Murphy says he knows best:' Race had nothing to do with it. People don't go:'' Oh, Eddie Murphy, let's go see his movie, he's a funny black man.'' No, they go to see Eddie Murphy because he's funny. ‘The reason they didn't go and see those movies was because they weren't good, plain and simple.' He also had personal demons. There was a paternity suit in 1987 and two years later one for sexual harassment. A former manager took him to court for a share of his earnings. There was humourist and columnist Art Buchwald's breach of contract action against Paramount Studios challenging the authorship of the Murphy movie ‘Coming To America', a story that had been credited to Murphy. Then, director Spike Lee leading a new generation of black film-makers criticised Murphy for being unwilling to help other black artists. ‘People were letting me down left and right and women were using me and hurting me.It took its toll,' he said while on location in San Francisco for the movie ‘Metro'. He responded with the concert movie ‘Raw' which despite being a major commercial success pushed all the wrong buttons. Loud in his red Elvis-style leather jumpsuit and in every other way the misogynistic and gay-baiting jokes were out of line with the time of AIDS and lawsuits like the sexual harassment one he himself had suffered. ‘I know I scared the shit out out of people with ‘'Raw''. They were like -- ‘'he's an angry black man!'' ‘I was a child. What people saw was an artist growing up. I was a young black man flying solo in an wall white industry. I was finding my way. People say they saw ‘”Raw''. I can't even remember it.I would probably like it even less than the chicks who were offended by it. I'm an artist. God created talented people and its people that put labels on them. I'm not trying to reach an audience. I'm trying to express myself.' Certainly in ‘Raw' he was not that cute Chicago cop Axel Foley making mayhem through Beverly Hills . He returned to the character in 1994 in ‘Beverly Hills Cop 111' and admits:' I made it because they offered me $15 million. That $15 million was worth having a critic's thumb up my ass.' He got that and more but,as he says, he knew exactly what he was doing. Paramount had been relentless in their pressure for him to reprise Axel Foley the character who had made all involved millions. It seemed like a last straw. All around him were telling him that all he needed was another smash hit to put him back on top again. It was a roll of the dice on one last chance... ‘But first I had to clear up all that weirdness in my life and all that stuff about who's hot and who's not and criticism that I'm an asshole with bodyguards. The whole decade came to a head and I had to clean up all the bad stuff, get everything back on track.' Axel Foley the third time around didn't do it. ‘The Nutty Professor' has. With the remake of the 1963 Jerry Lewis classic which opens in Britain this week (SEPTEMBER 6) he found his audience in America again. At 36, he is on a roll again. He's still a little touchy:' I read that it was my last chance. What does that mean exactly? The reality of the situation is that if my career was on the decline I wouldn't be making movies.They don't give money to blacks in Hollywood because they're swell.' There is, of course, different perceptions of decline. His last film ‘Vampire' earned only $19 million in America . His salary was $12 million. It's not viable economics. More than $50 million was spent on ‘The Nutty Professor' but it's on its way to the magical $100 million already just in America . How the rest of the world will view Murphy as the fat professor who through DNA does a Jekyll and Hyde from plump Sherman Klump to smoothie Buddy Love has still to be determined. Murphy goes all out for laughs also creating a string of other characters. It is broadly directed by Tom ‘Ace Ventura' Shadyac and, like Jerry Lewis, it's all a matter of taste. Whatever else the movie has once again validated Eddie Murphy in Hollywood . We know that because he is being paid $17 million to be the title star of ‘Dr Doolittle'. This time he is taking over from Rex Harrison who talked to the animals in 1967. With the remakes he seems to have come full circle. His New York policeman father (‘ it's genetics -- he was funny') died when he was three.When he was nine his mother Lillian remarried and with stepfather Vernon Lynch in charge they moved from Brooklyn to the almost all-black Long Island suburb of Roosevelt. ‘He was such a lovable kid,' recalled his mother adding the mother's line:' Nobody wants to believe me but Eddie hasn't changed.' |
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