Zimmerman was directly inspired by 'an article in Esquire about a man who kept a diary in which he assessed each Johnny Carson show: ‘Johnny disappointed me tonight,’ he would write,” Zimmerman later recalled. Zimmerman-then a writer for Newsweek-began thinking about the nature of fame and fandom after reading a story about a man who was obsessed with Johnny Carson. Though it didn’t make its way to the screen until 1983, The King of Comedy actually has its origins in the early 1970s, when Paul D. The King of Comedy was inspired by an actual obsessive fan.
Here are 13 facts about the making of The King of Comedy, from the way the film uses improvisation to the scene that Jerry Lewis directed himself. The King of Comedy is Scorsese and De Niro’s meditation of the often hostile lines that form between private and public life, and it remains one of the most eerily prescient films of the 1980s. Years later, De Niro tried again, and Scorsese said yes to what would become an essential entry in one of the great collaborations in American cinema. In the mid-1970s, Robert De Niro brought a script about a fan obsessed with a talk show host to his friend and collaborator Martin Scorsese, who said he wasn’t interested.
