The Elephant Man (film) me hate acting." Because of the strain on the actor, he worked alternate days. Lynch originally wanted Jack Nance for the title character. "But it just wasn't in the cards," Lynch says; the role went to John Hurt after Brooks, Lynch and Sanger saw his performance in "The Naked Civil Servant" as Quentin Crisp. Lynch bookended the film with surrealist sequences centered around Merrick's mother and her death. Lynch used Samuel Barber’s "Adagio for Strings" to underline the end of the film and Merrick's own death. The film's composer, John Morris, argued against using the music, stating that "this piece
Man on the Moon (film) purposes." The famous Carnegie Hall "milk and cookies" performance, portrayed in the film as one of his last performances after being diagnosed with cancer, had in fact occurred in 1979, five years before Kaufman's death and well before his diagnosis. Also, the film is deliberately ambiguous over whether Kaufman actually died or if his death was a hoax as some fans believe. The film implies that Carol Kane was a member of the "Taxi" cast during the show's first season, which in real life was 1978–79. In actuality, Kane did not make her first appearance on the series until the