Trivia / Andy Kaufman

• What Could Have Been: Kaufman had many ideas that for one reason or another were only partly or never realized, some due to his premature death.
  • The Huey Williams Story was an epic novel, combining thinly-disguised autobiographical details and Author Appeal with wild flights of fancy, that he wrote from the early 1970s onward, hoping not only that it would be published but receive The Film of the Book. The unfinished manuscript (it's Cut Short) was eventually published independently at the Turn of the Millennium.
  • He wanted to remake A Face in the Crowd, one of his favorite movies, with himself as "Lonesome" Rhodes.
  • He tried to pitch a Christmas Special to the networks that would have been a Variety Show with a Black Comedy runner involving a chorus of freezing kids stuck in a mall parking lot, who at the end watch in horror as a skydiving Santa Claus' parachute fails to open and his body is carted away in an ambulance.
  • In 1979 he suggested a "99-cent tour" in which all tickets would, indeed, be just 99 cents (cheap even then), but his agents could not find a corporate sponsor to underwrite it.
  • He often brought up the idea of opening a chain of branded "wrestling salons" where men and women could wrestle each other for fun!
  • During the time he had a contract with Universal Pictures, he and Bob Zmuda wrote The Tony Clifton Story, a screenplay turning the Alter-Ego Acting persona into an obnoxious but sympathetic hero with High Hopes, Zero Talent who ends up exploited by...Andy Kaufman. The script has a gigantic plot twist at the top of Act Three — a sudden reveal from Kaufman that Clifton died of cancer before all his scenes were shot, whereupon Kaufman plays Clifton intentionally poorly from that point onward before Clifton turns out to be alive after all and salvages the finale. The concept was too challenging for Universal to greenlight right away (especially after John Landis, who wanted to direct a Kaufman movie, decided to do The Blues Brothers instead); first, subsequent drafts removed the most meta elements in favor of a Smooth-Talking Talent Agent villain, and second Kaufman agreed to do the film Heartbeeps in part to prove he could topline a movie. When that failed, his pet project was dead in the water.
  • When the Saturday Night Live viewer vote that banned him from the show led to a terrible drop in overall bookings for him, the producers did consider ways to reinstate him. The idea that had the most traction, and may have been considered before the vote (depending on who's telling the story), was that later in Season 8 a black cleaning woman would start to be a recurring background character in sketches. After a few weeks of this, "she" would reveal "herself" to be Kaufman. When the showrunners decided to honor the viewers' wishes instead, this idea was scrapped. He still might have appeared later in Season 8 during Joan Rivers' episode (as she convinced them to give him another chance) had he not been honoring his commitment to Teaneck Tanzi: The Venus Flytrap at the time. It's possible that he would have eventually been allowed on the show again had cancer not prematurely ended his life the following year.
  • In his final two years or so, he considered other kinds of tours — such as a lecture tour in which he would explain his craft, or a show in which he would surprise the audience by revealing they would all be going on a cruise with him, complete with pre-packed luggage for everyone.
  • I'm from Hollywood began production prior to his death, and had he not taken ill it would have "revealed" him to now be a deranged, wandering has-been in San Francisco ruined by his obsession with professional wrestling.
  • According to his late-in-life lover Lynne Marguiles, he often said that if work in conventional showbiz were to completely dry up for him, he could simply become a professional wrestler full-time. In fact, there were some conventional gigs lined up for him by his agent George Shapiro that had to be cancelled because Kaufman was too busy in Memphis with the Jerry Lawler feud. He and Shapiro were even discussing the idea of a wrestling-themed talk show shortly before his cancer diagnosis.

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