The Great Beyond

This was used in the 1999 movie Man On The Moon. The movie is about Andy Kaufman, a very strange actor/comedian who generated lots of media attention with his outrageous stunts. He played Latka on the TV show Taxi.

Lead singer Michael Stipe said this song is "About attempting the impossible, which I think is what Andy Kaufman did with his entire career." He added in Part Lies, Part Heart, Part Truth, Part Garbage: "My stab at an 'Ashes To Ashes,' which I consider to be one of the greatest songs ever written. Revisit a character that you've written a classic song about, and try to one-up yourself. That is no easy task. Bowie pulled it off for real. I think live recordings of this song are more exciting than the studio version, but it is a stunner. All the imagery in the chorus is from real life, and references my version of Kaufman's favorite joke by Laurel and Hardy." Laurel and Hardy were a classic-comedy team who starred in shorts and feature films from the Silent era through the early-'50s. One of their most famous gags was in The Music Box (1932), when they pushed a piano up an enormous set of stairs, with disastrous results.

This was nominated for a Grammy for Best Song Written for a Motion Picture, Television of Other Visual Media. It lost to Randy Newman's "When She Loved Me" (performed by Sarah McLachlan) for Toy Story 2.