Authors: Hadley Freeman
This, though, was precisely the sort of thing that Spike Lee objected to: he didn’t want covert success, or success within a white framework, and he certainly didn’t see the point in making an African-American film if no one knew it was one. Whereas Murphy believed his success was the statement, Lee argued there was no statement without a specified message. This is the trade-off that all minorities face in the search for success: in order to achieve mainstream success, how much are you willing to risk leaving behind your core audience?
According to Professor Neal:
In the early days black audiences appreciated Murphy’s presence onscreen. But when you start to see some of the tensions in the late 1980s, particularly around films and the tension between him and Spike Lee, and folks that were looking for quote unquote more authentic and even political black filmmaking that resonated especially for a hip hop generation, Eddie Murphy got left behind. He was doing something else. It’s really not until the nineties that he did
Boomerang
that he begins to reclaim some of what he had lost in terms of a black following. But this was something that befell that whole 1980s crossover generation. Michael Jackson struggled with that, losing a core black audience because he had crossed over so much, Whitney Houston got booed at the 1989 Soul Train Music Awards; obviously what Eddie Murphy was doing was in there, too.
Murphy knew this and struggled with it, uncertain what to do and horrified that the people he thought he was representing were turning against him. ‘You get these black people, it seems like they turn on you,’ he said to Spike Lee. Coupled with that, he was increasingly bogged down in the weird claustrophobia that comes with extreme fame, cut off from the real world and surrounded only by his tight adoring coterie, and simultaneously filled with resentment towards his critics with whom he felt he could do no right. ‘If I was rubbing you the wrong way, at the core of it was some racist shit: “Look at this arrogant nigger, two thumbs wayyyyy down!”’ he said with a laugh in a 2011 interview, recalling the late eighties. ‘Then I wasn’t helping either. I wasn’t giving no humble pie: “Fuck y’all, suck my dick motherfucker!”’
He is utterly wonderful in
Coming to America
but, Landis recalls, ‘he was less joyful, much less joyful, than the person I made
Trading Places
with five years before.’ So much less joyful, in fact, that he tried to beat Landis up one day on set and grabbed him by the throat. ‘To this day, I don’t know what happened,’ says Landis. ‘We were shooting in McDowell’s on Queen’s Boulevard, and it was snowing heavily outside. I was talking to someone and Eddie grabbed me from the back and put me in a headlock, and I was like “What the fuck was that?!” I was furious! And he was furious with me! And I grabbed the script girl’s notebook and I shouted at Eddie, “Here, shove this up your ass!” and I stormed off the set.’
Eventually, Landis angrily returned to the movie set and went to see Murphy in his trailer. ‘I go in and it wasn’t even a confrontation, it was just Eddie venting. He was very angry at his family, I don’t know what was going on, and he was very angry at me, saying I was treating him the same as everyone else. He said, “I’m the star, you’re not giving me enough.” I don’t know what the hell … Eddie said, “I’m going to have you fired,” and I said, “OK, but let’s finish the day.”’
So they finished shooting the scene in which Murphy’s character, Prince Akeem, meets Patrice (Allison Dean) at McDowell’s, and she invites him to a basketball game – no one watching this sweet, funny scene would guess that Murphy was raging inside, or that the director was furious at him. Murphy went home that night and, usually teetotal, had some alcohol: ‘I went back to the house and Arsenio got me drunk … I can’t drink,’ he said.
Landis went home that evening, similarly enraged, because he fully expected to be fired from the movie. ‘So [studio boss] Ned Tannen calls me and says, “Listen, John, Eddie called and is very, very upset. But we told him he has no power to fire you, we’ve seen the dailies, this is his best work, he’s an idiot so we said, Eddie, here’s the choice: we fire John and shut down the movie and sue you for the production costs, or we continue.” I was really shocked!’ Landis recalls.
The next day, he returned to the set and went to talk with Murphy.
‘So I go see him and – this is a terrible story but it’s true – and he said, “All right, we’re going to finish the movie but we are no longer friends.” And I said, “Deal!” So we did the movie, but we didn’t talk offset at all.’
Despite his anger about the film, Murphy later said that he did his best acting in
Coming to America
. The scene he specifically cited as being his biggest source of pride is the famous barbershop scene, in which he, along with Arsenio Hall, played multiple characters, including an old white Jewish man (‘Like a boid!’).
Landis remembers:
Those characters were never supposed to be played by Eddie and Arsenio. In fact, we’d already hired actors to play them. But one night I saw a black filmmaker – I won’t say who – on television talking about his new movie, and he said something really shocking to me. He was talking about minstrel shows, and he said blackface was created by ‘Old Jews who wanted to play young black men.’ Obviously he was referring to Eddie Cantor and Al Jolson – but does he know anything about the history of blackface? So the next day I came into work and said, ‘Eddie, can you do a Yiddish accent?’ And he said, ‘I don’t know.’ And I said, ‘Well I know you can, you can do anything.’ And he said, ‘Well how will I look?’ So I had Rick [Baker, the make-up artist, who was nominated for an Oscar for his work here] make him up and Eddie was so thrilled.
Landis then shot the barbershop scene using cutaways, using Murphy’s comedian brother Charlie as a double in some scenes.
‘From that point on, as soon as Eddie saw what Rick Baker could do, he was like, I want to play the barber! And Arsenio said, “I want to play the preacher!” And we had to pay off all the actors we hired.’
This use of disguise in movies, which Murphy would then employ repeatedly for the next two decades, was a means for him to escape the pressures and demands he felt from critics and audiences, both black and white.
‘From then on, whenever you look at Eddie’s greatest performances, they’re always in disguise, and it’s interesting. If you look at the
Nutty Professor
remake, when he’s in the fat suit, he’s brilliant, when he’s the other guy, he’s not that interesting. And in
Bowfinger
, when he plays the movie star he’s not that interesting, but as the brother he’s dazzling. It’s strange, but it somehow frees him and he’s brilliant at it,’ says Landis.
Coming to America
marked the end of Murphy’s triumphant movie run, and a large part of this is because it was around this time that Murphy got tired of being funny: ‘I think you got tremendous pressure on you, Eddie. Because every time you open your mouth, people want to laugh. And that’s crazy,’ Spike Lee said to him in 1990.
‘And they want it to be as funny as the last time I said something,’ Murphy replied, almost certainly with an eye-roll.
Maybe Murphy was sick of the pressure to be funny. Maybe it got too easy. Or maybe to be funny requires being aware of what life is like in the real world, and Murphy was now lost in the orbit of a superstar, cloistered up in his big homes. Whatever the reason, it wasn’t a bad idea of Murphy’s to try to break into drama; for the few comedy actors who made it into the nineties, moving into drama was the way they achieved this: Tom Hanks, most obviously, and, later, Bill Murray. Unfortunately, Murphy’s talent for picking stinkers in drama was almost as refined as his skill at picking successful comedies. He wrote, starred in and directed 1989’s
Harlem Nights
, which he admitted soon after was an absolute mess, and thereafter began his fallow run in the nineties, with only
Boomerang
alleviating the dreariness.
In 1993 John Landis got an unexpected call: Sherry Lansing, who then ran Paramount, told him that Murphy was going to make
Beverly Hills Cop 3
, and he had asked for Landis to direct it. Landis was astonished: he and Murphy hadn’t spoken since their fight on the set of
Coming to America
, five years earlier. But a bigger surprise was in store for him.
‘Eddie didn’t want to be funny, so that made it a strange experience,’ he says. ‘He was very jealous of Denzel Washington and Samuel Jackson, and he wanted to be an action star so he would go out of his way to avoid a joke, and I gave him so many opportunities. That became a very demoralising movie to make. Luckily it made a lot of money, but it’s a weird movie, because it isn’t funny.’
By now, Murphy was looking extremely out of step with the times. Although he increasingly made movies with largely African-American casts (
Harlem Nights
,
The Distinguished Gentleman
,
Boomerang
), they were not the kind of movies about African-Americans that were in vogue. Spike Lee’s
Do the Right Thing
came out in 1989, followed by John Singleton’s
Boyz in the Hood
and Mario van Peebles’s
New Jack City
, both in 1991, and these films were a far bigger part of the zeitgeist than anything Murphy was making then. He was still making glossy Hollywood products, but audiences and critics were more interested in politically aware films. Murphy’s run – one unparalleled by any comedian, white or black, ever since – was done.
In terms of the representation of African-Americans in movies, no other decade saw as much progress, and as quickly, as the eighties. Going from Nick Nolte calling Murphy a ‘spearchucker’ in 1982 to Spike Lee’s
Do the Right Thing
getting nominated for Oscars in 1989 is an incredible leap, and the person who made this happen was Murphy.
‘Hollywood had to be convinced that black stars could be bankable,’ says Professor Neal. ‘Pryor started that a little bit in the seventies but it really went full tilt in the eighties with Murphy. He was the necessary step in getting stories featuring black people to the mainstream. Now folks like Denzel Washington and Halle Berry can open movies, and it was Eddie Murphy who allowed for that to occur.’
The irony for Murphy, though, was that in carving this path for others, he made himself look redundant. He was no longer ‘the black guy’. There were other black guys, from Samuel L. Jackson to Laurence Fishburne to Denzel Washington, and he’s the one who made the space for them.
‘His films introduced or featured many black stars who later became stars, such as Arsenio Hall, Chris Rock, Halle Berry, Damon Wayans, Cuba Gooding Jr, and others. He did not “pull up the ladder” after himself,’ adds Anna Everett, Professor of Film and Media Studies at the University of California Santa Barbara.
What Murphy achieved in the eighties is more than any black actor had done before him or has done since, and the proof of that is that no one has been able to move the representation of African-Americans in Hollywood pictures significantly further forward since Murphy’s era and the immediate years after.
‘We haven’t fully realised the promise that was hinted at with
Do the Right Thing
in 1989 and
Boyz in the Hood
,’ says Professor Neal. ‘Then we saw black films by black independent auteurs getting nominated for Hollywood awards. But that kind of promise has not been sustained.’
In Hollywood movies nowadays, black actors are still largely cast as the convict, the slave, the outsider, or shunted into secondary roles, like a judge or a police chief.
fn22
No movie with an all-black cast, from 1993’s
What’s Love Got to Do with It
to 1995’s
Waiting to Exhale
to 1998’s
How Stella Got Her Groove Back
, has ever achieved the kind of mainstream and commercial success that
Coming to America
did.
Most tellingly of all, no black actor since has come even close to Murphy’s success: ‘Eddie’s movies have grossed over $6.5 billion worldwide before adjusting them for inflation. Will Smith’s total: $5.735 billion. Denzel Washington’s total: $2.788 billion,’ Bill Simmons writes. ‘I’m just sayin’.’
Eighties comedies are, for me, the height of comedy, in that they’re silly without being stupid, they’re sweet without being slushy, they’re funny without being mean and they understand the importance of a good script above all, and Murphy’s eighties films, especially
Trading Places
,
Beverly Hills Cop
and
Coming to America
, exemplify all those qualities. No one was funnier in the eighties than Eddie Murphy. Goddamn, that man was funny. He could swear like opera singers can sing and he would say more with his eyes in two seconds than other comedians manage with their voices in a year. No comedian before or since was more charismatic onscreen than him. Murphy is the case in point that for a black man to be on a par with his white contemporaries, he has to be ten times better than them. Murphy was a million times better than anyone else so he succeeded above everyone. Maybe he just made it all look so easy in the eighties and that’s why he doesn’t get the credit he deserves today.
‘No matter what you do, that shit is all getting turned into gobbledygook. In 200 years, it’s all dust, and in 300 years, it ain’t nothing, and in 1,000 years, it’s like you wasn’t even fucking here. But if you’re really, really lucky, if you really did something special, you could hang around a little longer,’ Murphy said recently.
Murphy’s achievements will hang around longer.
TOP EIGHTIES QUOTES
I’ve been so restrained – so far. Cut a lady some slack now, OK? These are the top twenty, and I quote them all, aloud or in my head, on a weekly basis. I’ve also made separate categories for the three most important movies of the decade in terms of quotes and, quite possibly, in terms of everything, ever.