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.
Soon, he caught the eye of a young director named Tom Shadyac. Shadyac was looking for the lead of a film he was about to direct, Ace Ventura: Pet Detective. They risked everything on Jim’s scene-stealing, over-the-top, broad physical comedy, which no one was doing at the time and didn’t want to. The gamble paid off and Ace Ventura was a monster hit, with half of America quoting Jim’s lines from the movie, such as, “Allllll rightteeee then!” He followed it up with other films (such as Dumb and Dumber, Liar Liar, The Truman Show, and my favorite, The Cable Guy, produced by Judd Apatow) and now he had his heart set on playing Kaufman.
Jim was still a struggling comic at the Store when Andy and I would come in and test new material on the audiences. Comics would sit in the back of the room, mouth agape in awe of Kaufman’s antics that left audiences either loving him or hating him. Either way made no difference to Andy. He was operating from a whole other gearbox. Carrey would later say, “The comics would watch Kaufman and say, ‘Just make a statue
