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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), theaters 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.”

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 pursue 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 bravura, especially after