Movie: Man on the Moon

I remember this 1999 biopic about the late comedian Andy Kaufman, and how his "comedy" transcended performance into a kind of full-time role-playing that sometimes got him into real trouble.  And some of what people THOUGHT was happening wasn't real.  Questions remain to this day.

Jim Carrey played Andy in the biopic, and played him so well that Andy's family visited the set and talked to "Andy" through Jim as if Andy was reincarnated.  Jim made the decision to stay in character throughout the filming, even off-camera and it freaked out the director, cast and crew (many of whom knew or worked with Andy in real life).  Jim himself claims he lost his own sense of self during this process.

Last night I watched a fascinating brand new (Saturday 11/18) Netflix documentary called "Jim & Andy" about the bizarre process of channeling Andy for the film, and what it did to Jim.  He was changed by it.  Carrey hired a film crew to follow him around on-set, but the footage was never edited until just recently.

Gonna go pick up the original movie in a few minutes.  It's a different kind of film that breaks down the 4th wall in a weird way, where the film turns into real life and events are not "staged" so much as just "happen."

Was not a huge Kaufman fan -- too contrived for my tastes -- but the film ABOUT him is a whole 'nother level of self-referential.  And the film about the film was even weirder.

Watched "Man on the Moon" last night -- it was occasionally brilliant but, as Jim says in the "Jim & Andy" documentary, he WISHED Miloš Forman had included his (Jim's) backstage footage to make it a movie-within-a-movie and add another layer of interpretation of this "character-within-a-character."  The original movie, as it was released, is almost too staid, too straight-forward for the radical nature of its subject. (Imagine what somebody like Charlie Kaufmann or Spike Jonze could do in the editing room...)

Rob Harvala wrote:

Andy Kaufman was an easy-to-appreciate, harder-to-love comedy genius whose primary weapons were cognitive dissonance and profound discomfort—the audience’s discomfort, but also, usually, his fellow actors’ discomfort. When Kaufman was on camera, his was the least-important face on camera: The magic happened as you read the faces of everyone else as they vacillated between delight and confusion and what sure seemed to be genuine rage, the border between those emotions electrifyingly fluid. Were they in on the joke? Were they the joke?

Source

The Bonus Features on "Man on the Moon" include a "making of" featurette that states many of the same weirdnesses that "Jim & Andy" exposed -- including the fact that Jim started displaying some Kaufman traits that were never documented anywhere.  Only his friends, family and co-workers knew about them.  People seriously began to wonder if Andy was directing Jim's performance.

Afterward I watched a bunch of YouTube clips of Kaufman performing (Improv, Lertterman, elsewhere) and a couple episodes of Taxi (it was obvious the Latka character quickly outlasted his interest) and the "easy-to-appreciate, harder-to-love" comment above just about sums him up.  His "comedy" was infuriating because he didn't follow any formulas, and as often as not was meant to irritate you as to entertain.

The scenes in Man on the Moon where most of the cast of Taxi played themselves again, 16 years after the series wrapped, was odd.  DeVito couldn't play Louie because he was playing Kaufman's manager, and Tony Danza didn't come back (because he was too big a star?) but everyone else was there, reprising their roles (briefly), looking much the same (but 16 years older).  They all said Carrey was a better Kaufman than Kaufman was.

Hey, in the very earliest episodes of Taxi, DeVito had hair!

Here's a good article on Jim & Andy from Newsweek.