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Bob Zmuda: Andy Kaufman's Best Friend Tells All
It's like when Priscilla Presley threw open the gates of Graceland to the public after Elvis’ death. It's as though a decision has just been made that the time is right to let us inside the world of Andy Kaufman, behind all the put-ons and inside that amazingly bizarre Graceland that was his mind. Just as with Elvis before him, the whole truth will never be known. (It's just too damned complex.) Very soon, however, everyone will be allowed to line up for the guided tour and have that tiny peek they’ve been waiting years for. It's not much, but it's a hell of a lot more than most of us ever thought we'd ever get. The Elvis analogy unfortunately ends there. If there were a beautiful ex-wife like Priscilla leading the tour, it could go on, but there's not. In the case of Andy, our tour is being lead not by an attractive, desirable woman, but by Bob Zmuda, Andy’s best friend, writer, and co-conspirator in their now infamous pranks against humanity. Bob’s on-screen time wasn’t limited to the obnoxious restaurant drunk though. He was also, on occasion, an obnoxious audience member. Remember that heckler who ruined Andy’s appearance on an HBO comedy special? Well, that was Bob too. You may also remember him as the referee in Andy’s Inter-Gender wrestling matches, or as the lawyer who counsels Andy concerning the possibility of a lawsuit against wrestler Jerry “The King” Lawler in the documentary I’m From Hollywood. These days, in addition to being the Founder and Director of Comic Relief, Bob Zmuda is an executive producer of the upcoming Kaufman biopic, Man on the Moon, and author of the new book, Andy Kaufman Revealed: Best Friend Tells All. Today he has been kind enough to talk with Crimewave not only about sharing a personality with Andy Kaufman (that of hated comedian and singer Tony Clifton), but the art of the prank. He and Andy are the kinds of people that Crimewave was made for... obsessed visionaries who put their craft before common sense and personal gain. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Bob Zmuda. So, the film about you and Andy, Man on the Moon, is coming out November 5th? It looks like it's not going to be released until December 25th now. Universal loves the film so much, they want it to be their big Christmas release. Is it a family film? No, it's not a family film. I thought that's what "Christmas releases" generally were. That's what I thought too, but supposedly not. (The people at Universal) say that everybody goes to the movies at that time of the season. They believe that they will do more business around Christmas time and that this film will blow the other ones away. What's it coming out against? A Tom Hanks film, the Oliver Stone film, with Al Pacino, about the NFL, and some Robin Williams film. And Universal thought that Man on the Moon would be their best shot against these other big films? I don't know. They just love this movie. Have you seen it yet? Yes, many, many times. What did you think? I love it. I think Jim Carrey will get an academy award and I think Milos Forman will get an academy award... It does great service to Andy's memory. What was your role in seeing the film get made? I'm an Executive Producer on the film, along with George Shapiro and Howard West, with Danny DeVito's Production Company, Jersey Films. I worked closely with Scott and Larry, the guys who wrote it. I was on the set every day. I'm still working around the clock on the marketing and the promotion of the film. You're being played in the film by Paul Giamatti? Yeah, I was too old to play myself. He was great the Howard Stern movie, Private Parts. He is fantastic.... I couldn't be happier. Is he a better you than you? (raising his voice) Nobody's a better me than me, Mark! Nobody's better than me, you know?... But I think that Paul caught the magic between Kaufman and Zmuda. And that relationship was what was important. And how would you sum up the magic between Kaufman and Zmuda?.... What advice, if any, did you give Giamatti when he came in to do the role of Bob Zmuda? That's a good question.... I provided a certain role for Andy. You know, Andy and I had met at the Improv in New York, before he came out here (to LA) and become famous. So, I knew Andy when he wasn't famous. And our senses of humor were very similar and we always wanted to work together. Then, once he became famous and felt that he was getting further and further away from his real work, which was his art, and getting swept into the Hollywood fabric of celebrity and all that, he really needed Zmuda more than ever to come out, and kind of hold his hand through this process. So, to answer your question as far as with Giamatti, I wanted to convey to him what that relationship was. And Jim (Carrey) was very concerned too, you know, like... "What is the relationship? What is the need? Why is it that when Kaufman comes out to Hollywood he tells Shapiro and West, 'I must have Zmuda. I need to find Zmuda. Zmuda has to be my writer. I don't want anybody else. This is the guy.'?" And it was through all of that that Paul got into what the relationship was all about. So, were you still in New York when Andy called you to come out to Hollywood? No, I was actually living in San Diego at the time. What were you doing in San Diego? I was working as a short order cook in a hotel. I was maybe making about ninety bucks a week... Andy had said to me years before that he was going to be famous, and that, when he was, he wanted me to be his writer. And I'd said, "If you become famous, Andy, I'd be happy to be your writer."... So, the girl who I was living with at the time, who was an ex-waitress from the Improv in New York, she remembered that. She said, "Why don't you call him up, now that he's becoming a big star in LA?" I said, "The guy's not going to remember me. Come on. Give me a break." And I kind of just hung out in San Diego and got stoned a lot. We had a place close to the beach, but we couldn't even afford a phone. I figured, “Who's gonna call me anyway?” And then a very odd thing happened... And nothing like this had ever happened to me before. I was at work one day— it was like 6:00 AM. I was (cooking) eggs and making breakfast, and I heard a little voice say to me, "Take off your apron, go back to your apartment, and wait, because your life is about to change." I had heard this voice that clearly. I had never heard voices before in my life! When I hear that people hear voices, I think that they're nuts! But, I took my apron off and quit my job right there. I told my boss that I was quitting and he just couldn't believe it. I went back to my place and my girlfriend, Shelly, said, "What are you doing back? Were you fired or something? Did you get in a fight with the boss?" "No, no, no, it's the craziest thing... I heard this voice that said my life was going to change." So, are you talking pretty freely about Tony Clifton now? You aren't keeping his true identity under wraps any longer? Yes, I'm talking about it now. When did you decide to do that? Well, first of all, the movie does it. Then, on top of that, because my book is coming out before the movie, I figured, "Why am I holding things back from the book?" Kaufman fans are going to say, "Well, Zmuda's the one guy who knows the truth about all this stuff." So, the movie's doing it, and I can't talk about it? That didn't seem right. It didn't seem fair, so I decided to do it. So, my book is called, Andy Kaufman Revealed! Best Friend Tells All, and I tell it all. What do you say about Tony in the book? I get into how, at a certain point, Hollywood was getting to Andy and he needed to bring Tony back. You see, when Andy started his act, way back in New York, he was Foreign Man. There was no "Andy Kaufman." Foreign Man wasn't even Latka; he was Foreign Man. Then, more or less, he sold the character's soul to the producers of Taxi, and they christened him Latka. Andy Kaufman, of course, became famous by selling his character's soul to Taxi... and that was OK with Andy, because Andy would then have the celebrity to do what he wanted to do. So that was kind of like the price he paid to the Devil. But what Andy missed then was the fact that he couldn't go on stage anymore and make believe that he was Foreign Man, because people just realized, "No, that's Andy Kaufman from Taxi. He's an actor playing a character." Well, that went very against Kaufmanism, Andy's whole style of putting the audience on. He couldn't put them on anymore that he was somebody else, because they knew who he was. So then, he had the idea in Hollywood, when he'd really had it with Hollywood and Taxi and everything else, to bring Tony Clifton back, and that's when we did elaborate prosthetics on his face, so nobody could tell that it was Andy. That's when he started opening for Rodney Dangerfield and doing stuff. He loved it. It was like he had just started in the clubs again, when no one knew who he was, and he could have fun pulling pranks on the audience. Well, that didn't last too long, when finally word got out in Hollywood that, in fact, Tony Clifton is Andy Kaufman. And Andy would write letters to the editor of the Calendar section of the LA Times saying, "Will you quit telling people I'm Tony Clifton. I'm not. I'm Andy Kaufman. Tony Clifton is a real guy. Blah, blah, blah." And then that whole controversy started. But still, I remember one day Tony Clifton went up at the Comedy Store and Tony wasn't on stage one minute when the audience started chanting, "Ann-Dee, Ann-Dee, Ann-Dee... We know it's Ann-Dee!" So, Tony stormed off and Andy smashed up the dressing room... I mean, Tony did... because we'd have to go back to Andy's house to take off the Tony Clifton make-up and everything. And Andy says, "That's it. I'm so fucking pissed that I can't believe it. I can't even do Tony Clifton anymore." And then he said, "Wait a second... the audience thinks that Tony is Andy, let's let them think that, and then you, Zmuda, you become Tony." So then we had great fun with that. Were you comfortable with that... with being Tony Clifton? No! Not at first. At first, I said, "You're out of your fucking mind. I ain't going on no fucking David Letterman program. What are you, nuts?" My nerves couldn't take it. I didn't need that shit, you know? I remember when you were on Letterman. You didn't come across as terribly upset. No, well, Andy got me into it. Once I committed to it, I was fine. Tony's such a wonderful character to play, and, because I'd been writing with Andy for all those years, I knew Tony's voice, so I knew the character and I knew how he sounded and everything... I'd been doing the character without anybody but Andy watching for years. So then, I started doing Clifton. I'd gone on Letterman, I'd gone on Merv, and they all believed that I was Andy Kaufman. During a commercial break, Letterman even turned to me and said, "Andy, if I didn't know it was you, I'd swear that it was somebody else." And, Mark, we kept it just between Andy and I, and he just loved it. You know, for Andy the whole thing was about pulling one off on the audience. Even though nobody knew this but me and Andy, he was just fine with it. Didn't he ultimately get to the point where he was standing up in the audience and interacting with Clifton? Yeah. What happened with this... After all that, Tony Clifton got booked at Harrah's, Lake Tahoe, in the main room, for two weeks. As a matter of fact, Harrah's called George Shapiro to book Tony. George said, "Let's get one thing straight. Tony Clifton and Andy Kaufman are two different people." And they were like, "Oh, yeah, we get it. Sure, sure, sure," thinking that it was just Andy. George knew that it really was two separate people and he was just like, "OK. If you want to book him, go ahead and book him." And then, when Tony Clifton went up there, Andy showed up too, because he wanted to be seen. He'd walk around the casino during the day to be seen, to kind of sell the illusion. And then my Tony would go up at night to perform. Meanwhile, Andy would go to the whore houses in Reno, like the Mustang Ranch. But a couple times during the two week run, he would show up in disguise. He had this long hair and he looked like Bob Zmuda. So Andy would show up in the audience as Bob Zmuda, with the long hair and the glasses, and heckle Tony. And he'd say, "We know it's really you, Andy Kaufman. Why are you bullshitting these people?" And I would have security remove Andy... Little did Harrah's security know that they were throwing out the very guy they thought they hired. Is that bizarre or what? Yeah, it's incredible... Speaking of bizarre, I was watching the film My Breakfast with Blassie the other day. When you come out at the end and throw up on the table where Andy and Fred Blassie are eating breakfast, how did you do that? And did Andy know you were going to do that? (laughing) No, no. He didn't know I was going to do that. The reason I ask is because right after that happens, Andy excuses himself from the table, saying that he has to wash his hands or something. It just seemed to me that you really caught him off guard and that he had to go and laugh or something. Yeah, I think it got to him. I was wondering how that came about. I was thinking, "Would Bob have done that without Andy knowing?" Yeah, we were just improvising. Listen, I didn't even want to go there that day. He was telling me that he was making a student film or something. "Oh, boy," you know... and then he dragged me there with him. Then, when I was there, I got caught up in the fever of the moment. If I'm not mistaken, I think I had a vanilla milkshake. So, after I went over to their table and pulled the straws out of my nose, I immediately got cast as this kind of obnoxious guy. So then, when I came over again, I came over with my mouth full of vanilla ice cream milkshake and I start spitting it up. And then, I think that even I start laughing as I was spitting up. And Kaufman is going like, "Oh my god, I can't believe it." "What the hell," I figured, no one was going to see this anyway. Little did I know that over twenty years later, it's a classic. Did Fred Blassie know what was going on? No, he had no idea. I don't think that any of us knew what was going on, to tell you the truth. I think that Johnny Legend, who put this together, kind of said to Andy, who was a huge Fred Blassie fan, "How'd you like to have breakfast with Blassie? I'll get Blassie, we'll shot it and you can just talk your philosophies." We basically got that it was a spoof of My Dinner with Andre. We knew about My Dinner with Andre, that it was a high-end, sophisticated, intellectual talk plot in a very fine dining establishment, so we knew the juxtaposition of where he was going, you know? But I don't think Andy thought about that much. I know I certainly didn't. And I don't think Fred did. I think it was just a question of, if you got Andy and Fred to talk, this is pretty much how the conversation would go anyway. So there wasn't anything written or even anything conceptually, like any major beats, figured out. There was really none of that. It was really what you see is what you got... But it's a real psychodrama that's played out. Concerning your book, is there anything you left out that you wish you would have put in? There was one story that I tried to get in at the end but they told me that it was too late. It was just this story where I was in the hospital with a broken arm after having been mugged. I was in a tremendous amount of pain and Andy was very upset. He wanted to kill the guys who did this to me, you know? Well, one of the days that I'm in the hospital, Andy and George Shapiro walked in, and they're talking to me and I can see that they have these little smiles on their faces. And I was in a lot of pain and I was thinking, "How can these guys be smiling and feeling so good when I'm so miserable?" And no sooner had they left than the door opened up and these two gorgeous nurses, with these big tits hanging out of their tops, come in with a little pan and some water and some sponges. They say they have to give me a sponge bath... My arm now is suspended over my head by some gadget so I can't move it... The next thing I know, the girls are washing my dick. Then one takes it in her mouth and starts blowing me, while the other one takes out her tits and shoves them in my face. I've got to tell you, Mark, for the prior 48 hours I don't think I had a single moment of comfort. Talk about a wild scene. I unhooked my arm from that fucking gizmo and I was all over them. It was great. Of course, once I realized... Wait, are you saying that you didn't realize until you were fucking that Andy and George set this up? You must have known... Yeah, I knew real quick. I knew that it was George and Andy, and that they had gone out and hired these two gorgeous hookers to take care of their friend Bob... So that was a good story that I wanted to tell, that never made it to the book. As a matter of fact, the punch of that, as George reminds me, is that, in the middle of this three-headed beast in the bed, the real nurse, who's an elderly type woman, walks in and says, "Oh, special nurses." Then she just turned and walked out, like she was used to seeing this at Cedar-Sinai, or where ever I was. Well, I'm glad that that was the punch line and not that when the gorgeous nurses took off their wigs and prosthetic breasts, you discovered they were really Andy and George. (Bob screams and laughs) Were you a wrestling fan, or did Andy bring that to your relationship? No, Andy was a big fan, but I really wasn't. Then, early on, he started taking me to the matches at Madison Square Garden. But, I got where he was going with that. To him, that was performance. At Madison Square Garden, you'd have people screamin' and yellin', as opposed to the nice, smaller Improv audience that he was used to, where people would laugh and applaud. To him this was like the big rock concert kind of scene. As a performer, he wanted more of that. Then, of course, that went on to influence his work greatly as far as fooling and manipulating an audience and not caring if people loved you or even liked you... That it was OK if they hated you, because, in his knowledge of wrestling, that's what the rules were. If you were a "bad guy" wrestler, you were more fun than the heroes. How long do you think Andy could have gone on, if he hadn't passed away? How long do you think that the American public would have put up with it? Oh, I think that it just would have kept going, and going, and going, because Andy always would have stayed one step ahead of them. It's like Madonna, as long as you can stay one step ahead of the public. That's the challenge of the stuff he was doing. We just couldn't believe that for so many years we pulled so many damned pranks off. You would think that at one point they would just say, "We aren't going to believe one more thing that Andy Kaufman says any more." What do you make of the fact that quite a few people didn't believe Andy when he said that he was dying? If anything gave Andy solace as he was dying, it was the fact that people thought that he was faking his death. That gave him great laughter. I'd push him around in the wheelchair, when he got down to 80 pounds, with no hair left on his head, and people would come up to him and say, "Andy, you with this dying routine now." Trust me, when you're dying, to have people think that about you, you just can't help but laugh. And he laughed at it. He thought that was as good as it gets. For this being as bad as it gets, this is as good as it gets. That's why Universal is making a movie about this guy. It's the most bizarre thing. That's why Jim Carrey, Nicholas Cage, Sean Penn, Ed Norton, Tom Hanks... the list goes on and on... everybody fought for and wanted to play this roll, because the subject matter is so unbelievable. And it's all true. There ain't nothing you have to make up about Andy Kaufman. People say, "Bob, are you going to bullshit in your book?" Bullshit!? Why would I have to bullshit? All I have to do is record. Don't you think that it might have been in the spirit of things to have embellished a bit? Well, there's a couple points... I don't want to toot my own horn, Mark, but just today I got two great reviews. One in Publishers Weekly and one in Kirkus, and my publisher tells me these are like huge reviews to get from these guys because it's where book buyers go. And what the reviews point out is that this book is honest and that I didn't just keep all these things going. I come clean because I think there's a greater understanding and appreciation of Andy if you know the whole story, if you know how the whole public was bamboozled, and what it took to bamboozle the public... In other words, you don't go on TV and do the things that Andy Kaufman did unless you have the full approval of the producers of the show and of the network, or else you'll never get on TV again. That's the bigger story... For people to realize the hoops he had to jump through and the business mind behind it to pull it off. Not that Andy wasn't totally out of this world - he was... But to be able to get other people to appreciate his work as an artist and to allow him in to mess with American television like he did, that’s really a story... Of course, they did it because he always delivered. What's next for you after this? Well, after this, Tony Clifton will go out on the road. Really!? Do you have any dates set yet? No, it's still in the very early stages. It's just that the positioning will be right to get Tony out there, due to the visibility of this film. You do know that Tony stars in the movie with Jim Carrey? He plays himself. Should we be looking for a Tony Clifton album as well? Sure, a Tony Clifton album, concert dates, TV appearances, everything, the whole gambit. He is the international singing sensation. You do know that, Mark? I've heard that mentioned, but I've never actually heard him sing. Oh my god... Well, I know for a fact that he will be at the premiere for Man on the Moon and that he will be performing at the party afterwards with some very big-name acts. And I've heard a rumor that Tony Clifton is, as we speak, putting together a music video with some very big-name stars, that will be out at around the time of the film. Well, if he needs any help at the premiere, just let me know. I'd be glad to carry his bags, or stand in the wings with a towel for him to dry his face on. (Bob laughs, but yet doesn't respond to my offer.) Tony will be quite a star. He'll go on to make quite a splash. Should we look for Tony to appear at the upcoming Comic Relief? I don't know if they'd put him in Comic Relief. He's kind of out there. You know, it's a live show, Comic Relief, and knowing Tony, he might refuse to leave. So that might be kind of scary. We'd really have our hands full. He's really uncontrollable. How are things going with Comic Relief? Great. We'll be doing number nine sometime in the spring. Yeah, we've raised 50 million dollars so far, and it's kind of a well-oiled machine at this point. How did Comic Relief get its start? It seems like a pretty wild turn from what you'd been doing with Andy. Well, it was Andy's death that was the catalyst for Comic Relief. It started with "Tony Clifton Live," a fund-raiser for the American Cancer Society one year after Andy's death. And that was the prototype for Comic Relief. It seems that if Tony did the first one, and started the whole thing, he'd be welcomed back. Well, Tony might think he's too big for Comic Relief. Bigger than Billy Crystal, Whoopi Goldberg or Robin Williams? Well, you see, Tony's ego has always been totally out of line. Remember, this is the guy who calls himself, "The International Singing Sensation," and tells people that he's sold more records than the Beatles and Elvis Presley combined. And you and I both know that's not true. But the guy believes it, so what are you going to do? I guess you could have him locked up. (laughs) Well, he may get locked up. You never know. Assuming that the film does as well as everyone thinks that it will, you'll probably be in a position to get more of your projects green-lighted in Hollywood. If that's the case, what are you going to try first? Well, I'd like to see The Tony Clifton Story get made. That was the script that Andy and I worked on at Universal. If Man on the Moon is a success, I think The Tony Clifton Story is a natural for Universal to take off the shelf and dust off. They own it... I'd like to see that made because that's what Andy Kaufman put his heart and soul into right before he died. So that would be a real amazing thing to see made, and maybe, with this revival of Kaufman's, it will happen. I'm sure it will, if you get out there and push for it. Well, I'm mentioning it to you. Every article from now on, I'm going to start mentioning The Tony Clifton Story. So, if I asked what kind of unfinished business Andy left, that would be right up there? Yeah, that would definitely be there at the top of the list. Was there anything else? There was a sitcom idea that he and I had been working on called Fingers and Knuckles. Andy would have played Knuckles. It's hard to describe without seeing the characters... It was really character driven. It wasn't any great breakthrough with the story or anything, it was just these characters. It was a character that no one had ever seen Andy do. I think you can see a little bit of Knuckles when he had a puppet do Knuckles on one of his Soundstage specials. I believe that Knuckles appears on that in a marionette form. But the voice was that of Andy. So, had Andy lived, that would have been the next character. You know, Andy was a real character actor when you think about it. He did Tony Clifton, Latka, British Man, and Elvis. And this was another major character that he had come up with, that he had tested out on the street and loved, but had never made it to TV. The name Knuckles would suggest, to me, that this character was something of a tough guy. Was he? No, Knuckles made Latka look like a tough guy. As a matter of fact, when the script was given to the network, they commented that they couldn't put Knuckles on television because people would think that the character was making fun of retarded people. Andy really took great offense at that. Andy said, "What do you mean, he's a sweet guy, like Latka?" Then an executive said, "Andy, at least Latka could make it to the elevator and press the button." We didn't think that, but apparently that's the way they saw him. And the other character, Fingers, was pretty much the same? Let's say that he was "extremely pure of heart." Did Andy ever fool you? Well, I told you the story about the prostitutes and that's probably the closest. I fooled him more than he fooled me. It was so weird... On stage he could keep a straight face pretty much, but, for some reason, when he tried to suck me into stuff he'd start laughing. When he was on the stage he could seem to go more for the fantasy than if you were with him privately. In other words, if you had a bunch of people in a room and you were all trying to put someone on, and you had to keep a straight face, Andy would be almost the first one to break out of it. The laughter would just get him too much. I know I pulled a good one off on him once. My ex-wife had been living in town here and he was attracted to her. I could sense that this was happening, but I could also see that he didn't want it to come between us. I was already living with someone else, but to him it was still, "Zmuda's ex-wife." So one day, he beat around the bush and asked if I would think it was alright if he asked my ex-wife out on a date. I said, "Sure, Andy." And he said, "Are you sure, because I don't want to offend you or anything?"... You know, he was extremely polite... I said, "No, no, it's fine. I'm living with someone else now. My ex-wife's a wonderful woman. You're a great guy. I think you guys might hit it off." So, they went out, and then I talked to my ex-wife the next day. Well, I asked her and she told me they'd, "done the deed." I said, "This is great," and she asked why. I said, "because I have a great joke to play on Andy." So, the next day, Andy called me with this terrible guilt about having fucked my wife... even though she was my ex-wife. He called me... and... OK, Mark, make believe that you're Andy and say "hi" to me. Hi, Bob. Oh, it's you, huh Andy. Yeah... Well, what do you want? I just wanted to... (angrily) You know what, Andy, I'm a little busy right now! Click. I did this to him and it drove him out of his mind. I kept it going all day. And then I got my ex-wife in on it. She talked to Andy and said, "Yeah, I probably shouldn’t have told Bob that we slept together. He really did not take it the right way, Andy." Andy was so upset. I really got him good with that one. I had him twirlin' in the wind for a while. (laughs) It was because of his guilt. You see, what we both realized is that if you always play into a person's guilt, then you can really play with their heads. That's a good lesson for me to take away from this conversation. It is a good lesson. That's where it all starts. The best way to play a practical joke on somebody is to understand what their worst fear and paranoia is. Then you've got them. It's like they can't even see outside of that, so they don't even see it coming. Even if they do see it coming, they somehow still believe it. Do you have any outlet for this side of your personality now that Andy's gone? Not much. Except now, because of the film, over the past eight months Jim Carrey and I have been able to play a lot in this kind of fashion... That was kind of our assignment in order to pull the movie off... And that did kind of awaken in me again that Kaufmanism kind of way of doing stuff. So, that's great. In a way it's like a childish ability that I see now as an important part of my life... and that I need to get some of that back. So I'm probably playing more practical jokes in my life now on people than I was three years ago, or two years ago. That was probably spurred on by all of this. And, hopefully, more of it will be spurred on. I think that it's a good thing to do. Yeah, I find it good to torture people by playing on their worst fears, paranoias and guilt. Absolutely. Maybe, in a way, it prepares people not to take their guilt and their paranoia that seriously. Because we do take it so seriously. And by doing that, it kind of lets... It's kind of like that old saying, if someone pulls a practical joke on you, can you laugh at yourself... You've got to be able to laugh at yourself, because if you take it too seriously, forget it. Did you ever take it too far? No, I don't think so. I don't think we ever took anything too far. I think that was kind of our job. Certainly the mystique of what was Andy Kaufman was his act. If you took that away, I think that the artist couldn't have survived. I think that's the life blood of an Andy Kaufman. That's why he hated Taxi... yeah, it's comedy, it's fame, it's fortune but it's not fun... and it's not daring. I'm glad that he stayed loyal to that. Yeah, he stayed loyal to it. He's a role model when it comes to that. That's always been one of the things I admired most about him, that he didn't take the easy way out when it would have been really easy to do so. Instead, he went out and wrestled women.... probably not a great career move. And that's why, at the end, Andy has the last laugh, because he becomes a legend. Because he did push the envelope and because he did take all that grief. Now it's easy. They're making a 70 million dollar movie about him. There are books out about him. He's a legend. The biggest stars in the world are playing him. The biggest directors are directing movies about him. So, I guess it worked, at least on a certain level. What was the most important thing you brought to the relationship with Andy. I think probably the most important thing that any writer can bring to a comedian that he writes for, is the ability to laugh... The fact that that person makes you laugh... You know, when I think of my real job, it's to laugh at Andy's stuff. Now that doesn't mean to make believe that I'm laughing, but to really laugh. These guys know... and that's their sounding board. Then they know that it works. Do you think that's why he went back and got you, because he knew you before, he trusted you and he knew that you wouldn't laugh at just anything? Andy thought I was the greatest story teller he ever met in his life. I'm going to sound very arrogant in saying this, but Andy Kaufman thought that I was the funniest person he ever met in his life. And because of that, and because he thought my sense of humor was similar to his... And I believe that you want people around you who think the way that you do... I think that's how friendships and relationships are born and go on... And he just trusted my opinion. Also, because this, at times, was very scary stuff to go out and do... and because I came from a 60's radical guerrilla street theater political background where you did these outlandish things on the street just about to the point where the police would come in to arrest people. So, he thought that was cool, because of the nature of the work that he was doing would get dangerous at times. And he needed to have somebody there that wouldn't run off scared when you were doing it. We were kind of ballsy when it came to that shit. *** (I'd like to thank Bob Zmuda for taking the time out of his very busy schedule in order to do this interview (he was kind enough to have called us three times to complete it), for sending us an advance copy of his book, and for promising to set up an interview with Tony Clifton in the coming year. The book, Andy Kaufman Revealed! Best Friend Tells All is published by Little, Brown and Company and is available everywhere. I am only halfway done with it right now, but it is already one of my favorite books of all time. The only bad thing about it is that it makes me wish I’d asked completely different questions... Buy it immediately. A++) (A special thanks also to Mike and Kristen at Comic Relief for being among the nicest people we’ve run across in LA and for seeing that this interview came off successfully.) |
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With a star-studded film and two new books about Andy Kaufman on the horizon, I am preparing, along with the rest of the world, to revisit the whirlwind of confusion that he stirred up over his brief, yet eventful, career. This time around though, we won't just be getting Andy's inspired brand of chaos, we'll be getting answers— what was a hoax and what wasn't, why he really wrestled women, and much more.