Vincent Gallo sues Los Angeles for 'wasting tax dollars'

If you've ever paid to see a Vincent Gallo movie and wanted to ask for your money back, the maverick actor and film-maker knows exactly how you feel. Gossip website TMZ reports that he is to sue the city of Los Angeles for wasting his tax dollars on a privately run programme to keep the metropolis' downtown arts district clean, tidy and secure.

Gallo, best known for his films Buffalo 66 and the infamous The Brown Bunny, says the LA Arts District Business Improvement District (BID) simply does not do its job and provides "no benefit". In his suit, he claims the private company which runs it is only maintaining the programme as a facade to keep receiving public funds. These totalled $1.3m ($860,000 in the last year alone), which Gallo, who lives in the district, says he wants to see returned.

It's possible, however, that the suit is simply part of the hipster film-maker's ongoing self-confessed quest to become "more like the stereotype of the Republican party".

The film-maker has had his own high-profile critics, as well as keen acolytes, over a rollercoaster three-decade career that stretches back to the early 1980s when he was an artist-contemporary of New York's famed Jean-Michel Basquiat.

Film critic Roger Ebert labelled The Brown Bunny the worst film in the history of Cannes in 2003: Gallo responded by calling the critic a "fat pig with the physique of a slave trader" and said he hoped Ebert developed colon cancer. The latter retorted by paraphrasing the Winston Churchill quote: "although I am fat, one day I will be thin, but Mr Gallo will still have been the director of The Brown Bunny". The film is known for an excruciating scene in which Gallo's co-star Chloe Sevigny performs oral sex on him for several minutes, which led to howls of derision on the Croisette.

Critics of Gallo's work may have been encouraged when the film-maker announced in August that he would not be taking his new venture Promises Written in Water, which had screened just twice at festivals, on to a commercial platform. "I do not want my new works to be generated in a market or audience of any kind," he said. Since then, there has been little in the way of new film work, though he is due to appear in front of the cameras in Julie Delpy's forthcoming comedy sequel 2 Days in New York.