Andy Kaufman

by Bob Zmuda

  Weeks went by and every time the phone rang, I jumped, hoping it would be DeVito. Weeks turned to months. The call never came. I chalked it up to the deal’s having collapsed, something that took place on a daily basis in Hollywood. I stopped anticipating that DeVito would call back. I figured he was probably bloodied by the studio. To save face, he just wasn’t going to call back.

  More time passed and I thought the whole matter was long dead. Then one day, my answering machine got a workout when call after call came in congratulating me on the fact that Universal was indeed making the film. Supposedly there was a huge write-up about it in Daily Variety. I ran to the nearest 7-Eleven and swooped up a half-dozen copies. I stood out in the street fighting the wind, trying to read the article. There it was in print, just as Danny said. Milos was going to direct, DeVito was going to produce with his partners Stacey Sher and Michael Shamberg, Larry Karaszewski and Scott Alexander would write the screenplay, George Shapiro and Howard West would executive produce. The film was to be called Man on the Moon, after the hit R.E.M. song about Andy. Everything and everyone was mentioned … except … except … where the fuck’s my name? … except … me!

  I called a friend I knew from Universal when we had been developing The Tony Clifton Story before Kaufman’s disappearing act. His name was Sean Daniel (Dazed and Confused, Tombstone, The Mummy). I told him my story. He concluded that I had “danced to the Hollywood two-step.” I asked what the hell was that. He put it simply: “You’ve been cut out. Actually,” he added, “You were never really in.” “But DeVito called me,” I said. “Obviously someone got to DeVito, Bob, and said we don’t need Zmuda.” “Is there anything I can do, Sean?” “Oh, yes,” he said with great confidence. “Listen to me and do exactly what I say.”

  The letter Sean instructed me to send “to everyone” was polite yet firm. It sincerely congratulated all involved on how wonderful it was that Andy was finally being recognized. Of course, it also conveyed that since I, being his writer and all, was not involved, they did not have the right to portray a laundry list of material such as Carnegie Hall when we took the entire audience out in school buses for milk and cookies, him wrestling women, Tony Clifton, the Great Gatsby, the masked magician, the fight on Letterman with Jerry Lawler, and a slew of other pieces that I had also developed with Kaufman. In short, all they’d be left with was basically Andy playing the congas and singing to the Mighty Mouse record.

  Soon my phone was ringing off the hook with apologies: “A mere oversight.” In short order, I was made a co-executive producer on the film, allowed to choose whom I wanted to portray me, be downloaded by the writers Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, and most importantly, work closely with Jim Carrey, giving him insight into Kaufman and Kaufman’s alter-ego, the notorious lounge lizard Tony Clifton. For all this, I was rewarded quite handsomely financially, along with a single-card producer credit in the film.

  As for Lynne, she was in New York when she got the call that the film was being made. She was told that the writers, Scott and Larry, would like to interview her. She met with Scott and Larry at their office on the Sony lot. They told her that they were having trouble getting a fix on Andy. “A very key moment in the research for us,” they said, “was interviewing Lynne. We said, ‘We’re looking for the real Andy Kaufman,’ and she said, ‘There is no real Andy Kaufman.’” Bingo! A light went on for them. It was a theme that was played out through the entire film. She had also given the studio tons of Andy’s personal belongings to use in the film as well as advising the set designers on how his house looked, how he dressed, even what he ate.

  When the film was going into production, Lynne had not heard from anyone about her being involved. (Sound familiar?) She had assumed, after meeting with Scott and Larry, and after giving the studio all of the memorabilia, that of course they would want her on board. After all, she was the love of his life—that should count for something. She called George Shapiro, who was executive producing the film with his partner Howard West, and set up a lunch meeting.

  Lynne

  He took me to Morton’s steakhouse on La Cienega. (That was always one of the best perks about hanging with the Hollywood set. Great free meals and drinks.) I told George that I very much wanted to be involved with Man on the Moon. He said, “Doing what?” Well, that rather flabbergasted me into a stuttered reply of, “Well, I’m not sure,” and George said, “Send me your resume and I’ll forward it to Danny DeVito.” I nearly spit out my food. I wish now that I had, right in his face. In those days, I was more intimidated by people than I am now, and I just stared at him in silence. Later, Bob and I compared notes and he told me that Stanley Kaufman didn’t want either of us involved. Why?

  Because Stanley (Andy’s father) felt the story should be told through his eyes, not ours, and he had already dictated to the writers the scenes he wanted in the film. The scenes, besides of course co-starring Stanley, also included a lot of revisionism. It’s not that they weren’t true, but they were aimed at cleaning up Andy’s image. Stanley wanted to paint a more innocent, loving, and normal Andy, a good Jewish boy who never missed Thanksgiving or Seders with his family. Yes, Andy did drive a long distance to visit a girl who was dying in the hospital. Yes, he did draw a crowd of people around a woman who was collecting for a local charity and helped her raise more money. Great, but not exactly the kind of scenes for a motion picture about the world’s greatest prankster. This wasn’t the Mother Teresa story, but the Andy Kaufman story. And Andy himself had already laid the foundation for the script with his body of work. But Stanley the overbearing patriarch and his family just couldn’t get that through their thick skulls. Or didn’t want to. After all, Stanley was acting like every needy actor who wanted to get as much screen time as possible. Major studios do not make movies of family albums. They make movies of remarkable people who have done remarkable things.

  The seldom-heard man behind the scenes, Howard West, George Shapiro’s partner in Shapiro/West, the management firm that signed Andy, has what I feel is the most accurate assessment of who Andy was from his no-nonsense, professional viewpoint:

  I’d say to him, “What else are you going to do to wreck your career? You make things difficult, Andy! Dif … fi … cult!”

  There was a self-destruct button in Andy. He was a daredevil, a high-wire act. I got this wire here. I can walk on it. Forty feet. Sixty feet. Eighty feet. One hundred feet. Maybe? That’s a self-destruct mode. But it’s also his talent. You can’t separate it. Andy did what Andy had to do for Andy and did it well.

  The real Andy you never knew or felt you knew. Nice, sweet conversationally, normal in his desires and wants, but I didn’t see that much of that too often. Maybe others saw it with those he was closer to, like Lynne, and saw what we didn’t see in their relationship. Mine was more career-oriented, with a few personal moments like talking about our hair loss, what can be done about it. That’s a personal moment, when the veneer is gone, but I didn’t have enough of those.

  Once I met with Scott and Larry, I just dazzled them with the adventures Andy and I had together. Eventually they came right out and told Stanley, “We went with Zmuda’s stories. They were better than yours.” After hearing that, Stanley would hate me and the movie to the day he died.

  With my newfound clout as one of the producers, I raised a ruckus and was able to get Lynne on the picture and paid. Still, first cuts are the deepest; the earlier snub by George and DeVito left its mark on us. After that, we never really trusted any of the executives who we felt tried to screw us, except for one, a producer by the name of Stacey Sher. Occasionally during the filming, DeVito would plead with me, “Bob, I had nothing to do with cutting you out of the deal. You gotta believe me!” Of course, he could never adequately explain why he never got back to me. Later, I would learn of similar transgressions by DeVito against others. I soon realized the cuddly Danny DeVito persona the public loves is in fact a power-driven mogul. Director Tim Burton, who is known to cast to type, scored
a home run by casting DeVito as the Penguin in Batman Returns. If you know DeVito the real guy, you know he is the Penguin when it comes to business, as diabolical as one could get.

  DeVito wasn’t always like that. When I first met him early on, when Taxi started, he was a regular Joe. It was funny—he and I had something in common. We both didn’t have much money and drove beat-up jalopies. Both of our cars looked so bad that friends and business associates would tell us that we really shouldn’t be driving these shit-cans onto the lot, as it was bad for our images. I remember having an exchange with Danny on this subject and he said something I’ll never forget: “Bob, the day we’re too embarrassed to drive those cars on this lot is the day we’ve sold out.” Truer words were never spoken. Eventually both Danny and I got different cars. As Jonathan Nelson, an advertising executive, once said, “If history proves two things, one is that the avant-garde almost always gets assimilated, and two, young people get older.” Yep, “times they were a changing.” DeVito went for the Mercedes. My tastes were much more modest: a Land Rover, used.

  As for Andy, he fought being co-opted with the best of them. The material possessions that fame and fortune brought he could do without, and did, except for one: “the pussy.” Celebrity attracted pussy like nothing else and Andy couldn’t get enough. After all, he had to make up for all those years when he was this unknown dork who was too shy even to talk to women. DeVito, on the other hand, seemed to be pretty grounded when it came to wife and family. If he had a mistress, her name was “Power.” Andy’s priorities were quite simple—TM first, and tied for second would be career and sex. As for the sex, he was insatiable. At first, groupies would do, but soon paid prostitutes became the order of the day.

  Who would have predicted in those early days of Taxi that DeVito would go on to be a mogul and one of his passions would be to make a film about Kaufman? Why? Curiously, I feel I have an insight into that, and it came to light almost by accident one day when we were making the film. With Lynne’s background in shooting documentaries, Universal needed an EPK (electronic press kit) for the film. So they threw a few extra bucks at Lynne to shoot it. It’s simple enough to build. You shoot some B-roll here and there and a few short interviews with some of the principals involved. But here’s where it gets interesting. One day, Lynne comes back to my trailer (as a co-producer I did get my own Winnebago) and she looked stunned. I said, “What’s wrong?” She said, “Something weird just happened.” I automatically said, “With Jim Carrey?” She said, “No, with Danny.” She explained that while she was shooting him for the EPK, he started talking about how distraught he was when he attended Andy’s funeral. I jumped in and said it the same time she did, “BUT HE WASN’T AT THE FUNERAL.” “Exactly,” she continued, “So why would he say that, when he wasn’t there, nor were any other members of the Taxi cast except for Carol Kane?”

  It all became crystal clear to me a few weeks later when it was time to shoot the funeral scene. And now things even got stranger, if not downright morbid. When shooting a film, especially a studio film, one of the advantages is you can make your movie on the lot. They have everything you need, as far as exteriors and interiors go. And for Man on the Moon, most of it was shot right on the Universal back lot. One of the exceptions was the funeral scene. For that, DeVito wanted to shoot off the lot at a real cemetery inside a real funeral chapel, which really didn’t make any sense because we easily could have constructed a small chapel right on one of the sound stages. It was just an interior shot, anyway. So why go to the added expense of schlepping the entire cast, crew, and equipment out to the real location? I believe because this one scene to Danny was the most important scene in the movie and perhaps the real reason why he wanted to make the film in the first place—and that is he and the Taxi cast never went to Andy’s funeral. And I believe that fact had been haunting Danny for all these years. But now he could change all that. He could right a wrong and rewrite history, for in his film not only he but also the entire cast of Taxi would be at Andy’s funeral.

  And that’s just what happened the day we shot it. Everybody was there and to make it as real as possible, they spent $35,000 on a wax figure of Andy/Jim to lie in a coffin. Now they easily could have had Jim lie in the casket and grabbed the shot and saved thirty-five g’s, but DeVito wanted that “dead body.” He wanted himself and that cast of Taxi to be in a real chapel at a real cemetery. He wanted his cast to experience the funeral of Andy Kaufman they were never at but knew in their heart of hearts they should have attended. And now they were. I’ll say it again: I believe that Danny DeVito made Man on the Moon specifically so he could shoot that scene and finally thaw out his frozen grief. Let me tell you, that day was probably the most gut-wrenching scene for all of us. Long after the cameras stopped rolling, Danny and his fellow cast members of Taxi sat perfectly still and wept openly, paying their last respects to Andy. And then the casket was slowly closed.

  Months later, when filming had wrapped, the studio asked Jim if he wanted the wax figure of himself/Andy. He said no, it creeped him out too much. If you ever get a chance to watch Man on the Moon, look closely at that funeral scene, especially at the wax figure. Look how real it looks. Could a similarly realistic wax figure have been used at Andy’s real funeral? Dr. Joe Troiani, a good friend of Andy’s, attended Andy’s funeral in ’84. To this day, he will tell you that he believes the body at the Nassau funeral home in Great Neck, Long Island, was a wax dummy. Why? Because he touched it with his own hands. “I was alone with the body as it lay in the casket. Realizing that Andy and Bob were probably pulling off one of their elaborate pranks, I had no qualms about giving the corpse a few good shakes. No matter how hard I shook it, the head didn’t budge one millimeter. It was as if it wasn’t even attached to the torso. There is no doubt in my mind then or now that the whole thing was faked.” Dr. Troiani himself will be in attendance for Andy’s return to shake his hand for pulling off the longest prank in history.

  Milos Forman, the director, is a star in his own right. Back when we shot Moon, he was sixty-six years old. He was handsome, with a captivatingly dramatic Czechoslovakian accent and two Academy Awards for Amadeus and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest that he carried with him wherever he went (figuratively, not literally). A friend of Danny DeVito’s, Milos had given DeVito his first film role in Cuckoo’s Nest, starring Jack Nicholson. Remember Martini? A great performance by Danny. Now DeVito was the big dog at Universal with his Jersey Films company. DeVito’s and Milos’s paths crossed at some Hollywood shindig, and the subject of Andy Kaufman came up. Seeing that Milos had a pay-or-play deal at Universal for another project called The Black Book, which Universal wasn’t too keen on doing but DeVito’s company was hot on, the Man on the Moon project came together quicker than most. Milos had two young writers in his pocket named Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski. Besides writing Ed Wood for Tim Burton, they had just written The People vs. Larry Flynt, which Milos directed. They were immediately commissioned to start on the script and did extensive research on Kaufman. Once the script was completed and approved, casting began.

  Here’s where things got interesting. No sooner did the word get out that a biopic was being made by Universal Studios about Andy’s life, directed by the legendary Milos Forman, than a slew of major motion-picture stars began to clamor to get the role. Tom Hanks, Sean Penn, Jim Carrey, Gary Oldman, Ed Norton, Nicolas Cage, Kevin Spacey … the list went on and on. We were all stunned. This was quite problematic for Milos. You see, Milos is what they call a gun-for-hire director. He shoots a movie every eight years. Between movies, he and his much-younger and gorgeous wife, Martina, enjoy the good life of fine wine and dinners with well-known personalities from all walks of life. One night Milos the raconteur might dine with Elton John and the next night with Henry Kissinger. All these stars wanting to play Kaufman put Milos in a precarious situation. What if the next movie he made depended on one of these stars to get financing? If Milos had rejected him for Man on the Moon, he wasn�
��t very likely to think kindly of Milos next time.

  So he came up with a clever plan. He would get the word out that if anyone wanted to play Kaufman, he’d have to make an audition tape, thinking many of them would say, “Screw that,” and simply withdraw, not having to get rejected and cloud a relationship down the road with the Czech director. His plan paid off and many walked away. Secretly, Milos wanted his buddy Ed Norton to play the role. Ed had played the lawyer to Woody Harrelson in Milos’s previous outing, The People vs. Larry Flynt. Norton was Lynne’s first choice too. When she saw Flynt, the moment Ed Norton walked onscreen she leaned over to her friend Wave and said, “If they ever make a movie about Andy, that’s who should play him.” Danny DeVito wanted Jim Carrey, whose box-office appeal would be sure to open the film big. I personally wanted Nicolas Cage to play Andy. There was something about Cage that reminded me of my best friend. Besides, at the time, Cage had a list of stellar performances such as Leaving Las Vegas. Somehow Cage got my number, and he and I spoke quite often. I assured him that he had my vote. As Andy’s writer, best friend, and now co-executive producer on the film, I knew my voice as to who should play Andy was a significant one, and I wanted Cage. Period. Nothing and no one was going to change my opinion.

  It wasn’t long before I got the phone call I dreaded most. It was from Jim Carrey. I knew Jim previously, but only briefly, when he was still an up-and-comer and shot a vignette for me a few years prior for the Comic Relief charity that I am the president and founder of. Now Carrey was a major star, the highest-paid actor in Hollywood—$20 million a pic. Jim’s own story of success could be a movie itself. He’s Canadian, never finished high school. His family was poor, his dad a sax player whose career never really took off, but a great guy. His mom and sister filled out the rest of the clan. From the time he was very young, they all knew Jim had a special talent. He could impersonate anyone. Not just celebrities like Elvis and Clint Eastwood, but the typical guy off the street. It was sort of uncanny how he did it. He has this physicality to his impressions that are spot on. You can sit with him in a restaurant and point to any one of the patrons and say to Jim, “Do him,” and within seconds his whole physical being morphs into that person. Frankly, I’ve never seen anything like it. When young people come up to me today and ask how to get into show business, especially stand-up, I always tell them the Jim Carrey story. How he worked at Mitzi Shore’s The Comedy Store on Sunset in Hollywood for eight years—two shows a night—for FREE! It was only when he befriended the Wayans Brothers, who themselves were just starting out and they got a show on Fox called In Living Color with an all-black cast, that things happened for him. They needed a “token white” and Jim was their choice. Remember Fire Marshall Bill? Every time he was in a sketch, he killed.