Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond
2017 documentary film directed by Chris Smith
Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond – Featuring a Very Special, Contractually Obligated Mention of Tony Clifton (or simply Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond) is a 2017 American documentary film directed by Chris Smith. The film follows actor Jim Carrey as he remains in character as Andy Kaufman during the production of the 1999 film Man on the Moon, directed by Miloš Forman. It was released on November 17, 2017, through the streaming service Netflix.
Synopsis
The film alternates between contemporary interviews with Carrey and firsthand footage of the making of Man on the Moon almost 20 years earlier. According to Carrey, Universal Pictures had withheld the behind-the-scenes footage (much of it originally shot by Kaufman's former girlfriend, Lynne Margulies) "so that people wouldn't think [he] was an asshole".
The basic premise is that while making the film, Carrey is so committed to the role that, like Andy, he had difficulty separating himself from the character. Carrey's performance becomes so real that people who had known Andy, even family and others close to him, felt like they had him with them again.
Release
The film premiered at the Venice Film Festival in September 2017. Later that month, streaming service Netflix acquired the film's distribution rights after a screening at the Toronto Film Festival. The film was released on November 17, 2017.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond” as 2017 documentary film directed by Chris Smith. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the arts & letters register because the source frames it as 2017 documentary film directed by Chris Smith. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Reception evidence should be dated and situated: later canonical status may differ sharply from the work’s initial circulation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 9, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q43294135. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2017 and 1999.
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This entry incorporates text from “Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.