by Bob Zmuda
As we planned the pilot, I felt the action should be set in the place it all started, the basement of Andy’s childhood home. I had been hearing stories for years about how Andy would eschew outdoor activities with the other kids to linger in the basement and stage his shows, playing to an imaginary camera in the wall. According to Andy, that behavior constantly irritated Stanley Kaufman, who felt his son was solidly on track to becoming a misfit. Andy proudly acknowledged his dad had been right.
We decided, as an homage to the disdainful parents of that seemingly autistic oddball who secreted himself in their basement, that we’d cast Stanley and Janice Kaufman as themselves. Occasionally Stanley would open the basement door and yell down for Andy to quit farting around and come upstairs because his “lunch was getting cold.” Of course Andy’s parents never went downstairs to discover that his “imaginary” TV show was in fact real. Though Andy dearly loved and respected his folks, this was a gentle zinger for all those years they didn’t “get” him.
We re-created the Kaufman household in the studio in painstaking detail. I even shot an exterior that looked like their home for the opening establishing shot, wherein the camera flew up to the house and made a trick dissolve through the basement window into our studio “basement.” I was in my glory as the writer and producer — this was what I’d been dreaming of doing all my life. I gave Andy a dog to use on the show, my own dog Lazarus. We called him Laz, and Andy loved him as if he were his own.
As great a show as “Uncle Andy’s Funhouse” was, we had a big problem: it couldn’t be longer than ten minutes. ABC had commissioned the work to be part of a half-hour special called “Buckshot,” which would consist of ours as well as two other ten-minute segments to be produced by other talent. As Roseanne Roseannadanna used to say, “It’s always somethin’.”
ABC’s chopped-up format was ill-conceived, as ten minutes wasn’t enough time to establish a feeling for the segment, particularly ours. In our pilot, Andy used up nearly two minutes with a film of his Grandma Pearl sleeping on her sofa. Thus, with such a slow pace set, the remaining six and one-half minutes (after leaving a minute-and-a-half hole for commercials) went by in a flash without giving us room to deliver a true taste of what our show could be. But, regardless of its length, we were happy that ABC had footed the bill to let us put the concept on tape, if only for ten minutes. “Buckshot” aired, and no one took notice.
The next foothold was offered us by Universal Studios. We were shocked yet deliriously happy when George called with the news that they wanted to do a biography … The Tony Clifton Story, with Andy starring as the title character. Even better for me, they wanted the two of us to write it. We thought we’d died and gone to heaven. Contracts were drawn and the money was going to be quite spectacular. We enjoyed some perks as well, including a fabulous babe secretary named Connie Bryant and individually assigned golf carts to be used to save our legs from the grueling walk between our beautifully appointed bungalow and the commissary. Actually, the Universal lot is pretty huge, so there was some practicality to that.
As we were settling in to our new office I noticed some workers out front, preparing to stencil our names into the parking places. I went out and watched with pride as David Steinberg’s name was blotted out and mine filled in. I had seen Steinberg years before in Chicago’s Second City troupe and he was a comedy god to me. But at that moment I felt like Caesar, rolling through the streets of Rome in triumph, my chariot’s wheels crushing both foe and friend. It didn’t matter: I had a deal with Universal!
Our benefactor, that is, the man responsible for our bounty, was director John Landis. At the time, Landis had replaced Steven Spielberg as Universal’s resident enfant terrible, due largely to his extraordinary success with 1978’s Animal House, a blockbuster hit. He was currently working on The Blues Brothers, and the scuttlebutt was it was going to be a hit. Landis was apparently a fan of Kaufman and me and had suggested to studio cheeses Thom Mount and Sean Daniel that we were the hot kids in town and they should hire us.
I was very grateful to Landis, and since we’d never met, I requested a meeting be arranged so that I could properly thank him for his support. On the day of the meeting I arrived two hours early at our office, did some work, and then, dispensing with the cart, walked in the stunning midday sun over to the commissary for some lunch and a chance to hobnob with my Universal brethren. As I ate I subtly dropped hints to my table-mates that I was about to have an audience with the Boy Wonder himself.
They were duly impressed, and as I walked hack to get ready for my meeting, this goofy kid with hair hanging down in his eyes and with thick black Poindexter glasses accosted me. I remembered him from the Huntington show because he had wanted to chatter away with me as I tried to get people on the buses. He annoyed me then, and he was annoying me again. As we walked and I tried to outpace him, I wondered how he got on the lot and why he was bothering me now, just as I was set for an extemely important audience with the great John Landis.
He persisted, so I sped up, saying, “Sorry, I can’t talk now!”
But he wouldn’t listen, so I finally turned and, as firmly and rudely as I could, said, “Stop! Not now!”
I resumed walking and was relieved I’d scraped the pest off my shoe. After all, I didn’t want to be late for my audience with Mr. Landis. When I got to Landis’s office, I was about ten minutes early, and though he wasn’t back from lunch, his secretary led me into his office, where I waited. I spent the time admiring miscellaneous memorabilia he’d accumulated, mostly from the Animal House project. Just then I sensed someone watching me, and when I turned, to my irritation, I saw that goofy kid again, this time staring through the window, smiling and waving.
But it was when he came around the corner and had the audacity to actually enter the place that I finally snapped. Leaping to my feet I sprinted to the outer office to prevent this chowder-head from embarrassing me in my big moment. Just as the nerdy kid had the temerity to pick something off the secretary’s desk, and as my mouth opened to chastise him, the secretary beat me to the punch. “John, here are your calls while you were out.” For a split second I looked past this nut for a glimpse of Landis … and then I realized he was Landis!
Completely mortified, I wanted to crawl under the rug and die. Since that day, I have held that lesson closely: never dismiss anyone who comes up or phones, no matter who I think they are or aren’t. It was arrogance on my part and an element of that “creeping co-option” that Andy battled so heroically.
Landis took it all in stride and laughed generously when I confessed my sins. John and I have maintained our friendship to this day. The director of such hits as Trading Places, Coming to America, and Beverly Hills Cop III, John is a genius when it comes to his ability to see through the eyes of an eighteen-year-old, more or less Hollywood’s target age.
With the Universal deal came such a feeling of well-being that I temporarily lost my head one day and threw an idea at Andy. “We should call Mr. X.”
“Call him? Why?” he asked.
“Well, we’ve got a big-time movie deal and it would be fun to brag a little.”
Andy’s eyes lit up at the notion of calling that legendary lunatic. “You still know his number?”
“I never had it, but we could call his agent.”
“Think they’d give it to us?”
“Let’s try,” I said.
We placed a call to Mr. X’s agent and a woman answered. The conversation was short and sweet: Mr. X’s privacy is very important and we do not give his number to anyone. End of story. After waiting a few days for our request to be forgotten we called again, this time employing a few theatrics. By taking our bungalow’s phone to the end of its extension cord, we made it just outside the door to obtain the perfect street ambience we needed. Andy dialed the number.
The agent answered and Andy went into his act. “Ma’am, this is Officer Walters with the NYPD and we have a man in custody who claims to know you. He says he’
s Mr. X, a famous writer.”
I confess to doing a dead-on Mr. X impression, so I stood in the background blithering on with alternating pleas and insults, as Mr. X would do. Andy continued, “Lady, I’m tellin’ you, this guy looks like a street person, not no big-shot writer. Could you describe him?”
She described X perfectly, from the matted hair to the tattered, soiled uniform. “Okay,” said Andy. “What’s his home address and phone, to confirm?” She quickly gave it to us as “Mr. X’s” screams and threats welled in the background.
“Oh, yeah, that’s him,” she acknowledged matter-of-factly.
“Thank you, ma’am,” said Andy as he hung up.
Then we dialed the number. I got on the line, the plan now having been changed from our bragging about a movie deal to something more surreal.
“Hello,” answered Mr. X.
“Hello,” I said, as Mr. X.
“Who’s this?” he asked.
“You.”
“Who?”
“It’s you, asshole.”
“Yeah, whatta you want?”
Yeah, whatta you want? You get a call from yourself and you want to know what you want? I could barely keep a straight face, and Andy, on the extension, was in tears.
“I wanted to say hi. So, hi, asshole, how you doin’?”
“I’m fine. How’re you?”
This Kafkaesque exchange went on for a full five minutes — Mr. X talking to Mr. X. That’s when we finally came to terms with the true depth of his insanity. We could tell he wasn’t playing along, but actually seemed to believe he was speaking to himself. We were in awe. Finally the conversation came to a natural end — natural for Mr. X, that is.
“Well, asshole, good talkin’ to ya,” I said.
“Yeah, likewise.” And we hung up. We couldn’t work the rest of the day.
Life on the lot held some of the best experiences I had in Hollywood. I hammered away on our script, and Andy stopped in occasionally when he could pull away from Taxi. He loved the direction the script was taking, especially when I cast Andy Kaufman as the antagonist to Tony Clifton’s hero. When he came by the office we’d act out various characters and scenes. We were pumped knowing Universal was probably going to make the movie — unlike the other ninety or ninety-five out of a hundred screenplays developed by the studios.
During this time, since Andy wasn’t at Universal helping me write the Clifton script and had managed to keep his schedule at Taxi down to a mere two days a week, the question was: What was he doing? Andy woke up when he wanted to, watched a lot of TV, and read his fan mail. But mainly, since he had met so many women, he was constantly on the phone promoting dozens of relationships. His little black book merits a place in the Smithsonian.
Andy had willed himself to be famous, and he had succeeded. The teenage alcoholic with bad grades and a pregnant girlfriend had pulled it out of the crapper with amazing style. Was it Andy, LSD, or TM that was responsible for his spectacular career arc? Probably all three. Andy’s childhood friends would tell you that he would have been voted least likely to succeed, and they were awed by his success (though none were jealous), surprised by what this very strange friend of theirs was able to achieve. What Andy did was different from any other performer, with no rules seeming to apply. Dangerous? Frequently. Exhilarating? Every day with him was an adventure, every moment lived in the now.
When we finally handed in the first draft of The Tony Clifton Story, the studio loved it. I was on top of the world! Then, like the iceberg to our Titanic, something crept out of the mist to loom in our path: it was a movie called Heartbeeps. Universal set up the picture to star Andy and voluptuous actress Bernadette Peters and to be directed by Allan Arkush, whose previous credits included Death Sport and Rock ’n’ Roll High School. When Andy told me he and Peters were to play robots who fall in love in the wildly futuristic world of 1995, I dug up a copy of the script. After reading it, even though I was new to the screenwriting trade, I was savvy enough to realize that the manuscript had “turkey” written all over it.
I warned Andy not to do it, and I gave him two reasons why. One was that after poor Marty Feldman’s dog, In God We Tru$t, Andy had stepped into the wait-and-see spotlight as far as the movie side of Hollywood was concerned. Another stinker and his film career would probably be over. The other reason was that we had what seemed a sure thing in Tony’s movie. Andy knew the character, we had the jokes down, and the material was tried and true. I felt strongly that Heartbeeps was going to tank and begged Andy not to sign the contract. I told him Tony Clifton was what we should focus on and that I didn’t understand Shapiro/West’s logic in risking Andy’s film future on a likely loser. I guess the bird-in-the-hand philosophy won out.
Andy signed to do Heartbeeps, and when the dust from the deal had settled I was asked not to visit the set because this was “Allan’s first major film and he’d be nervous” with me around. Insulted by the suggestion, I also knew that it was a load of shit and that he’d had plenty of experience making bad movies, but I stayed away as requested. In some ways I was relieved, because the script stunk, and to see such expensive and talented manpower going to waste would have depressed me. Besides, I wasn’t getting paid to be there, so I was content to hole up in our lovely bungalow and polish our masterpiece, The Tony Clifton Story.
Occasionally Andy would stop by, more downcast than ever, given that his schedule on Taxi now blended uninterrupted into his time on the Heartbeeps set. At least Taxi was well received. Andy tried to put a good face on it, but a good performer knows if things are working or not. He knew he was shooting a bomb, and to make matters worse, he had to endure hours of elaborate makeup each day to become the metallic character he portrayed. It was hell for him.
Many people in this town have worked on films they thought would be hits that in fact were bombs, while others have labored on what they regarded as fait accompli disasters that turned into huge success stories, so who knows? On the set of Ben-Hur, Charlton Heston was on the phone every day to his agent complaining that he looked ridiculous in a Roman “dress” and wanted off the picture.
Despite my shots at Heartbeeps, I honestly wanted it to be a hit for two reasons: because of Andy, and because it would mean Clifton would be a slam dunk. I cringed at the thought of it failing, for I could visualize the next guy to occupy our bungalow watching the workers rub my name off the parking place. When Heartbeeps’ principal photography ended, in July 1980, we sat back and waited for them to cut it and then set a release date, figuring that would be sometime in 1981.
Around this time a new performer entered the airwaves and quickly developed a reputation for a razor wit and acid sarcasm. His name was David Letterman. Letterman’s first outing with NBC was in the mornings, and Andy made two appearances on that incarnation in 1980. Andy arrived for one of the shows disheveled and panhandling the audience, claiming wrestling had ruined his career and that he was now forced to sleep on the street. Dave loved Andy’s antics, and they clicked from the start. Letterman, like Lorne Michaels, was sophisticated enough to grasp Andy’s off-kilter sensibilities and that knife-edge he swung against convention.
When Dave moved to late night and Late Night, he took Andy along, giving him carte blanche, knowing he’d always deliver — which he did. To this day he calls Andy Kaufman the best guest he ever had. In a 1993 interview with Rolling Stone, Dave said: “You know what I really miss? There’s a song on the new R.E.M. CD that I listened to like six times before I finally realized, ‘Holy shit, this is about Andy Kaufman!’ Andy would orchestrate and rehearse each of his appearances for maximum impact. And when the impact worked, good or bad, he would savor it. If we could have one guest like Andy — to me that’s worth six months of new material. There’s nobody like that now.”
We understood that while waiting for Heartbeeps to sink or swim it was vital to get Clifton out and generating press. The only problem was, after the eggs à la Dinah incident, and despite being the talk of Tinsel Town
, he was very difficult to get booked — people actually feared Clifton. That pleased us no end, but George really had to dig deep to find anyone ballsy enough to have Tony. The guy with the brass cojones turned out to be Rodney Dangerfield. George hit pay dirt when Rodney made an offer to Tony to open for him during his upcoming two-day show at San Francisco’s Fillmore West.
Rodney was an old hipster who ran with Lenny Bruce and got what Andy was all about. Rodney’s stage persona was not unlike Foreign Man’s, in that neither got any respect. In real life, Rodney is the antithesis of his stage persona; he is extremely articulate and very, very cool. But Rodney had created a golden cage for himself over the years, and that tension between who he really was and who people thought he was tugged at him. Though Rodney often wanted to tell audiences to go fuck themselves, he couldn’t because his character was, by design, powerless. So, like hiring a hit-man, he could live vicariously through Mr. Clifton, who was guaranteed to assault anyone who dared think he was there to please.
Dangerfield’s stamp of approval on Clifton emboldened Andy’s management team, who had begun to wonder whether Tony Clifton wasn’t becoming a terrible mistake for Andy. Dangerfield’s career was undergoing a sort of rebirth with his popularity from the Miller Lite commercials, and he was finding acceptance among a younger audience. With such an endorsement, suddenly Tony Clifton — at least among the industry insiders — was seen as not only dangerous but bookable.
Andy knew he was headed into the lions’ den. The Fillmore is a very large venue and would be full of screaming kids who were there to see Rodney, not some hack lounge singer. They’d certainly be indifferent if not downright hostile. Andy couldn’t wait. Over the years, I’ve worked with most of the top comedians, and none have exhibited the sheer confidence of Andy Kaufman. If he ever had self-doubts, they were never even remotely apparent. He always plunged ahead full steam with the unwavering conviction that he was right. It wasn’t ego or bravado, but rather the confidence of genius.
