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
