Hollywood Needs to Make Andy Kaufman’s ‘Tony Clifton Story’

TONY

Shine ... let's see. Shine ... vine ... kind ... 

dine ... fine ... gine. (gradual pick up in tempo)

... hind, line, nine, pine, cline, rine ... (fast now)

sign, tine, vine, wine, yine, gine, zine -- That's every word in the

world that rhymes with shine -- I just went down da alphabet.

“They’re going to hate him more and more,” Kaufman predicts of his protégé. “They’re going to love to hate him. And more important, they’re going to pay to hate him. I got myself the next hoola-hoop.”

But how? After some nights of soul searching, Little Andy hits on a solution: “For a while, I looked into various fields to become famous in. But after careful consideration, I decided on show business. It seemed easier than anything else. Besides, it was a field where total idiots could become famous overnight! And since fame was my only prerequisite, it was the logical choice.”

Not only do we learn the (real?) story of how Kaufman embarked on a comedy career, Little Andy perfectly sums up the premise of The Tony Clifton Story: Comedy is a field where total idiots can become famous overnight.

That’s the third act of The Tony Clifton Story in a nutshell. Just when we think we understand the story’s reality, a layer of skin is pulled back to reveal another, weirder membrane underneath. Then it happens again. And again. Kaufman is Kaufman is Clifton is Zmuda or some other actor playing Clifton — or wait, was it the other way around? It’s one of the best comedy mindscrambles ever committed to paper and it deserves to be on a streaming service near you.

Sure, Kaufman might have dressed up as Clifton now and then for a goof. Same with Zmuda. But that was just Clifton enjoying a night off and Kaufman having yet another laugh at our expense. Even in the screenplay, there are multiple Cliftons — an army of impersonators ready to meet the world’s demand for more Clifton. But Clifton is his own man in The Tony Clifton Story, discovered by Kaufman and unleashed on an unsuspecting public. 

If we entertain the thought experiment that Clifton might have been real, could he still be around? Let’s take it a step further. Zmuda claims that the Tony Clifton Story screenplay is documented proof that Kaufman is still around as well. “Here we go again,” you might say, but hear Zmuda out: He claims their screenplay, archived at Universal for all these years, is proof that Kaufman was either psychic or the greatest fake-death prankster of all time.

“It appears for all to see in black and white on page 124 of The Tony Clifton Story,” says Zmuda in Andy Kaufman: The Truth, Finally, a book he co-wrote with the love of Kaufman’s life, Lynne Margulies. 

Four years before his own death, Kaufman scripted that Clifton would die of cancer at Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Hollywood (that death, in the screenplay, was yet another hoax). Zmuda points out that Kaufman died exactly the same way — of cancer at Cedars-Sinai. “A statistician from the University of California, Berkeley ran an odds-predictability study listing all the possible ways one could die and a total of all the hospitals in the U.S.,” Zmuda has explained. “Statistically, the odds of someone’s predicting what he would die from and the hospital he would die in are 780,000,000 to one. Basically an impossibility. That S.O.B. knew back in 1980 exactly what he would supposedly die from and where.”

Why Kaufman would fake his own death is a story for another article. But the notion that Zmuda believes it’s possible is intriguing. Could Kaufman be waiting somewhere out there, just waiting to yell “gotcha!” when we least expect it?  If he does indeed return, we know the perfect script for his Hollywood comeback.