And how did the original screenwriter react?
"Well," says Murphy with a smile, "we didn't get no credit, so it made him look like hot shit."
He is interrupted by another knock at the trailer door; it seems that they're ready ready now. On the set, Murphy alters his lines with every take; the script supervisor is kept busy erasing and penciling in the changes he makes. But this tinkering definitely improves his speeches. In Beverly Hills Cop, he plays a policeman from Detroit who visits Beverly Hills to find out how a buddy of his died. The scene being shot today shows him telling a lieutenant why he trailed two men into a strip joint. In the script Murphy's line reads, "I saw bulges in the suspects' jackets." By the time he's through, he is saying, "I saw bulges in their jackets, and that's a bit bizarre, having bulges on the way into a place like this."
Murphy does the scene and walks off, straight into a group of crew members who are reading a story about Vanessa Williams' renunciation of her Miss America title. Murphy is immediately engrossed by the subject. He hasn't yet seen the Penthouse mag azine photo spread that got her in trouble, but the speculative talk is raunchy, and he has to be pulled away for the scene.
At the director's "Cut," he goes right back to the Vanessa discussion. Then he spots a television camera taping footage for a behind-the-scenes video of the movie, and he mugs. Next he launches into Mario Lanza's "Be My Love," his voice booming over the clatter of the set. And he keeps on singing, right through the yells of "Ready," of "Silence, please," and even of "Rolling," stopping and switching into character in the middle of the now-or-never shout. 'Action!"
Not that Murphy is purposely trying to disrupt the set; it's just that he doesn't take anything too seriously. If there's a method to his acting, that's it. Only Murphy doesn't call it acting.
"I'm an entertainer and a comedian," he says. "I'm not impressed with the whole acting groove. It doesn't blow my mind to be an actor. The whole respect thing that actors get is bullshit. Don't call me an actor. I'm a liar. That's all acting is: lying. You turn the cameras on and I can make tears run down my cheeks, like All my sons are dying,' and make the audience believe me. I can tell a good lie."
Eddie Murphy has been interested in show business since childhood. He wanted to impress girls, he says, so at age 15 he launched his first attempt to become a singer.
"Comedy wasn't the groove back then. You didn't get no girls by telling jokes. I couldn't sing, but I had a band. Music was just an excuse to be onstage." After a couple of years, Murphy turned back to his first love: comedy.
He and his two brothers were raised by their mother and stepfather (his biological father died when Murphy was 8) in Roosevelt, a lower-middle-class community on Long Island. "The Murphys," he says, "are just funny people. At family reunions, everybody's trying to outjoke everybody else. Uncles, aunts, and cousins-we all got big mouths. We were poor people, but we're a real proud family. We have so much pride we seem arrogant. We're not. I'm not."
In fact, says Murphy, despite his public swaggering, he's insecure "about everything. I wonder if I'm good-looking, if I'm talented, if I can sing. I wonder how funny people really think I am, or if it's a fluke."
At age 17, Murphy tried out at the Comic Strip, a Manhattan comedy club. Not only did he land a regular spot at the club, he found his managers there as well: the club's co-owners Bob Wachs and Richie Tienken. That pair was also friendly with sometime Comic Strip performer Joe Piscopo, and the connection led to Murphy's auditioning for Saturday Night Live.
SNL was in a state of creative limbo following the departure of its entire original cast in 1980. By the time Murphy tried out for it, a new cast had been recruited, and the new producer (Jean Doumanian) didn't think much of him. It took intensive prodding by Piscopo, among others, before Murphy was hired-to do bit parts. He wasn't happy. but his low profile may have served him well: after that unfunny season, the entire cast was dismissed-except Piscopo and Murphy.
In the fall of 1981. on the first show of his second year with SNL, Murphy became a star. He did it by unveiling a new and hysterically funny character, the effeminate exercise instructor Little Richard Simmons. During that season he created a crowd of other memorable characters, including Velvet Jones. pitchman for the book I Wanna Be a Ho; the full-grown Buckwheat from the Our Gang comedies; and the prison poet Tyrone Green. ("Kill my landlord...C-I-L-L"). He also did devastating takeoffs on such luminaries as Muhammad Ali, Bill Cosby, and Stevie Wonder. He was brash and he took risks, especially in poking fun at both stereotyped black characters and black cultural heroes. What's more, he got away with it, mostly by sugarcoating his performances with his disarming smile and cartoonish laugh.
And, says current SNL producer Dick Ebersol, "he has the most magical TV eyes I've ever seen. He can get away with a lot just by flashing them to tell an audience he's laughing. He's kind of like Johnny Carson in that way."
In the spring of 1982, Murphy began getting movie scripts. One of them was 48 HRS., a film originally written for Richard Pryor. Murphy landed the Pryor role and stole the film. 48 HRS. went on to gross $ 77 million. His next movie, Trading Places, was one that Paramount had also hoped to make with Pryor (and Gene Wilder). Again Murphy took Pryor's place, and the movie pulled in $92 million. The two films wound up numbers four and five in The Hollywood Reporter magazine's Top 100 list for 1983, and Murphy came in second in a recent poll of theater owners who were asked to name the leading box office draws. He finished ahead of Burt Reynolds, Harrison Ford, and Richard Pryor; only Clint Eastwood outpolled him.
Murphy, who had also cut a record of his nightclub act, was a changed man when he returned to the set of Saturday Night Live for the 1982-8 3 season. "By the seventh or eighth show," says Ebersol, "his attentions were divided because of all the demands on him." Murphy, who in his first full year had written constantly for the show, now contributed little. He began to quarrel with Ebersol, refusing to act in skits he didn't find funny. It was the beginning of the end for Murphy and SNL.
By the beginning of the 19 8 3-84 season, Murphy had signed a $15 million, fivepicture deal with Paramount; he had no need for the TV show but was lured back, on a limited basis, by loyalty to Ebersol and by a hefty deal: $ 300,000 for ten live appearances and ten pre-taped bits. (During the previous season he'd made $8,700 a show, up from a starting salary of $750 a show.) Even so, by the time he made his last appearance, he was anxious to leave. He was quoted as saying, "I don't think the show is funny. I hate it."
Now, a summer later, Murphy has mellowed. "When I first left the show, I think it was overkill. I was tired of my work," he says. "But now that I'm gone, I realize how much I loved everybody I worked with. I get sad sometimes watching, just reading the names, 'cause I really grew up on that show. The show molded me: everybody bigbrothered or big-sistered me, right down to the new people who were there when I left."
He now recalls Ebersol with fondness. "When I was fucked up, I could go to Dick. The year 48 HRS. hit and I was the hot shit on the show, I was going crazy. It was happening too fast: my ego was all fucked up. I'd go from being the happiest guy in the world to being depressed. I was manic-depressive. Joe Piscopo was the first person I'd go to; if Joe wasn't there, there was Tim [Kazurinsky] or Dick. If they couldn't help, I was fucked."
With Saturday Night Live behind him, Murphy took a small role in Dudley Moore's movie Best Defense. It's a piece of work he wishes he could undo. Bob Wachs explains the appeal of the deal much the way he must have explained it to Murphy: "I thought it was important that Eddie be on the screen; it would've been a year and a half between movies otherwise. He got paid a very handsome sum of money to do it." (Murphy reportedly got $1 million.) The reviews, however, were mostly negative. Distributors protested the misleading advertising for the movie, in which Murphy spent less than twenty minutes onscreen and the two stars didn't share a single scene.
The film opened big, raking in almost $8 million at the box office during its first weekend. Murphy is happ
y about the box-office figures. But he expresses deeper reservations about his part in the film. "Best Defense was a bizarre one. It was the first time I was weak in this business, the first time I did something other than what I wanted to do. I read the script and wasn't nuts about it, or about doing a cameo after two very successful movies, but it was, `Well, it's not your movie, and they'll give you X amount of dollars to work for a week,' and I went into it for financial security. It was the first time I felt I was whoring myself artistically."
But what kind of security did he need after signing his multimillion-dollar deal with Paramount? Murphy nods; it's a fair question. Low-voiced, he says, "It was greed. I can't be condemned for it, 'cause we've all been guilty of it at one time or another."
Back on the set, Wachs is less than pleased with Murphy's candor. "Did he say `greed'?" He tries playing editor. "Do Moviegoer readers want to read about greed?" he asks.
A few weeks later, back home in Alpine, New Jersey, Murphy sounds even more embarrassed. After the big opening, Best Defense receipts fell 60 percent the second week and another 50 percent the third. "Word of mouth sells a movie," says Murphy. "That's what made 48 HRS. big. The idea of Dudley and me in a film was pleasing to the public, so the movie opened real big. But if a movie sucks, I don't give a fuck who's in it, it'll crash. This movie sucked real bad. I saw a screening at Paramount, and I felt like putting a Band-Aid on my eyes 'cause I'd just been fucked. I was depressed."
Beverly Hills Cop-which is now in the can-will be better, he promises. He slows down the pace of his speech to deliver a statement. "Beverly Hills Cop is my apology to the country for Best Defense. It's as entertaining as 48 HRS. but funnier, and it has the same kind of dramatic overtones. It'll be a very good movie."
Relaxing into one of his reflective moods, he says that he sometimes wishes success had come to him later in life. He's thinking about the protests over his HBO special late last year. Gays were upset at his jokes about "faggots" and AIDS; others protested the crudity of his language and material in general. "My attitude was `Fuck everybody; this is me, this is the way I express myself onstage," he says. "Then after the special came out, I was scared. People got offended. Now I'm thinking, whatever I'm doing, I have to be doing it right. It doesn't mean I don't feel guilty about anything I've done, it's just that I know I'm growing into something else. It's fucked up that I have to grow up comedically in public. If I could change one thing in my career, it would be to put off success until I was 30 years old."
On balance, though, "I'm in control of my life," he states. He's engaged to Lisa Figueroa, a college student. He remains an abstainer from drugs and alcohol. And he stays close to his family, on whose members he has lavished money, cars, and a house.
Then he adds: "I'm still manic-depressive; I still go up and down. Everybody does. But sometimes I'll wake up and my manager'll say, `This is wrong, that's wrong, this is wrong, that's wrong,' and I'll say, Ah, so what? I'm happy to be alive.' And sometimes I'll wake up and want to cry. And not really have any reason: just a bunch of small stuff, wondering about my career. Or sometimes I'll get depressed about certain places I can't go anymore, like the park."
And that's a problem-not because Murphy needs fresh air, but because he needs fresh comedy material. "I've seen at least fifty guys in clubs who in the next ten years will be stars. They have hours of material, of life experiences. My life now is being in the studio. Nobody wants to hear a routine about `Hey, the other day I was in the studio and the camera came up real close....' What I need is a vacation, to be around people. I gotta go out and live. "
But when you're Eddie Murphy, the living ain't always easy. One evening last July, he got involved in a good old-fashioned bar fight. It took place at a Hollywood nightclub, and by the time it was over, there were claims that Murphy had instigated the battle, that he'd thrown a glass at a man. Lawsuits were threatened.
Murphy just shrugs. "What happened was I was talking with a friend, and all of a sudden somebody pushed me. I pushed the guy back, he pushed me again, I hit him, and it turned into a barroom brawl with everybody punching everybody, and at the end of it, because I was Eddie Murphy, somebody said, `Eddie punched me,' somebody said, `Eddie hit me with a chair,' and somebody else said, `Eddie threw a glass.' 'Cause Eddie's got money, so let's get paid."
Still, he got something out of it, didn't he?
Murphy brightens and flashes that smile. "Yeah. Get your ass kicked and you got a whole new routine."
-Moviegoer
December 1984
Tom Hanhs Plaijs It Cool
month after filing the Eddie Murphy article, I was back in L.A. for a day with a young comic actor named Tom Hanks. That's all the piece was worth in the fall of 1984: a day at the Fox studios, where Hanks was working on a film that would disappear shortly after its release.
One day was perfect for my schedule, too. I was now juggling Chronicle articles with my column in GQ, freelance articles for GEO, Parade, and TV Guide, and-believe it or not-a teaching gig back at my alma mater, San Francisco State. The Journalism Department had a sudden need for someone to teach the Contemporary Magazines course, and John Burks, who was Rolling Stone's managing editor when I joined in 1969, recommended me.
Right after midterms, I was off to see Hanks, and, after our brief visit, I was back in San Francisco, meeting a GQ deadline and planning my next lecture.
Hanks, as we all know, would survive the bump of a bad movie. And, many years (and a couple of Oscars later), he would remember our day together, these two lads from Oakland, California.
YOU SHOULD KNOW Tom HANKS, but you probably don't. At best, you've got him confused with someone else.
Look at his picture. Wasn't he in Mr. Mom? You know, the wired wacko who stole that Night Shift movie from Henry Winkler? And isn't he the same guy who played the gonzo groundskeeper in Caddyshack and the crazy counselor in Meatballs? Didn't he used to be on Saturday Night Live? ("Get outta here, you knucklehead!") Or was it SCTV?...
Nope. Tom Hanks is not Michael "Mr. Mom" Keaton or Bill "Meatballs" Murray. Hanks is the man who got wet with Daryl Hannah in the smash movie Splash and cooljerked his way through Bachelor Party. But just as Tim Hutton, Tom Cruise, Matt Dillon, and Rob Lowe are sometimes crowded into one hunky horde, Hanks is kind of lost in a comic crowd.
"I'm a poor man's Bill Murray, according to a lot of critics," Hanks admits as we sit in his trailer on the lot of 20th Century Fox in Hollywood. "They say something like, 'The producers couldn't get Bill Murray, so they got this other kid, the ripoff Bill Murray."'
Hanks just shrugs. "I'm not surprised. It's mostly because of Bachelor Party, 'cause the guy was real iconoclastic." In other words, gonzo, wild and crazy, with maybe only two wheels on the ground-kind of like, say, Keaton in Night Shift. Hanks nods. "Yeah," he sighs, "I'm a poor man's Michael Keaton, too. It's partly because I'm not tall, I'm not blond, and I'm not good-looking. Neither is Michael, so we get lumped into a bunch of the same stuff. And people say, `Oh, I just loved you in Mr. Mom.' I say, 'Well thank you.. .that really makes me feel good.' I like that better than `I loved you as Robin the Boy Wonder on the old Batman series."'
We're on the set of Hanks' new movie, a spy comedy called The Man With One Red Shoe. Between scenes, he is dressed in a black sweatshirt and faded jeans; he fiddles with a pair of shades. He talks easily, sometimes earnestly, sometimes with a sarcastic edge to his thick voice. But, like Murray, the sarcasm is softened by an innate warmth and intelligence. Like Murray, Hanks can disarm with the dance of an eyebrow or a jazzy offhand shake of a finger that says, "Hey, we're just kidding around, folks."
Even on the subject of being confused with others, he sounds almost flip. `At least for the time being," he says, "I'm one of the faces-I'm one of those guys."
Those who've worked with Hanks disagree. In their view, Hanks could break out of the pack any film now. Ron Howard, former star of Happy Days, was Hanks' director in Splash. "I think Tom has a very specific place
in the business if he wants to take advantage of it," he says. "He's that every man, the guy who leads a pretty normal life but isn't boring and can be very entertaining; who makes you identify with him. There hasn't been anybody concentrating on doing that lately, and I think Tom is a strong enough actor to accomplish it."
Hanks comes off as what he likes to consider himself: a serious, theatrically trained actor who happens to be able to handle comedy roles. Yet, when you're meeting him for the first time and you're curious about just what makes him tick, it helps to have common ground. With Hanks I get lucky. Within minutes of our being introduced, he's regaling me with a song:
YEP, OUR COMMON GROUND IS OUR HOMETOWN, that maligned city in the sunny shadow of San Francisco-Oakland, California. And besides being two of maybe five people on earth who know "Oakland," by a one-regional-hit jug band called the Goodtime Washboard Three, we soon find out we are both sons of restaurant dadsmen who cooked and ran kitchens for a living. And finally, I learn that Hanks' stepmother is Chinese; I'm Chinese.
We are instant bosom buddies. And as much as Hanks would like to project an image as a serious actor, sometimes-like right now, when he's talking about his stepmother-he can't help but go a little crazy.
Tom was 10 when Frances Wong and her own large family invaded the Hanks household of Dad and three kids (one brother lived with his natural mom). As he recalls a typical family gathering and mentally tallies up the Wong-Hanks clan, he suddenly stands and throws himself against a wall of the trailer, to illustrate how his house turned into a crowded Chinese restaurant.
"It was like, wow, this steady parade of people milling around making these huge dinners, twenty-two people sitting around the big plywood table my dad made. I'd just kinda sit there and be polite. 'What're we having for dinner? Oh, squid. That's delicious.' But it wasn't unpleasant at all. It was really kind of fun, but it was pretty bizarro."
Not Fade Away: A Backstage Pass to 20 Years of Rock & Roll Page 49