie Bassett and Chris Winterbauer, post-production and music by David Bowman. This episode was researched by Jesse Winterbauer and edited by Karen Krepsaw.