Director:
Milos Forman

Screenplay:
Scott Alexander, Larry Karaszewski

Cast:
Jim Carrey, Danny DeVito, Courtney Love, Paul Giamatti, Tony Clifton

Bio/Comedy/Drama, USA/UK/Germany/Japan
1999, 118 minutes, colour, Original English Language

MAN ON THE MOON tells the story of one of the most innovative, eccentric and enigmatic performers of his time – Andy Kaufman. Who? Aye, there’s the rub, as Shakespeare wrote, because non-Americans never got to experience the sheer comedic genius of the man who was a master at audience manipulation, able to generate belly laughs, stony silence, tears and even fist fights. Kaufman’s performances were so real not even his friends could be sure where the truth lay and which of his multi-layered masks he was displaying at the time. It’s doubtful whether even Kaufman himself knew. Even his untimely death became part of the act which was his life.

And it is precisely this complexity which drew no lesser a director than the Academy Award®-winning Milos Forman (“One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest”, “Amadeus”) and producer-director-comedian Danny DeVito to the project.

Working on the basis of it taking one to know one, the casting of comedian Jim Carrey is nothing less than inspired. As he has shown in, among others, “The Truman Show” and “Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind”, Carrey can carry a serious role as well as a comedic one. Also, not to put too fine a point on it, Carrey, who has had his own share of problems, clearly digs deeply into his own personal experiences for the role.

MAN ON THE MOON belongs among the great Hollywood biopics. Entertaining, informative and, finally, moving, it’s the warts and all exposé of a character so larger than life that not even Andy Kaufman himself would have known where he began and ended! And, in case you’re wondering, the song MAN ON THE MOON by US super group “R.E.M.” is about Andy Kaufman and his comedy creations and also forms the film’s title music.