How Coming to America Flipped the Script on Eddie Murphy’s Career

https://www.vulture.com/article/coming-to-america-changed-eddie-murphys-career.html

When the Eddie Murphy vehicle Coming to America landed in theaters 30 years ago, it was received in much the same fashion as the comic superstar’s last few pictures (Eddie Murphy: Raw, Beverly Hills Cop II, The Golden Child) — big box office, but middling reviews. A few noted that it marked something of a departure for Mr. Murphy, playing a gentler character in what was, as the studio’s press notes pointed out, his first romantic comedy. But few could have predicted that the film would influence so much of what Murphy did in the years to follow — or the hold it would continue to have on contemporary audiences.

Murphy was the undisputed box office king of the 1980s, propelling his explosive debut in 48 Hrs. into a series of wildly successful vehicles. He set himself up with an old-fashioned (and lucrative) studio contract at Paramount, where he began to develop his own projects under the “Eddie Murphy Productions” banner. He devised the story to Coming to America (he said; more on that later), of an African prince looking for his queen in Queens, New York, as a chance to work with his pal Arsenio Hall, who had just come to national prominence as Joan Rivers’s replacement host in the final weeks of her failed Fox talk show.

Screenplay duties were handed off to David Sheffield and Barry W. Blaustein, who began writing for Murphy when he was on Saturday Night Live. And to direct, Murphy brought in John Landis, who helmed his early hit Trading Places. The intensity of the schedule (it began shooting six months before its summer release date) and the big egos involved did not, by most accounts, make for a harmonious set. “He directed me in Trading Places when I was just starting out as a kid, but he was still treating me like a kid five years later during Coming to America,” Murphy told Rolling Stone in 1989. “And I hired him to direct the movie!” Landis, in a 2005 interview, granted that Murphy had changed. “The guy on Trading Places was young and full of energy and curious and funny and fresh and great,” he explained. “The guy on Coming to America was the pig of the world — the most unpleasant, arrogant, bullshit entourage, just an asshole.”

But whatever the tensions on set, the collaboration yielded rewards. Landis brought in Rick Baker, the Oscar-winning makeup wizard whom he’d worked with on An American Werewolf in London and Michael Jackson’s Thriller video, to design the elaborate prosthetics that allowed Murphy and Hall to each play multiple supporting roles — wild comic creations (in essence, Saturday Night Live bits and characters) to offset their kinder, gentler leads. Landis, who had just read a book about Jewish comedians donning blackface in the vaudeville days, suggested flipping the script. “Rick Baker can make you an old Jew,” he told his star, and Baker did — so successfully that when Paramount executives visited the set while Murphy was made up as “Saul,” they didn’t recognize their studio’s biggest star.

Those pleasures were barely noted by mainstream critics when Coming to America was released in June. Time’s headline, “The Taming of Eddie Murphy,” was emblematic of the reviews — complaints abound that by casting Murphy as such a restrained character, the film “seems designed to handcuff and gag the high-voltage, outrageous comedian,” as Stanley Kuffmann wrote in The New Republic. Never mind the outrageous comedy of the character vignettes, or Murphy’s understandable desire to grow his screen persona. But audiences turned out in droves; it ended up banking a staggering $288 million in receipts (on a $35 million budget).

And then the lawsuits began. Five separate suits were filed, by everyone from struggling screenwriters to an actual African prince (who claimed the film told the unauthorized story of his life), but the biggest name was political columnist Art Buchwald, who said he sold Paramount a Murphy-targeted treatment called King for a Day in 1983. His $5 million breach of contract suit would dominate entertainment journalism for years, not only for the sensational claims of plagiarism, but for the subsequent exposure of “Hollywood math” that would lead Paramount to claim, when the court ruled in Buchwald’s favor, that the $288 million grosser had somehow not shown a profit. (The tabloids, meanwhile, had a field day reporting Murphy’s lavish weekly expenditures during production, including $3,800 for his custom motor home, $1,500 for his personal trainer, $650 for his valet, $5,000 for a weekly “living allowance,” and $235 for a single McDonald’s breakfast for the star and his entourage.) After the court ruled in Buchwald’s favor, Paramount appealed, then finally settled the suit in 1995.