Man on the Moon (1999)

If you believe they put a man on the moon, you will believe that Man on the Moon (1999) is the true and unfiltered true story behind the life of Andy Kaufman, the notorious performance artist cum comedian cum actor cum women's wrestling champion cum men's wrestling heel... phew, that's a lot of cum. Even for Mr. Skin! Two time Academy Award winning director Milos Forman (One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Amadeus) brings Kaufman's story to the screen as best he can because he hired Jim Carrey to play Kaufman. That's not an insult in any way, because Carrey inhabited the role of Kaufman so completely that he basically made Forman's life a living hell on set. Carrey was bound and determined to deliver a performance that's true to the nature of Kaufman's own hatred of acting or dissecting his own life in any way. It's basically meta-cinema before that was in vogue, though Forman himself dabbled in this sort of thing three years earlier when he made The People vs Larry Flynt (1996). Unlike that skin-filled classic, Man on the Moon is a mostly skin-free affair with one brief exception. Right around the midpoint of the film, Andy decides he's going to sabotage his role on Taxi by playing his drunken lounge singer alter ego Tony Clifton on the set of the show in a bid to get fired. He goes to a brothel to be with some girls and selects Angela Jones and Krystina Carson, with whom he wrestles while they're topless! They lend an air of authenticity to the whole scam and we salute them for their work!