- Man on the moon movie details trial#
- Man on the moon movie details professional#
- Man on the moon movie details tv#
He was getting a bad press and was voted off Saturday Night Live in a viewers' phone poll that Kaufman clearly believed he would win: a rare stunt of which he was not in control.īut Carrey plays Kaufman the same throughout, in good times and bad, with no growth and no progression, with the same blinking, moon-faced detachment, a sort of halfway-house between Kaufman's weird, deadpan live act and an assumed professional backstage reserve. What could and should have been interesting about Andy Kaufman's life is how he reacted to failure: he had hardly reached the top when public and fellow artists alike wearied of being his straight man, and turned against him.
Man on the moon movie details trial#
(Judd Hirsch and most of the original cast of Taxi appear in the film, unsmilingly enduring once again the trial of looking like pedestrian schmucks compared to Kaufman's mercurial talent, but not DeVito, who has interestingly promoted himself out of the Taxi cast to play someone in on the gag.) But this wild and crazy guy died from lung cancer at the age of 35, a career move which took him into the realm of legend and away from playing, say, the silver-haired lead in Father of the Bride 2.
Man on the moon movie details tv#
And considering how profoundly conservative American network television was and is, it is remarkable how far Kaufman was allowed to go: mad stunts on air, attacking and humiliating the audience, "a single-minded pursuit of anarchy" from which he appears never to have been spiritually seduced by a parallel career in a top-rated middle-of-the-road network TV show. Man On The Moon cannot risk attempting to be funny on its own account it has to establish a complementary tone of respectful, bittersweet drama as a showcase for the implied comic genius. And afterwards,Kaufman's agent George Shapiro (Danny DeVito) chuckles prescriptively: "You're insane! But you might also be brilliant!" QED. The film does an efficient sleight-of-hand job of suggesting comic genius: Kaufman dying on stage at the Improv club cut to shot of audience looking baffled and irritated cut to shot of Kaufman ploughing on cut to audience smiling, shrugging, starting to laugh. But we never get much more than a few seconds' continuous showing of Kaufman's act, his "comedy canvas", and maybe that is as it should be. Jim Carrey, in a solemn and conspicuous act of ancestor worship, plays Kaufman, and Milos Forman directs: a return to his familiar themes of madness and creative inspiration. A volatile stand-up-comedian-cum-situationist-hoaxer, Kaufman is now remembered here, if at all, for his squeaky-voiced Latka in the early 80s TV show Taxi.īut he was also a cult figure in the US for his anarchic performances on Saturday Night Live, Letterman, Johnny Carson and playing live on the lucrative college circuit or in Vegas as his alter ego, the appalling lounge singer Tony Clifton. The problem arises with the short and troubled life of Andy Kaufman, the subject of Man On The Moon. But sooner or later the camera has to peep, however cursorily, at what is actually on the canvas, and risk all that assumed brilliance looking a bit thin. You can show the painter being brilliant and drunk in a cafe, or brilliant and angry with agent or gallery-owner, or brilliant and inspired in his atèlier. Films about great comics have a similar problem to films about (fictional) painters.