Eddie Murphy and Arsenio Hall in Coming to America.
Photo: Paramount Pictures
This story was originally published on June 25, 2018. We republished it along with our coverage of the newly launched Come 2 America.
When the Eddie Murphy vehicle Coming to America arrived in theaters 30 years ago, was received in the same way as the last photos of the comic book superstar (Eddie Murphy: Raw, Beverly Hills Cop II, The golden child) – big box office, but average reviews. Some noted that this represented a kind of departure for Murphy, playing a kinder character in what was, as the studio notes pointed out, his first romantic comedy. But few could have predicted that the film would influence as much what Murphy did in the years that followed – or the influence it would continue to have on contemporary audiences.
Murphy was the undisputed box office king of the 1980s, driving his explosive debut in 48 hours in a series of highly successful vehicles. He signed an old-fashioned (and lucrative) contract with a studio at Paramount, where he started developing his own projects under the “Eddie Murphy Productions” banner. He invented the story for Coming to America (he said; more on that later), from an African prince looking for his queen in Queens, New York, as a chance to work with his friend Arsenio Hall, who had just gained national prominence as a replacement host for Joan Rivers in the final weeks of his failed Fox talk show.
The script was delivered to David Sheffield and Barry W. Blaustein, who started writing for Murphy when he was on the air Saturday Night Live. And to direct, Murphy brought in John Landis, who directed his first hit Commercial places. The intensity of the schedule (it started to be filmed six months before the summer release date) and the big egos involved did not, in most accounts, make a harmonious set. “He directed me on Commercial places when I was starting out as a child, but he still treated me like a child five years later, during Coming to America, ” Murphy said Rolling Stone in 1989. “And I hired him to direct the film! Landis, in an interview in 2005, admitted that Murphy had changed. “The guy from Commercial places he was young and full of energy and curious and funny and fresh and great, ”he explained. “The guy from Coming to America he was the pig in the world – the most unpleasant, arrogant and idiotic entourage, just an idiot. “
But whatever the tensions on the set, the collaboration paid off. Landis brought in Rick Baker, the Oscar-winning makeup wizard he worked with in An American werewolf in London and Michael Jackson Action movie video, to design the elaborate prostheses that allowed Murphy and Hall to play a number of supporting roles – wild comic book creations (in essence, Saturday Night Live bits and characters) to compensate for your kindest and kindest clues. Landis, who had just read a book about Jewish comedians wearing blackface at the time of vaudeville, suggested reversing the script. “Rick Baker can make you an old Jew,” he said to his star, and Baker did – so successfully that when Paramount executives visited the set while Murphy was introduced as “Saul”, they didn’t recognize the biggest star from the studio.
These pleasures were barely noticed by traditional critics when Coming to America was released in June. TimeThe headline, “The Taming of Eddie Murphy”, was emblematic of criticism – complaints abound that, by launching Murphy as such a restrained character, the film “seems designed to handcuff and gag the outrageous high-voltage comedian” like Stanley Kuffmann wrote in The new republic. It doesn’t matter the outrageous comedy of the characters’ vignettes, or Murphy’s understandable desire to grow his persona on the screen. But the public showed up en masse; ended up accumulating a staggering $ 288 million in revenue (on a budget of $ 35 million).
And then the processes started. Five separate lawsuits were filed by everyone from struggling screenwriters to a real 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 had sold to Paramount a treatment directed at Murphy called King for a day in 1983. His $ 5 million breach of contract action would dominate entertainment journalism for years, not just for the sensational plagiarism allegations, but for the subsequent exposure of “Hollywood mathematics” that would lead Paramount to complain when the court ruled in favor of Buchwald, that the $ 288 million turnover somehow made no profit. (The tabloids, however, had a field day reporting Murphy’s luxurious weekly expenses during production, including $ 3,800 for his custom home engine, $ 1,500 for his personal trainer, $ 650 for his valet, $ 5,000 for a “grant” weekly subsistence and $ 235 for a single McDonald’s breakfast for the star and his entourage.) After the court ruled in favor of Buchwald, Paramount appealed and finally settled the case in 1995.
In addition to issues of authorship, another silent controversy haunted Coming to America in 1988 – a matter of representation. On a New York Amsterdam News editorial (later republished, presumably for the benefit of white readers, in the Village Voice), Ali Rashid Abdullah wrote that “voices from the African American community predictably took pro and con Coming to America, ”Specifically regarding the scenes of Zamunda, a native of Prince Akeem. Abdullah asked pointedly: “Does Murphy help to perpetuate a negative image of Africa – because of some laughter – at a time when blacks are beginning to identify with their African roots?”
In New York Sun, the famous bomb-thrower Armond White went further, calling Coming to America “A betrayal of every instance of politics, history, sex and ethnic culture that blacks have ever known.” White’s criticism was so exaggerated that it prompted Murphy to respond by issuing a statement in a paid advertisement on Sun, discovering that “the lack of charity on the part of this black man towards the life and work of another black man is intriguing, superficial, exceptionally cruel and deserves a public response”.
In retrospect, what is really disconcerting about White’s broad side is how he completely covers up what was, in fact, revolutionary about Coming to America in Murphy’s career arc. White writes: “There is ethnic self-loathing and humiliation throughout Coming to America. Murphy’s conscience is one that is completely disconnected from political action…. Black politics, black conscience, has never figured in the plots of Murphy’s films, but the perceptiveness of his comics uses the idea of black conscience to appear truly black, up-to-date. “
There is a bottom line of truth in this last point – Murphy’s films were, up to this point, not about black people. His debut, 48 hours., it was basically the story of a modern, talkative black guy who was the smartest guy in a room full of whites, and this is a pretty fitting description of Trading Places, Beverly Hills Cop, and Beverly Hills Cop II also. As his power and financial capacity increased and his involvement in developing his photos became more practical, Murphy was criticized for not creating opportunities for other African Americans; most notably, this was the subject of a longstanding rivalry between Murphy and Spike Lee, who said Jet magazine, “If Eddie Murphy, who won a billion dollars for Paramount, came into his offices and said, ‘I won’t make any more films until you hire some black people in your office’, they would have to do that. I hope he uses his influence instead of focusing on who gets the best table at Spago’s. “
Murphy resisted this criticism – “[The] the company is called Paramount, not Eddie Murphy Productions, ”he said Rolling Stone. “I can’t go into the studio reception and demand shit: ‘Hire some blacks here! ‘”- but even a superficial look at his filmography shows a course correction that started in 1988. Even Lee noticed; in the introduction to your Do the right thing companion book the following year, he recognized Coming to America as “a serious move by Eddie Murphy to make a film about black people”. (More than that, it was a film that did not give much importance to its darkness; as Landis recalled: “I realized that this is an opportunity to do something really important that no one will notice … It was so successful; to that as an African American film. Never. However, it has three parts spoken to white people. All other roles spoken are of an African American. ”)
Murphy, in fact, created opportunities in the process – America in the first sporting appearances by Samuel L. Jackson, Eriq La Salle and (if you look closely) Cuba Gooding Jr. Immediately thereafter, Murphy wrote, produced, directed and starred in Harlem Nights, a film filled with African American legends from showbiz and newbies. Three years later, he returned to work with screenwriters Blaustein and Sheffield for Boomerang, romantic comedy with an almost black cast. And in the years that followed, he alternated Beverly Hills Police Officer– action movie style with Coming to America-multifunctional comedies aimed at the black, such as The Nutty Professor, Vampire in Brooklyn, and Norbit.
Yet Coming to America gets taller, driven to this day by his memorable characters and meme-friendly dialogues and costumes (see the flurry of onlookers arriving Black Pantheropening weekend in Wakandan and Zamundan duds). By any reasonable definition, its position today is less that of a studio comedy than a cult film – although that term has been appropriated by the culture of the white man for films like Fight Club, The Big Lebowski, and (God help us) Righteous Saints that dominate midnight movie bookings and retro screenings.
But he has the cultural ubiquity and endless quote from a great cult film – and something else. What unites the best cult films is an exclusively personal perspective and, again, you don’t think of a great Eddie Murphy film from the 80s as being particularly personal. Still, since his opening scenes, in which Prince Akeem of Murphy is awakened by a set of ropes, bathed by beautiful women and escorted by rose petals wherever he goes, America it is satirizing the popular perception of Murphy’s luxurious lifestyle (a perception almost confirmed by the receipts read at the Buchwald trial). Writing in the short New York magazine 7 days, Louis Menand took the allegory further: “It is the story of a man who lives in a fantasy world where all desires are satisfied and where everyone loves him. But he fears for his true self, the man he was before his wealth and success, and dreams of returning to the petty streets of his beginnings and discovering his soul’s true companion. He doesn’t want the bad streets, however, he wants the royal palace; and when he finds his soul mate, that’s where he hopes to return. Wealth will then be a just reward – the reward for being true to yourself.
“Zamunda, in short, is Hollywood, and Akeem is Eddie Murphy.”