BEFORE: I've reached the last documentary in my chain, for now. Considering who my outro link is, I could easily have extended the chain - but then I'd miss Mother's Day. I'm going to use that prominent person who is both a talk-show host AND an actor to transition back to fiction films tomorrow so I can get to a mother-themed film by May 9. I'll have more to say about the May line-up in just a couple days, obvi.
There are just three more days left in TCM's "31 Days of Oscar" line-up, now that the 2021 Oscars are in the rear-view. Here are the films airing tomorrow, April 29:
7:30 am "The Three Musketeers" (1948)
9:45 am "To Be or Not to Be" (1942) - SEEN IT
11:45 am "Tom Jones" (1963) - SEEN IT
2:00 pm "Tom Thumb" (1958)
4:00 pm "Top Hat" (1935) - SEEN IT
6:00 pm "Travels with My Aunt" (1972)
8:00 pm "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre" (1948) - SEEN IT
10:15 pm "The Truman Show" (1998) - SEEN IT
12:15 am "Tunes of Glory" (1960)
2:15 am "12 Angry Men" (1957) - SEEN IT
4:00 am "Twice in a Lifetime" (1985)
With 6 seen out of 11, this is probably the last day where I've seen the majority of the films. Now I'm up to 135 seen out of 337, almost exactly 40% seen. And TCM and I are both on a Jim Carrey theme, I've got this doc today that uses some clips from "The Truman Show", and they're showing that same film tomorrow. Pretty sweet.
Dick Van Dyke carries over from "Walt: The Man Behind the Myth".
THE PLOT: A behind-the-scenes look at how Jim Carrey adopted the persona of idiosyncratic comedian Andy Kaufman on the set of "Man in the Moon".
AFTER: Wait, is that Jim Carrey or Andy Kaufman on the poster. (Yes, it is.) I just watched a magic trick on "Penn & Teller: Fool Us" about a week ago that used upside-down photographs of famous people in a trick, and the magician talked about the cognizance factor when a photo is upside-down, how your brain can be tricked when processing an image. So I think this poster is a photo of Carrey as Andy, but I'm not completely sure. But that's what this whole film is really about, the blurring of the two men that occurred when Jim Carrey portrayed Kaufman in the 1999 film "Man on the Moon".
If you somehow haven't seen "Man on the Moon", by all means, go and do that. It's a very metaphysical piece about a very meta comedian - some people didn't really "get" Andy Kaufman, many were confused about whether he really WAS the foreign character he played on the sitcom "Taxi", or if he was just doing a bit (Andy's "Foreign Man" character was kind of the pre-Borat, if you think about it). Then Kaufman would go on SNL and lip-sync along with a record of the "Mighty Mouse" theme and the humor was so out there that when he was doing a bit, then people got confused about whether it was real. Sometimes he aimed so low with his comedy that it went right over people's heads, if that makes any sense. There was nothing to really "get", so, naturally, some people didn't get it - you were better off if you just switched your brain off and went along for the ride.
Then Andy got into wrestling, which even at its best has that same questionable nature to it - is it real? Is it all staged? Is it somewhere in-between? Andy seemed to prefer wrestling with women, and to do that he had to act like a sexist heel and put down all women, but was that how he really felt, or was that just part of the act? Then he had a long-running rivalry with wrestler Jerry Lawler, but in the true spirit of wrestling, it's possible that every bit of that was also just part of an act. Every staged wrestling fight is meant to LOOK really dangerous and painful, without being so.
I watched "Taxi" as a kid, so I knew who Kaufman was, but then his other appearances on SNL and Dave Letterman's show just left me scratching my head, like it seemed like a lot of work just to figure out what his deal was. I got more insight when "Man in the Moon" came out in 1999, but now here comes this documentary to tell me that what was going on behind the scenes, making that movie, was even weirder than what made it into the film. In order to play Andy Kaufman, Jim Carrey really had to get into his mind, and that meant living AS ANDY while he was on the set, and the cameras weren't rolling. Or who he imagined Andy to be, acting the way that he believed Andy would act, never turning it off, until he got off the set, I think - and even then, there was some question. Some people would say he was "channeling" Andy's spirit, other people found it either endearing, noteworthy or probably quite annoying.
Somebody was shooting documentary footage the whole time - and that somebody was Lynne Margulies, Andy's girlfriend/partner. Meanwhile Courtney Love was there, playing Lynne Margulies as a character, so things maybe felt a little weird. But there was a lot of that going around - Paul Giamatti was playing Bob Zmuda, Andy's writing partner, but Bob Zmuda was also constantly on set, and he played a different character in "Man on the Moon", not himself. Danny Devito played George Shapiro, Andy's manager, but George Shapiro was also on the set, and played a different character in the film. Meanwhile, Danny Devito was a co-star of Andy's on "Taxi", so I think he played himself in the same film, too, or maybe they used archive footage of a younger him for scenes where he played Louie DiPalma, I forget. But you can see how this could get confusing very quickly, with everybody pretending to be somebody else, who was also there. And then Carrey's a "method actor" who decided to live in his character for several weeks...
(Meanwhile, Richard Belzer, David Letterman and Jerry Lawler played themselves in "Man on the Moon", which seems a lot simpler - but in another way, when juxtaposed, ended up being more complicated than you might think...)
On top of that, then you have the Tony Clifton character, who was a creation of Kaufman and Zmuda, a crude lounge-singer who tended to act out and yell at people on set, and from what I understand, sometimes Kaufman was Tony Clifton, and sometimes it was Zmuda in the outfit. And then Kaufman insisted that this alter ego of his be offered a guest role on "Taxi", but he had to be hired separately, as if he were a real person. Again, it was probably just Kaufman doing a bit to be funny, but it also made him appear to be a difficult pain-in-the-ass to work with.
Behind the scenes on "Man in the Moon", Jim Carrey also adopted this practice, and switched from day to day between the Andy Kaufman and Tony Clifton personas - as Kaufman, knowing he'd be coming to the set the next day as Clifton, he then spoke of Tony in the third person, and acted like he had the next day off. But under that, somewhere was the knowledge that he was still Jim Carrey, just wearing a different outfit and acting differently the next day - still reality was clearly blurring and maybe Jim's persona was getting a little bit lost under the other two characters.
There are framing sequences here, where Jim Carrey (now) talks about Kaufman, and what it meant to go deep into that role, to speak to Andy's father and Andy's daughter AS ANDY so they could finally have some sense of closure. Then he had to take some time off from being Andy, after the shoot, just to figure out again who Jim was, and who Jim wanted to be. Even when this doc was filmed, almost 20 years later, Jim has a very different perspective on life, and what it means to be who you are, and his thoughts on life, death, being and non-being and what it all means in the end, perhaps nothing. We all want different things, but then again we're all heading toward the same place, which is a state of non-being, and some people will get there sooner than others, and some will feel fulfilled when they get there, others not so much. Deep thoughts.
But in a weird reflection of the "Man in the Moon" footage, as weird as it is when an actor takes on a role, walks a mile in another man's shoes, essentially "becomes" him for a few weeks, whatever that means, in the framing interview footage, Jim Carrey is forced to speak as himself, and though that also seems like it SHOULD be a lot simpler, in another way, when juxtaposed, ended up being more complicated than you might think.
I've got a friend who directed another documentary about Andy Kaufman, called "Kaufmania", which is not streaming anywhere just yet - that's a shame, because it shares about 10 or 12 actors with this doc. But even if I could watch that tomorrow, it would throw me off, because then I might not make it to Mother's Day on time. Maybe later this year if I can work it in, though.
Also starring Jim Carrey (last seen in "I Love You Phillip Morris"), Danny DeVito (last heard in "The One and Only Ivan"), Paul Giamatti (last seen in "Fyre Fraud"), Milos Forman (last seen in "Heartburn"), Courtney Love (last seen in "Kurt & Courtney"), Bob Zmuda (last seen in "The Number 23"), Jerry Lawler (last seen in "Fighting with my Family"), Elton John (last seen in "Rocketman"), Lynne Margulies, Judd Hirsch (last seen in "This Must Be the Place"), Carol Kane (last seen in "The Dead Don't Die"), Peter Bonerz (last seen in "Catch-22"), Ron Meyer, George Shapiro, Stacey Sher, Angela Jones, Gerry Becker (last seen in "A Perfect Murder"), Michael Stipe, David Letterman (last seen in "Unfit: The Psychology of Donald Trump"), Hugh Hefner (last seen in "Class Action Park", Jon Lovitz (last seen in "Killing Hasselhoff"), Andy Dick (last seen in "Zoolander 2"), Stanley Kaufman, Eric Gold,
with archive footage of Andy Kaufman, Peter Buck, Johnny Carson (last seen in "ZZ Top: That Little Ol' Band from Texas"), Jeff Conaway, Jeff Daniels (last seen in "The Lookout"), Tony Danza (last seen in "Don Jon"), Cameron Diaz (last seen in "Things You Can Tell Just by Looking at Her"), Sammy Davis Jr. (last seen in "Selma"), Jamie Foxx (last seen in "John Lewis: Good Trouble), Merv Griffin (last seen in "Whitney"), Arsenio Hall (last seen in "Coming 2 America"), Philip Baker Hall (last seen in "In Good Company"), Marvin Hamlisch (last seen in "How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days"), Ed Harris (last seen in "Swing Shift"), Marilu Henner (last seen in "Noises Off..."), Bob Hope (last seen in "The Last Laugh"), Maurice LaMarche (last heard in "Ralph Breaks the Internet"), Matt Lauer (last seen in "The Accidental President"), Oprah Winfrey (ditto), Mike Mills, Nick Nolte (last seen in "Warrior"), Gwyneth Paltrow (last seen in "Higher Learning"), Dinah Shore, Kate Winslet (last seen in "A Little Chaos"), Renée Zellweger (last seen in "One True Thing").
RATING: 6 out of 10 talk-show appearances
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