Best Movie Ever!

[lael]

I really like CLUELESS. It's quite entertaining.

. . .time for some random. Brass monkey, junky, that funky monk3y!

 

[savagemonkey]

1 of my favourites is Still Crazy its funny and has an awesome soundtrack!

monkey

 

[Winslow Leach]

Both of those have received pretty great special edition DVDs this year. Have you picked them up yet, Winslow?

Yessiree bob!

Usually I'm wary about extended cuts, but That Thing's extra footage actually ADDS to the film.

And Rio Bravo has an excellent new transfer, cool extras and a commentary featuring fan John Carpenter.

 

[Speed Tracer]

Yeah, they're two of my favorite purchases so far this year. Great stuff.

 

[Winslow Leach]

Ooh that would be smashing, fankew. *Pins it on proudly*

You're welcome!

 

[Winslow Leach]

Has anyone seen this movie yet?

South Park? Yeah, I found it quite amusing. Lotsa good songs, too!

 

[Speed Tracer]

Kiki, we roll with Winslow's gang now!

 

[Winslow Leach]

Okay, this was never made into a film, but since it was shelved in the early 1980s, it has become legendary in Hollywood circles and amongst Andy Kaufman fans.

The screenplay is entitled The Tony Clifton Story, and is based on the "life" of Andy's sleazy, lounge-singing alter ego. Universal scrapped the film after Andy's first starring film, Heartbeeps, bombed at the b.o. Andy would have played Tony and himself had the film been made. It was written by Andy and friend Bob Zmuda, and can be found online. This is the only film script that made me laugh out loud as I was reading it.

Here is a plot synopsis of the film by author Bill Zehme, who wrote the definitive biography of Andy, Lost in the Funhouse: The Life and Mind of Andy Kaufman.

Clifton lives in Philly, works on an assembly line screwing tops on salt shakers...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 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 woman with a heart of gold named Anna arrives to see that he is being taken advantage of 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 8x10 glossies of himself. Andy is thoroughly besotted by Clifton's idiotic bravury, especially after witnessing him perform during an amateur showcase. Andy decides that Clifton will be billed as his special guest/opening act at Carnegie Hall. Clifton performs with usual extravagant badness and the audience eventually storms the stage in riot, and The New York Times calls Clifton the most obnoxious act in show business history. There is a malevolent glint in Andy's eye as he says, "they're going to hate him more and more. They're going to LOVE to hate him. Gentlemen, I got myself the next Hula Hoop."

This comes to pass exactly and, in short order, Clifton is on the cover of Time Magazine and there is a run on peach tuxedos throughout the land and his preferred exclamation of paranoid ("Getcha hands off me!") becomes the ubiquitous catchphrase of the moment. He performs at the White House, where he disgraces Chinese diplomats, and is given his own weekly television show on NBC at which the audience happily comes to boo him as he torments celebrity guests--asking Raquel Welch about her cosmetic surgery and terrifying the San Diego Zoo's Joan Embry, who has brought out a baby seal, which is then chased around the stage by a club-wielding baby-seal killer from Newfoundland.

And it is Andy Kaufman who is the Svengali-producer of this vulgar sideshow and who assures Clifton that it is all meant in fun, because Clifton thinks this mania has gone too far and gotten too ugly. To distract Clifton from his qualms, Andy has located Anna, and sends Clifton off to romp with her and she awakens him at last to the notion that he is being used and he decides to do something meaningful in his career, so he tells Andy that he wants to star in a sensitive remake of THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME. Andy sets up the deal instantly (smelling, in fact, a comedy blockbuster).

It is the night of the premiere and Clifton stands in the back of the theatre and watches the audience scream with laughter at his Quasimodo, who has a cigarette dangling from his mouth, as per Cliftonian trademark, while being whiplashed by tormentors. Aghast that his noble dream has become a laughing stock, Clifton runs to find Andy in the theatre manager's office, where he is barking demands into a telephone. [Andy tells Tony] "you have been played for a buffoon! You think people wanna look at you playing the Hunchback of Notre Dame serious? Look at you! You're a buffoon! That's all you are, and that all you're ever gonna be! I made you! I'm making a lot of money on you, pal. I'm not going to have some stupid buffoon blow it for me!"

And Clifton is reduced to tears and he runs back into the theatre and leaps in front of the screen and tells the audience that they've all been duped. 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..." And he pitifully leaves the stage declaring that he will never return and the stage remains empty.

The picture freezes. 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. He goes on to say that with three scenes left to be completed in the film, Tony Clifton, age forty-seven, died of lung cancer, and two weeks later it was decided by Universal that, in honor of Tony Clifton's memory, he would play the role of Clifton for the remainder of the movie. And now the film takes a completely different turn. It's going to change from realistic to a complete comedy. Kaufman is taking total liberties with the character.

Andy/Clifton leaves the theatre and jumps in a cab and heads for the airport, where he steals a small plane which crashes into a distant jungle where Andy/Clifton emerges unharmed and becomes a tribal god among the natives who are impressed with his Sinatraesque chant, until he gets word via the jungle paperboy that Kaufman is staging an elaborate memorial service, selling thousands of tickets because Clifton was believed to be lost at sea after stealing the plane.

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, and grabs her, and then offscreen the 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 that I died a cancer?" 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!"

The real Clifton proceeds to lambast his exploiter for making mockery of [his] life and the "total fabrication" of truths implied therein. He walks over to "the girl playing Anna" and professes his undying love and the cemetary 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.

The Tony Clifton Story was to be made in "Stinkavision," so that whenever Clifton sprayed on a certain repulsive cologne, theatres would be engulfed in the stench.

Thom Mount, who ran the film division for Universal said of the script:

"It was completely brilliant--and unreleasable. 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."

Sean Daniel, Mount's second-in-command, had this to say:

"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."

 

[Speed Tracer]

Man, that sounds wonderful. Any idea where I can find the script?

 

[Kiki]

You're welcome!

Thanks! *Struts around proudly*

Kiki, we roll with Winslow's gang now!

We sure do, man! People in Winslow's gang stick together. How about a club name?