by Bob Zmuda
Lorne stated:
I knew an essentially shy kid who had gone from his parents’ home to a stage to national television. People would describe Andy as “quirky” or “idiosyncratic,” all of which were euphemisms for “We weren’t there yet.” Nobody knew where he was headed, but it seemed really interesting. I think that the network at the time and the consciousness of what people would find acceptable was pretty sad. Andy was on the outside of what people were prepared to risk. But in late-night television, people did not mind it, and he was instantly popular. What I tried to do with him was to bring him along gently, so that he was always protected on the show. The cast was instantly supportive of him, a little less later on because during the second or third year, Andy would be doing pieces that could last a weekend and that meant that they wouldn’t get to perform. But he was the first to begin to define anti-performance. He didn’t really care whether the audience joined in or not. He was talking to himself out loud, basically, and if you wanted to tune in to the dialogue, it was perfectly all right with him. But he wasn’t pleading with you to join in. It was conceptual and pure and, more importantly to me, it was what he wanted to do. I wish I could say it was popular. It was certainly popular in the small segment of society that I lived in. Back then, the kids in the ‘70s used to call it “Brechtian.” It was anti-performance and therefore, sometimes the audience response was outrage or anger, which seemed to please him. I looked at it as if I was presenting a performance piece from Andy Kaufman. As for the wrestling, what happened was, as he became more and more committed to it, like people who develop an orthodoxy, it’s very hard to get out of it, because you’re pretty much heading down that road. And Andy passed the sort of safety exits three or four exits ago.
Jump ahead a few years and Lorne leaves the show and Dick Ebersol’s now producing it. Andy shows up one day, Ebersol watches his bit and says no, he doesn’t like it, and bumps Andy from that week’s telecast. Apparently the two get into a loud shouting match. I wasn’t there at the time, as I was off writing a Joel Schumacher film called D.C. Cab for Universal. Andy did call me a couple of weeks later and told me that he and Ebersol had mended fences and in fact Dick had come up with a funny idea for him. I said, “What’s that?” Andy asked me if I had seen SNL a few months before, when they did a phone-in vote with viewers at home. It was to kill a lobster or to let it live. The lobster’s name was Larry. With a boiling pot of water and a live lobster, votes were taken during the live telecast. Luckily for Louie, at the end of the show viewers voted to save his life. I told Andy I did see the segment. What did this have to do with him? “Well, what Dick wants to do,” he said, “is to have another vote. This time, they vote if I live or die.” “Live or die?” I asked. Andy answered, “Vote to keep me on the show or off. Same thing, I guess.” I immediately said, “They’re going to vote you off.” Andy said, “You think so?” I said, “I know so. Comedically, if they voted to save the lobster, the next bastard they vote on is going down. It’s only logical.” He laughed. “That will be great.” I said, “I’m missing something here. How is getting voted off of SNL a good thing?” “Because,” he said, “Dick and I agreed that if I do get voted off …” Once again I repeated, “Not if—you will.” He said, “Fine. Once they vote me off, a few weeks later, Dick’s going to call me and I’ll appear back on the show either first as a guy sweeping up in the background or as Tony Clifton.” I said, “That’s funny.”
So on November 20, 1982, they vote and—as expected—Kaufman is voted off. Everything is going as planned, but then a strange thing happens—Ebersol never calls Kaufman as promised. And any time Andy calls him, he refuses to take the call; i.e., Ebersol double-crosses Andy. He really is cut from the show—FOREVER! Everyone in the Kaufman camp, including myself, is shocked and appalled by Ebersol’s behavior. Marty Klein, Andy’s agent at APA, tries to reason with Dick, but to no avail. George Shapiro, Andy’s manager, doesn’t fare much better. Andy was furious. He even wanted to sue Ebersol and NBC. He felt he had to do something. Immediately ticket sales for our college dates began to drop drastically, as SNL was such a powerful cultural program that people were going to believe what they heard. Andy was DOA.
***
What I’ve found astonishing all these years, and nobody other than myself has really picked up on it, is the willingness on the part of Lorne Michaels and the cast of Taxi to play themselves in the film. Weren’t they aware that Scott and Larry’s script portrays them as antagonists to Kaufman, our anti-hero? They are, after all, the Inquisition to Kaufman the artist. Didn’t they know they were being cast as the heavies?
If the script didn’t convey that to them when they read it, or perhaps they only read their parts, then surely a brief analysis of Milos’s films should have given them a clue. Think about it. Milos only does films where the hero, be he Amadeus, Jack Nicholson in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Larry Flynt, or Andy Kaufman are castigated by the society they live in. In Man on the Moon, these antagonists are the cast of Taxi, SNL, and the maniacal network executive played brilliantly by the late Vincent Schiavelli. But who in their right mind would portray themselves in such a light? The actors I could understand—a big Universal film directed by Milos Forman. How do you turn that down? But Lorne Michaels? Lorne didn’t strike me as the type of person whose ego made him want to see himself on the big screen. With his portfolio he could probably buy Universal. Why then? To what end? Besides, it was Dick Ebersol who actually appeared on SNL and read the statement against Andy, not Lorne. It is bad enough that Dick goes down in history as the guy who dumped Kaufman. Why should Lorne get caught up in the controversy? He wasn’t even attached to the show when the “vote” happened. Besides, if anyone supported Andy’s work it was Michaels. I recently asked Scott Alexander why Lorne played the Dick Ebersol role. He told me because Lorne was in an earlier scene, so they just decided not to throw too many SNL producers at the film-going audience as it might confuse them. Besides, Bob, “It’s only a fucking movie.” I had to laugh. He was right. But still, if you lived through the reality of “the vote” like Lynne, George, Stanley Kaufman, and I did and saw how deeply it injured Andy, you had to take it seriously. It was the second time in his life that Andy felt dumped, the first being when he thought his grandfather had dumped him. As Stanley would say about the vote, “Andy never fully recovered from it.”
Now, to be fair, I could see why Ebersol got upset with Andy. Kaufman found SNL downright boring. I would watch him watch the TV monitor in his dressing room and just stare at the sketches going out live. He never smiled once. They just didn’t register. And yet America was going crazy for the stuff. The show and cast had really taken off. Andy would get on a chair and reach up to the monitor mounted high on the wall and change the channel—looking for cartoons or, better yet, wrestling. Now that’s something he could relate to. Did Ebersol perhaps walk into Andy’s dressing room once too often and see his precious programming turned off while Andy looked for Popeye cartoons?
Or even worse. How about when Ebersol couldn’t even get into Andy’s dressing room to talk to him because of that “fucking meditation.” Andy would meditate for twenty minutes before every performance. Never missed it. Ever. It didn’t matter if it was SNL. There always was a huge sign on his door: “Meditating—Do Not Disturb.”
Lynne
He did it at Taxi too. First of all, he had it in his contract that he didn’t have to be there for the week of rehearsals that the rest of the cast had to do. Andy had a stand-in for the week, and only had to show up on Friday for the dress rehearsal before the show. (He could memorize the script after one reading.) So that alone drove the rest of the cast crazy. And then, while they were all out on the stage for dress rehearsal, they’d be waiting for Andy while he was in his dressing room meditating. I remember being in there meditating with Andy and Tony Danza pounding on the door yelling, “Andy, get the fuck out here!” I glanced up at Andy and he had the tiniest little smile on his face while he conti
nued meditating. He loved driving people mad.
When he walked out on that stage in front of all those “LIVE” cameras being beamed out to millions of viewers, what they were seeing was basically a man still in a “trance,” or at the very least just coming out of one. He wasn’t even operating on this physical plane! The mere fact that he was able to get away with this for as long as he did is in itself a miracle. I could only imagine what might have been going on in Dick Ebersol’s mind when he finally figured it out:
E: You’re not eating up my precious time reaching nirvana on my show, not when Clearasil commercials are going for twenty-five thousand dollars for thirty seconds. Pack up your ‘mantra’ and get the hell out of here! We take comedy seriously here at SNL.
A: If you take it so seriously, why isn’t it funny?”
E: Not funny to you, perhaps, because you’re a weirdo.
A: I laugh at Laurel and Hardy, Abbott and Costello, and W.C. Fields! I laughed when Eddie Murphy would say, “I’m Gumby, damn it.”
E: Any other time on SNL?
A: Probably not.
E: Andy, do you know how insulting it is for you to find the other cast members who work hard all week not funny?
A: I’m sorry. Do you want me to lie and make believe I’m laughing? Can I keep my job then?
E: It’s too late, Andy. You’ve got to go. You’re just not a team player.
A: The cast of Taxi could have told you that. I’ve never fit in anywhere. It’s not my nature. That doesn’t make me a bad person. It’s just how I am. Sorry.
E: Well, we’re sorry too. Just pack up your congas and wrestling mat and leave.
A: But where am I supposed to go? I’ve been doing this show since the beginning.
E: Go over to David Letterman. He’ll put you on.
A: There you have it. David Letterman finds me funny. Explain that one.
E: I don’t have to explain anything. I just want you out of here. NOW GO! Or I’ll have you thrown out. I don’t have time for this. I have a show to produce.
A: Maybe that’s why your show isn’t funny! It’s just become big business. It’s not fun anymore.
E: SECURITY!
A: Can I say one last thing?
E: NO!
A: Just one and then I’ll leave.
E: What is it?
A: If I’ve made one person happy, it’s all been worth it.
E: GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE!
Dick Ebersol knew that SNL sensibility was nothing more than Second City sketch comedy (Second City being a comedy troupe out of Chicago that 80 percent of SNL’s cast came out of). Kaufman, on the other hand, was too esoteric, some say dadaistic. He made an audience think. Christ, TV was supposed to be a sedative—at least Marshall McLuhan told us so in his book The Medium Is the Message. Andy was stirring things up too much. Beside, Ebersol’s Frankenstein monster was beginning to talk back to his creator, and nobody talked back to Ebersol. Kaufman had to go, and what better way than to have the audience vote him off. It was the perfect cover, and Ebersol could walk away clean, or so he thought.
Hi. I’m Dick Ebersol, the executive producer of Saturday Night Live. In recent weeks we have received inquiries from many of you, including even the editors of TV Guide, as to why, prior to our last two telecasts, we heavily promoted Andy Kaufman and then failed to present him as advertised. So tonight, let me set the record straight by saying, in my opinion, that in both cases Andy misled us into thinking, right up until airtime, that his material would be up to the show’s standards. It was not. It was not even funny, and in my opinion Andy Kaufman is not funny anymore. [Audience applause.] And I believe you, the audience here, agrees with me. [More applause.] So thank you, and I hope this sets the record straight. Good night.
I have a problem with Dick’s rejecting Kaufman’s material as “not funny.” By then, there were certainly enough articles in major publications like the New York Times, Rolling Stone, Village Voice, etc., that labeled Andy the anti-comedian, and his material was known at times to cause more controversy than yuks. What I think really happened back then was that SNL was under vicious attacks in the press for not being funny itself. The pressure on Ebersol to deliver the funny every week had to be enormous.
Andy worked best in juxtaposition to the “funny.” In comedy clubs where he started, you had a series of comedians, one after another. When Andy got up and did what he did, it was so different. You found yourself laughing because it was so out of place. When SNL was funny during the Lorne Michaels years, you could drop Andy in the middle of it all and once again, the juxtaposition made it work. When SNL started going downhill comedically—plop Andy in the middle of that and the anti-comedy stuff doesn’t fly as well, because everything around him is anti-comedy; i.e., not funny.
There’s another scenario that I recently discovered that could just be the smoking gun and may have played a big part in the Kaufman/Ebersol debacle. And that is the “other” late-night comedy sketch show, Fridays. Fridays was ABC’s rip-off of SNL. It aired Friday nights live on ABC and was an exact duplicate of SNL in every way. At first, Ebersol shrugged it off as a joke, but over time, SNL ratings went down and Fridays ratings started to rise, especially when a certain performer would make an appearance. That performer was none other than Andy Kaufman. His appearances on Fridays became so controversial that all of America would be talking about it the next day around the office water cooler. In fact, according to John Moffitt, the executive producer of Fridays, Andy actually saved the show from being canceled:
It was the end of our first season and ABC informed us they were not picking us up. Since we had nothing to lose, we went for broke and asked Andy to appear on the live show, telling him he could do anything he wanted to. That’s when he refused to read the cue cards and got into a fight with the cast and crew. It was real fisticuffs and we had to cut to commercial. The next day, that’s all Americans were talking about—Was it real? Was it staged? I immediately got a call from ABC telling us how fantastic it was for ratings and that they’d changed their minds and decided to pick us up for another year … So we have Andy to thank.
I believe that after hearing this, Ebersol went through the roof. Here he is, the guy who discovered Kaufman, and Kaufman goes over to the enemy. Ebersol had to be furious with him, and I believe this may have played a big part in his wanting Andy dumped from SNL.
So I can understand where Dick was coming from. What I take issue with is his not returning Kaufman’s calls. That’s the double-cross. That was mean.
My theory of Fridays being the culprit that pissed Ebersol off to start with may be substantiated in this interview Lynne had with Howard West, the rarely seen or heard other half of Shapiro/West.
Howard: I was against his doing the vote.
Lynne: What was his thinking behind doing it?
Howard: That he’d be back in the good graces of Lorne Michaels and he’d be back in the good graces of the public again … WRONG. Also “something” came down between George and Dick Ebersol.
I believe Fridays was that “something” and why Andy felt he had to get back in the good graces of Lorne Michaels. What did he do to Lorne Michaels? Was Lorne also pissed that Andy went over to the other side (Fridays)?
If what I suspect to be true is true and Fridays is the smoking gun, you’ll never hear Shapiro/West admit it. If so, then they, not Andy, created the powder-keg situation that led to Andy’s being let go. Maybe instead of spooning chocolate ice cream down his piehole during business meetings, Kaufman should have been listening more.
***
Andy didn’t like being a “star.” It separated him from normal, everyday people and he detested the feeling of him “being better than anyone else.” That’s why at the height of his career, he took a lowly busboy job at Jerry’s Deli for minimum wage while pulling in $40,000 a week on Taxi. As Martin Scorsese said, “It’s nice to be the center of attention; the danger is it may alter your perceptions. The most important thing for an actor
is their sense of the relationships between people. This social behavior I find fascinating, and very often if you walk into a room and you’re the center of attention, it’s harder to pick up on these things.” No wonder the cast of Taxi was pissed at Kaufman. Every Monday night is when they would go off to a fancy restaurant and party, which usually meant drinking and doing drugs, which Andy wouldn’t partake in. He would tell them he couldn’t join them because he had to work at his busboy job Monday nights. They must have thought, “Well, fuck him—isn’t his Taxi family more important than cleaning up some stranger’s slop?”
Back then Andy saw it coming. He saw it when Danny got rid of his old car and they all started signing autographs. Saw it when they stopped renting in Hollywood Hills and bought property in Bel Air and Malibu. Saw it when they couldn’t be seen at Canter’s (a low-rent Jewish deli) anymore. Saw it when they were becoming rich and now were swept into keeping up with the Joneses. Except now the Joneses had fourteen-bedroom homes with a personal workout gym and pool. Andy wondered how the hell he’d gotten caught up in this mindless pursuit of the almighty buck. It’s one of the reasons why when he supposedly died, his family found all these uncashed checks from his wrestling bouts in Memphis. He loved it so much he didn’t want to take money for it. It made him think back to how his dad would berate him, telling him he had to make something out of his life. Now that he had, he could just as easily have drunk the Kool-Aid like everyone else. If that was the case, he might as well have just joined the jewelry business with his dad, just like his dad did with his dad before him. He wanted out and what faster way to get out than death itself?