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change the hands of His watch when traveling. Then he returned to the back lot of Universal Studios to complete his grandiloquent acting assignment—“He never appeared on the set as Andy,” said Feldman, who both wrote and directed the film. “He arrived fully charactered as Thunderbird and never once left him.” And during the shoot, he became friendly with Richard Pryor, who played the role of God. Pryor would sit in Andy’s trailer, where Andy often recited from his novel-in-progress (which he was inordinately fond of doing when virtually anyone was within earshot) and one day Linda Mitchell encountered Pryor stepping from the trailer—“He came up to me and he seemed a little stoned and he had tears in his eyes. He put his arms around me and said, ‘Linda, he’s a genius! He makes us all look like nothing!’ I said, ‘What are you talking about?’ Richard said, ‘He’s been reading his book to me.’ I said, ‘God, you are stoned!’ Then I thought, maybe I’m missing something, because I thought Richard was a genius.” (In the publicity notes Feldman prepared for the film’s release, the book would now be characterized as such: “Titled The Huey Williams Story, Andy describes it as a fictional biography of a neighbor he once had who would stand watering his lawn. That is all he knew about his neighbor. The neighbor’s name has been changed in the novel. And the fact that he watered the lawn has been eliminated lest the neighbor recognize himself.”) Feldman, who took a professorial shine to his young charge, would later mordantly note, “In Andy, there is something underneath the playfulness—a sense of danger, a kind of genial anger, as if the way we wearily come to see the world is simply insufficient.”

Not long thereafter, 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. On March 9, 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,