Lost in the Funhouse_ The Life and Mind of Andy Kaufman - Bill Zehme [136]
And Clifton is reduced to tears and he runs back into the theater and leaps in front of the screen and tells the audience that they’ve all been duped and 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 tells 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, and 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 Cedars-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 theater 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 the offscreen 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 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 magical Busby 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.
Thom Mount gave them offices