The Story Behind
"THE TONY CLIFTON STORY"
(excerted from the book,
LOST IN THE FUNHOUSE,
by Bill Zehme)

... George secured an office suite at Universal for Andy and Zmuda as part
of a deal made to realize The Tony Clifton Story as a major motion picture.
 Universal had optioned an outline written by the pair after an unpleasant
altercation in February, when the idea for the film was conceived by a
comedian named Ed Bluestone who, like Andy, was a Marty Klein client
at APA.  Andy had loved Bluestone's idea -- in which Clifton would fall
from Vegas lounge greatness, then lose his wife to another singer,
whereupon Clifton would marry his own manager (a man), whom he
then married many more times before he died at the end of the movie.
(Andy would have played both Clifton and the unctuous performer Nathan
Richards.)  Bluestone pitched the story to Universal and to Paramount
-- with Andy and George and Zmuda and various agents in attendance --
and both studios were deeply interested in having Bluestone commence
writing, which displeased Zmuda, who insisted that he cowrite the film
with Bluestone, which Andy believed was fair since Zmuda had certainly
contributed to Clifton's character development.  But Bluestone adamantly
refused to work with Zmuda and, since Clifton was Andy's intellectual
property, Bluestone was summarily removed from the project (about
which he was furious), thus forcing Zmuda and Andy to invent an entirely
new Clifton story, which they immediately began to brainstorm ...
they were at the Playboy Hotel and Resort in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin,
where George had flown in to listen to the story line that they had
cooked up. The three of them sat around a table in Andy's suite and
George turned on his tape recorder and Andy insisted that they all
smoke cigars while he and Bob enacted the story, because they had
been smoking cigars throughout the writing process because that was
what they thought real screenwriters did.  (George said:  "Suppose I tell
you that Neil Simon doesn't write with cigars."  Bob responded:
 "He's a completely different kind of writer than we are.  This is our
way of doing it.")   Anyway, they performed the essence of the movie
for George and George thought it was a little confusing but a very good
start and, when the first draft was completed in August, most of the
elements had remained and others had been added.  This draft -- which
the studio executives would find too dark largely because Andy, playing
himself, was the despicable villain of the script and Clifton was the
good-hearted hero -- would quietly circulate throughout smarter quarters
of Hollywood for years to come because it was eventually understood to
be something of a comic masterpiece, a mind-bending house-of-mirrors
tour in which identities sublimated other identities and tricks were played
upon other tricks and real life interchanged itself with fiction and vice versa.
 Meanwhile, the executives who had tried to shepherd the script toward
workability -- Thom Mount, Sean Daniel, Bruce Berman -- would years later
still feel varying pangs of remorse over the fact that the many rewrite
demands had pushed the concept so far away from its miraculous
original premise as to render it toothless and then finally dead.

"It was completely brilliant -- and unreleasable.  Perfect.  Just what I needed,"
said Mount, who ran the film division for Universal.  "It could have been a little
less brilliant.  We took a position that it was too dark in its ending, and it was.
 It had a sucker-punch, bait-and-switch sensibility that Andy loved, but would
have been difficult for an audience to deal with because there was nothing
in it to consistently trust."  Daniel, who was second in command, would add,
"I have to say that the phrase ahead of its time  genuinely applied here.
I believe that had it come twenty years later Tony Clifton, as a persona
and as a movie, would have been a giant hit, tapping into a much bigger
culture of cynicism."  Ultimately, it was Universal president Ned Tannen
who pulled the plug (after expending nearly two years of patience with
the project and, in the meantime, having hired Andy to play a robot in a
film that would embarrass everyone involved with it).  And even Tannen
would harbor chagrin in hindsight.  "It's funny that it stuck in his brain,"
mused Daniel, "because in later years I was sitting with Ned when
The Tony Clifton Story came up in conversation and he said,
apropos of nothing, 'You know, that's  the one we should have made.' "
 

They initially wanted the film to be made in Stinkavision, so that
whenever Clifton sprayed on a certain repulsive cologne to entice
chickaroonies (it was called Purple Passion), theatres would be
engulfed in the stench.   They believed the natural antecedents to
their film were King Kong and The Hunchback of Notre Dame.
"You see, this man on the surface looks like a pretty abrasive guy,"
Andy said of Clifton.  "But in this movie you get to see his soul.
He is a wonderful man.  He's the kind of guy who would see a little lost
dog on the corner of a city street and would say, "Ahh, get out of here!"
And then, when no one's lookin', at midnight, he'd take the dog home."
 "He's a lovely guy," Zmuda said, "but very stupid. And Andy becomes his
manager to exploit him -- like an evil version of Colonel Tom Parker."

  If you haven't yet read the script, and don't want the surprises spoiled,

STOP READING HERE

and come back after you've finished it ... I'll wait ...

To synopsize:

Clifton lives in Philly, works on an assembly line screwing tops
on salt shakers (George's idea), is a forty-five-year-old virgin
who talks (in his own special parlance) of having laid much pipe
and making like a ham sandwich with countless females and his
nonsensical bluster is barely humored by those around him.  One
night, he falls into a massage parlor/bordello and is finally compelled
to throw around fistfuls of cash and receives a Jacuzzi bath (while
wearing a pink shower cap and singing lounge standards) from four
topless scarlet women who happily take his money and claim to admire
his voice, telling him that he sounds just like Tony Bennett and / or
Frank Sinatra.  At which point, a hooker with a heart of gold named
Anna (oh!) arrives to see that he is being taken advantage of and
she kindly relieves him of his virginity and, thunderstruck by
feelings of love for her, he summons courage to quit his job and
decides to aggressively purse a singing career.  Andy, meanwhile,
comes through Philadelphia on tour and he and Zmuda are accosted
by Clifton in an all-night diner, where he is peddling 8-x-10 glossies
of himself and repeatedly calls Andy "Mr. Belushi"  and Andy is
thoroughly besotted by Clifton's idiotic bravury, especially after
witnessing him perform to a Frank Sinatra record during an
amateur showcase at the nearby Porterhouse Lounge. Andy decides
that Clifton will be billed as his special guest / opening act at
Carnegie Hall on April 26.  Clifton arrives -- after much confusion
wherein he thinks a ticket is awaiting him at the box office -- and
performs with usual extravagant badness and the audience eventually
storms the stage in roit and The New York Times calls Clifton the most
obnoxious act in show business history and George is appaled at
Andy's lack of judgement and lectures, "Andy, they hate him!  They
were throwing things at him!"  And there is a malevolent glint in Andy's
eye as he says, "That's right, and they're going to hate him more and
more.  They're going to LOVE to hate him.  And more important, they're
going to PAY to hate him.  Gentlemen, I got myself the next Hula Hoop."

And this comes to pass exactly and, in short order, Clifton is on the cover of
Time magazine and there is a run on peach tuxedos throughout the land and
his preferred exclamation of paranoid ("Getcha hands off me!") becomes the
ubiquitous catchphrase of the moment and he performs at the White House,
where he disgraces Chinese diplomats ("What time does da Chinaman go to
da dentist?" and he is given his own weekly television show on NBC at which
the audience happily comes to boo him as he torments celebrity guests --
asking Raquel Welch about her cosmetic surgery and terrifying the San Diego
Zoo's Joan Embry, who has brought out a baby seal, which is then chased
around the stage by a club-wielding baby-seal-killer from Newfoundland.
And it is Andy Kaufman who is the Svengali-producer of this vulgar
sideshow and who assures Clifton that it is all meant in fun because
Clifton thinks this mania has gone too far and gotten too ugly.  (George
feels the same way and Andy tells him to relax and to try meditating,
but George insists that Andy stop the madness, so Andy fires him.)  To 
distract Clifton from his qualms, Andy has located Anna, the nice hooker,
and sends Clifton off to romp with her and she awakens him at last to
the notion that he is being used and he decides to do something meaningful
in his career, so he tells Andy that he wants to star in a sensitive remake
of The Hunchback of Notre Dame (since he feels a tragic kinship).
 Andy sets up the deal instantly (smelling, in fact, a comedy blockbuster)
and now it is the night of the premiere and Clifton stands in the back
of the theatre and watches the audience scream with laughter at
his Quasimodo, who has a cigarette dangling from his mouth, as per
Cliftonian trademark, while being whiplashed by tormentors.
Aghast that his noble dream has become a laughing-stock, Clifton
runs to find Andy in the theatre manager's office, where he is barking
demands into a telephone  ("I want the TV rights sewed up NOW,
fucker!", then, noticing Clifton, changes his telephone manner and
says, "Yes, Grandma, I love you, too ... ")

Clifton wants the movie stopped and Andy -- (Well, here was how Andy
himself improvised the scene for George back in Lake Geneva, making
illustrative use of his writing cigar:  "Then Kaufman says, 'Tony, sit down.'
 'No, I think I'll stand if you don't mind.'  'Tony, let me explain to you the
facts of life.  Remember tenk you veddy much?  You like I like doing that,
baby?  You think I like that -- oh, he's so cuuuuute!  I do it for two
reasons, baby!  For the moolah and the chickaroos!  That's why I do tenk
you veddy much! You got a gimmick here, Tony.  You gotta play it up!
The public is stupid! The public eats it up!  Listen to them -- they're
laughing at you! They love you!  Take the money!'   'Waitaminute!
Lemme get this straight...' 'Tony, you have been played for a buffoon
 jerkoff! You think people wanna look at you playing the hunchback of
Notre Dame serious? Look at you!  You're a buffoon jerkoff !  That's all you
are and that's all you're ever  gonna be!  I made you!  I made you!  You think
you're gonna give me a hard time and blow it for me?  I'm making a lot  of
money on you, pal. I'm not going to have some stupid buffoon jerkoff
blow it for me!'"  And here Zmuda reminded George:  "This,
you know, is Andy Kaufman actually talking to himself onscreen."
And Andy corrected him -- "But you don't know that.  It has to be
done very well.   No one is going to think that I'm Tony Clifton.")

And Clifton is reduced to tears and he runs back into the theatre and leaps in
front of the screen and tells the audience that they've all been duped and that
the audience believes this to be yet another Clifton act of comic obliviousness
and they begin cheerfully pelting him with rotten tomatoes (supplied by Andy)
and he drips with tomato guts and tell them, "I feel sorry for you people ...
I don't think you even know why you did this ..."  And he pitifully leaves the
stage declaring that he will never return and the stage remains empty and then
the picture freezes -- and the camera pulls back so that the frozen frame is
seen on a film-editing console, where Andy sits and now addresses the camera
to introduce himself as Andy Kaufman, maker of The Tony Clifton Story,
he goes on to say that on July 18, 1980, with three scenes left to be completed
in the film, Tony Clifton, age forty-seven, died of lung cancer at Cedar-Sinai
Medical Center in Los Angeles and two weeks later it was decided by Universal
MCA Pictures that, in honor of Tony Clifton's memory, he would play the role
of Clifton for the remainder of the movie.  (So Andy said to George  in Lake
Geneva:  "And now for the rest of the film, I play Tony Clifton, but the makeup
looks like shit -- putty on the nose, the wig, no belly, it's very crappy looking.
 You can see right through it.  Like that horrible makeup I wore in the Home
Box Office show.  And now the film takes a completely different turn;  it's
going to change from realistic into a complete comedy.   Kaufman is taking
total liberties with the character.  So this is what happens --")

Andy / Clifton leaves the theatre and jumps in a cab and heads for the
airport, where he steals a small plane which crashes in a distant jungle
where Andy / Clifton emerges unharmed and becomes a tribal god
among natives who are impressed with his Sinatraesque chant -- do be
do be doooo -- until he gets word via the jungle paperboy ("Now the film
has taken a new turn, like an Abbott and Costello comedy -- Clifton asks
what the paperboy is doing in the middle of the jungle and the paperboy
says, "Can I help it if they gave me a bad corner?") that Kaufman is
staging an elaborate memorial service at Forest Lawn cemetery and selling
thousands of admission tickets and various other Clifton paraphernalia,
because Clifton was believed to be lost at sea after stealing the plane.
 So Andy / Clifton charges into the memorial service, riding an elephant,
with his tribe of savages in tow, and he clobbers  Kaufman  ("I've been
waitin' to do this for a long time!") who falls into an empty grave and then
Andy / Clifton sees Anna, the nice hooker, and grabs her lustfully and then
offscreen the voice of the real Tony Clifton says,  "Getcha hands off her!"
 And then the real Clifton steps into frame and says to Andy / Clifton,
"Where do you get off tellin' people that I died a cancer?"
And the startled Andy / Clifton gives panicked instructions to his film
crew -- because this is obviously a movie set -- "Keep the camera going!
 This is gold!"  And the real Clifton proceeds to lambast his exploiter for
making mockery of the real Clifton life and the "total fabrication" of
truths implied therein (including, and especially, loss of virginity at
age forty-five!),  and then he walks over to "the girl playing Anna"
and professes his undying love and the cemetery transforms itself into
the set of a magicalBusby Berkeley-style leg-kicking musical finale
at the close of which the real Clifton announces to the camera that
if he has made just one person happy, then it's all been worth it.
 

By the time all the rewrites were completed, an evil Andy had
been replaced by an evil manager named Norman, who would
commit both Andy and Clifton to a sanitarium.

But nobody would really care much anymore.

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 THE TONY CLIFTON STORY