Kayfabe lives again at rare screening of Kaufman's 'I’m From Hollywood'

PORTLAND, Ore. — There’s a scene in episode three of Chris Smith’s documentary, Mr. McMahon, now streaming on Netflix, where the film cuts between various wrestlers and talking heads saying the word “kayfabe.” It feels obligatory and much too on the nose and would have been better off on the cutting room floor. For Vince McMahon, it was never all that much of a priority to protect “the business.” His overriding concern was always how to best protect “his business.” The first chance he got he remade professional wrestling into a product line focused more on ice cream bars, cartoons, and disposable merchandise, and less on maintaining an air of gritty realism. The plug had been pulled on kayfabe long before the Kliq broke character at Madison Square Garden in 1996.

But the frantic need to make life’s storyline align with the magic show in the ring was alive and well on the evening of September 30 at Portland, Oregon’s majestic Hollywood Theatre for a rare screening of the documentary-adjacent film I’m From Hollywood. I’m From Hollywood follows the wrestling career of actor and comedian Andy Kaufman from his earliest forays into wrestling women as part of his nightclub act in the late 1970s to his run of matches with Jerry Lawler in Memphis in 1982 and 1983.

Kerby Strom shows off some of his remastered Portland Wrestling footage outside The Hollywood Theater in Portland, Oregon, on September 30, 2024, prior to a screening of Andy Kaufman’s I’m From Hollywood.

The night, which included a Q/A with its inimitable co-director and Kaufman’s romantic partner for the last years of his, Lynne Margulies Osgood, was not just a celebration of the film, but also the release of my book, Ballyhoo: The Roughhousers, Con Artists, and Wildmen Who Invented Professional Wrestling, and the release of never-before-seen Super 8 footage of classic matches from the Seattle and Tacoma area, shot originally by fan Ken Hamblin and restored by Portland wrestling fanatic Kerby Strom. Somewhere around 200 people turned out turned out to share in the pure insanity of Kaufman’s wrestling career.

Kaufman lived the spirit of kayfabe not just in his wrestling life but in every aspect of his work. He antagonized audiences with lengthy readings from The Great Gatsby, followed bits to exhausting and uncomfortable lengths, and blurred lines between his life on and off a stage. As more than one person interviewed in the film made clear, when it came to Andy, you just never knew.

Which made his foray into professional wrestling all the more confounding for his fans. Already the darling of a certain portion of the hip audience that appreciated his boundary-breaking antics, as well as a mainstream star thanks to multiple appearances on Saturday Night Live and his starring role as Latka Gravas on Taxi, he all but burned his career to the ground pursuing his lifelong desire to play the bad guy in a wrestling ring.

The Hollywood Theater in Portland, Oregon, screens Andy Kaufman’s I’m From Hollywood

I’m From Hollywood is a crucial document because without it, the remnants of Kaufman’s wrestling career would likely have been forgotten. Most people are familiar with his now infamous appearance on Late Night with David Letterman on July 28, 1982, when he seemingly antagonized Lawler into striking him on live television. The incident is well-known enough to have been recreated in Man On The Moon, Milos Forman’s 1999 biopic on Kaufman’s life. Awareness trails off from there. Some might remember Jerry Lawler delivering not one, but two, piledrivers to an overmatched Kaufman when they wrestled in 1982. (Kaufman, after all, donned a neckbrace and screened that footage for viewers on Saturday Night Live.) Beyond that, awareness trails off steeply.

As I’m From Hollywood makes clear, there was much, much more. Kaufman travelled to Memphis on a regular basis, appearing both in the Mid-South Coliseum and on television tapings. And it was all happening well before anyone outside of the greater Memphis area could follow along. Memphis wrestling wasn’t on cable. There was no internet. Even the match results were only reported locally when they were even reported at all. Kaufman and Lawler were making wrestling history in a vacuum.

Lynne Margulies and Jon Langmead a few years back.

I’m From Hollywood changed all that. It was a staple on Comedy Central in the early 1990s, almost a decade after Kaufman’s untimely death in 1984 at the age of 35. Fans could now fill in the portion of his career that the majority of his biographers have tended to ignore. The obsession with wrestling was all too unseemly, all too painfully unhip. But as the film, and Margulies herself, makes clear, the wrestling acts as a kind of skeleton key to everything he did.

The film is currently unavailable for streaming and is at risk of going out of print, so seek it out while you can. It’s an irreplaceable time capsule of a spirit that’s now long gone, and a testament to Kaufman’s belief that preserving a fiction in the service of entertaining an audience might just be the ultimate act of love and respect.

ANDY KAUFMAN STORIES & LINKS