Cinema: The Odd Fellows

Oddballs are Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski's specialty. Five years ago, the screenwriting partners turned the life of cross-dressing B-movie director Ed Wood into a critically acclaimed film starring Johnny Depp. Next they wrote The People vs. Larry Flynt, a Capraesque portrait of the porno kingpin who won a First Amendment case before the Supreme Court, with Woody Harrelson in the title role. But even for these masters of the "anti-biopic," which they describe as a movie biography of someone who doesn't really deserve one, telling the story of comedian Andy Kaufman presented a challenge.

If they remember him at all, most people think of Kaufman as the bashful foreign mechanic on the sitcom Taxi whose salutation "Tenk you veddy much" became a national catchphrase. But a small cult of hard-core fans reveres Kaufman as a performance artist who upended stand-up comedy to explore his inner child. He wrestled women for laughs, created a thuggish alter ego named Tony Clifton and never let on where the prankster stopped and the real person began. When he died of cancer in 1984, at 35, even close friends suspected a hoax.

After months of tracking rumors and talking to Kaufman's family and friends, Alexander and Karaszewski had no clue who the real Andy was or how to structure a screenplay about him. It was only after one of Kaufman's girlfriends told them "there is no real Andy" that they found the key to their movie--the comic with multiple personalities was actually an invisible man. With that notion as their guide, they wrote Man on the Moon, a movie nearly as ambiguous as Kaufman himself.

Jim Carrey's uncanny portrayal of Kaufman may be the film's main draw, but it is Alexander and Karaszewski's re-creation of Kaufman's life, enigmatic and unapologetic, that best captures his anarchic spirit. "Sure, Jim's performance channeled the guy, but it's all part of a whole," explains Danny DeVito, who not only produced and co-stars in Man on the Moon but also appeared with Kaufman on Taxi. "Without a good script, everybody knows you'll wind up empty-handed. They nailed him, baby."

The screenwriters concede that they massaged some facts for dramatic effect. To offset the downbeat reality of Andy's premature death, for example, they took a successful Carnegie Hall show from early in Kaufman's career and recast it as his last hurrah before succumbing to cancer. Several girlfriends were combined into a composite character, played by Courtney Love, and a few other liberties were taken as well. But Kaufman's life remains familiar to those who best know it. "Facts, schmacts, they made him honest," says Bill Zehme, who spent six years researching Kaufman for his comprehensive new book Lost in the Funhouse (Delacorte; 368 pages; $25.95). "Scott and Larry did impressive research, learned exactly how Andy's life really happened, then threw everything in a Mixmaster and poured out something essentially true."