‘Man on the Moon’ from the other side
‘Jim & Andy’ shows how Carrey went ‘Beyond’ in Kaufman role
When Chris Smith was in high school, a friend gave him a VHS tape of a documentary about one of his idols, Andy Kaufman, the comedian who became the stuff of legend with characters like Foreign Man and obnoxious lounge singer Tony Clifton and stunts like his foray into professional wrestling. his Smith, award-winning who shot to 1999 fame documentary with “American Movie,” remembers thinking, “Oh, this would be a great movie to make. I wish I could have done this.” Wishes do sometimes come true. Producer Spike Jonze granted Smith’s when he tapped him to direct “Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond — Featuring a Very Special, Contractually Obligated Mention of Tony Clifton.” The film, which makes its Netflix premiere on Friday, Nov. 17, blends behind-the-scenes footage from Milos Forman’s 1999 Kaufman biopic “Man on the Moon” with a contemporary interview with the film’s philosophical star Jim Carrey and archival footage of both men’s careers. Blending the various elements together became something of a juggling act for Smith. “You’re balancing the biography of Andy Kaufman, the biography of Jim Carrey, this crazy event (the making of “Man on the Moon”), and then you’re also making a movie about what the ramifications of that were going forward, how they manifested themselves and affected Jim’s life since then,” Smith says during a recent conversation in San Francisco, where he screened “Jim & Andy” as the closing night film of SFFilm’s Doc Stories. That the film would involve all these elements is something Smith brought to the project. The footage was shot by Kaufman’s girlfriend Lynne Margulies (played by Courtney Love in “Man on the Moon”) and Kaufman’s friend and collaborator Bob Zmuda (“Man on the Moon” executive producer, portrayed in the film by Paul Giamatti). Behind-the-scenes footage is normally included with electronic press kits, but with Carrey so completely into the skin of either Andy Kaufman or Tony Clifton, the material was too surreal for that purpose. (Smith likens the 100 hours of raw footage to an Andy Warhol film.) Carrey locked away the material until his friend Jonze persuaded him it was time for the wider world to see it.
The original idea was for Smith to interview not just Carrey, but also other key players for a movie about the experience of making “Man on the Moon.”
“I felt that that ran the risk of becoming a glorified DVD extra, which seemed a lot less interesting to me,” Smith says. “I was much more interested in understanding the emotional and psychological toll this would take on an actor, not only in that experience, but going forward. I very much felt like the movie could and should be told just from Jim’s perspective. It wasn’t until I did the interview that I was pretty confident that that would work.”
Kaufman himself was someone who so completely immersed himself in his performances that even his 1984 death from lung cancer gave rise to rumors that it was an elaborate hoax. That Carrey was determined to follow his lead in portraying him is evident in footage in which “Andy” berates Forman for talking to Jim about Andy. “You talk like I’m not even standing here.”
Carrey recalls sitting on a beach in Malibu on the day he learned he’d won “Man on the Moon’s” lead role. He was wondering if Kaufman could communicate telepathically even after death when 30 dolphins suddenly broke through the Pacific Ocean’s surface.
“That was the moment Kaufman showed up, tapped me on the shoulder and said, ‘Sit down. I’ll be doing my movie.’ ” Carrey says in “Jim & Andy.” “What happened afterwards was out of my control.”
“You’re seeing him constantly being — you’re seeing Jim and Tony and Andy, and they’re all him, yet they’re all different people,” Smith says. “It’s a very revealing portrait, in terms of the way those characters talk about Jim.
“There was an endless amount of material where Jim was Andy or Jim was Tony, so you got kind of got used to him as these sort of alter egos. It had its own charm to it, because you really could just sort of live in that moment or that space and you were able to relive that experience. We’ve tried to give audiences that feeling, with context.”
Smith says he has a hard time imagining the footage he would come to know so intimately sitting, unwatched, in one of Carrey’s closets for nearly 20 years. But the actor’s reluctance to do anything with it presented Smith with an opportunity not just to make a documentary, but also to revisit Kaufman and his work.
“When I look back and really start looking at the footage of Andy, it was such a pleasure to live in his world again,” Smith says. “It’s always good to be reminded that Andy Kaufman existed and of his work, but it’s hard for me to imagine anyone else being able to do that role, just because he was so larger-than-life. You needed someone with that gravity and that presence. When you really look at it, the way that Jim transforms and turns himself into that character, it is so nice to to really see how far he went into that role.”