Bob Zmuda

Talking About Kaufman and Carrey: the Men on the Moon

by Jeffrey M. Anderson

Andy Kaufman once went on stage and began reading The Great Gatsby to the audience in a fake English accent. The audience booed him and pleaded with him to stop. Kaufman gave the audience a choice--either he could continue reading, or they could all listen to the record player. The audience overwhelmingly chose the record player. Kaufman put the needle in place, and the sound that came out was Kaufman's voice reading The Great Gatsby. Bob Zmuda wrote that joke.

Zmuda was Kaufman's best friend and writer. On his deathbed, Kaufman made Zmuda promise two things: to write a book about him and to make a movie about him. It took Zmuda years to even begin, due to the painful loss of his friend. But beginning Christmas weekend, Zmuda has fulfilled his promise at last with the release of Man on the Moon starring Jim Carrey.

"Jim Carrey is like the biggest Andy Kaufman freak in the world," Zmuda tells me during his trip to San Francisco to promote the film. "If he wasn't Jim Carrey, he could travel the country lecturing on Kaufmanism. He's very influenced by him, just thought he was one of the most influential people in American humor in the last 100 years. He was born to play this role. He even has the same birthday as Andy Kaufman. He literally fought to get this role."

The movie was directed by Milos Forman, a two-time Oscar winner for Best Director (One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest in 1975 and Amadeus in 1984). Zmuda praises Forman for his approach to the casting. "Everyone wants to play Kaufman. Nicolas Cage wants to play him. Ed Norton wants to play him. Tom Hanks, Sean Penn, Hank Azaria, Kevin Spacey, the list goes on and on and on. And Milos says, 'who ever plays Andy makes audition tape.' Well, I'm not going to give you the names, but a few of those guys went 'I'm not making no audition tape. You know who we are?' Well, Carrey says, 'I'll make that audition tape.'"

According to Zmuda, Jim Carrey was never really on the set. "He was either Andy or he was Tony. One day was two half-day shoots. One half of the day was Tony Clifton, the other half was Andy. Andy showed up on the set with a bloody nose, saying he had passed Tony Clifton and Tony punched him out. And I don't know if it was real blood, if it was stage blood, if the actor hit his head on something, or what."

"Carrey was just unrelenting in his knowledge about Kaufman. Come day 21 of the filming, he started exhibiting Kaufman-esque behavior that none of us had told him about, which freaked us out."

Zmuda admits that at first he was not a big supporter of Carrey. "This was before The Truman Show, by the way, so I thought he was going to be eating the scenery." Then Carrey invited Zmuda and Forman over to see his audition tape. "The tape is not on for a minute and I'm crying like a baby. If somebody had given me this tape and not told me it was Jim Carrey, I would have thought it was Andy. It was remarkable. There was no question once everybody looked at his tape, compared to the other three or four tapes that were turned in-not that the other guys were bad-it's just there was something about him."

"Also, I liked the idea because Jim Carrey had done that job as a stand-up at a comedy club for eight years. That's a muscle, that's a level of performance that's so different from doing Broadway or doing TV sitcom. It's a whole different muscle. It's kinda what didn't work in Punchline (1988) with Tom Hanks and Sally Field, because that's not what those two people did. He intrinsically knew that muscle. Jim could go out and be a performer in a live nightclub set and it ill work, people will buy it."

"Some of the crew members thought he was channeling Andy. I don't believe in that stuff. He's just so good. He just downloaded everything into his (internal) computer and hit the switch. He knew just how Andy would react to stuff."

Many people still believe to this day that Andy Kaufman faked his own death. Some believe that he will return at the world premiere of Man on the Moon. Zmuda says that they once talked about it and decided that if Kaufman were to play dead and go into hiding that he would come out after 10 years. It's now been 15. But apparently, there was an unproduced script by Kaufman and Zmuda called The Tony Clifton Story which has Tony dying of lung cancer at Cedars Sinai Hospital--the exact same circumstances of Kaufman's death eight years later.

"What fueled the rumors that he faked his death was that Andy never smoked! He was a health nut. So for this guy to come down with lung cancer; nobody believed him! I would push him around in a wheelchair, the guy was down to 80 pounds, had no hair on his head from chemotherapy, and people would come up to him and go, 'Andy, you with this dying routine! You're a maniac!'"

"So let me go on the record to say that Andy Kaufman is dead. He's not in some truckstop with Elvis someplace. Had Andy Kaufman lived, though, he would have faked his death. No doubt in my mind."

What happens if Man on the Moon gets bad reviews? "Andy loved hearing his bad reviews. He just loved it to death. It seemed the more he could get people upset, the better he liked it."

November 9, 1999