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 make any sense because we easily could have constructed a small chapel right on one of the sound stages. It was 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