Life Moves Pretty Fast: The lessons we learned from eighties movies (and why we don't learn them from movies any more) (29 page)

7 ‘LIBYAAAAAAANS!!!!!!!’
^fn11

In fact, we can just look at Murphy’s own early movies to see what he was up against in this decade. In
48 Hours
, Murphy’s first film, he plays Reggie, a convict who is teamed up with Jack, played by Nick Nolte, a charmingly gruff cop, and by ‘charmingly gruff’ I mean ‘totally racist’. Here are just some of the names Jack calls Reggie TO HIS FACE:
^fn12

‘Watermelon.’

‘Spearchucker.’

The n-word.

Truly, nothing makes a film’s protagonist more adorable than some good ol’ racism. It is worth noting that Jack is the lead in the movie and Reggie is his sidekick – it’s just because Murphy is so charismatic that the movie seems like it belongs to both of them. It’s Jack who has the personal life, and it’s Jack who has the emotional journey in the film; Reggie is just there to serve the plot. So here we have a movie protagonist, who we’re supposed to like, being openly racist, in 1982. When Jack later apologises to Reggie for saying those things ‘I shouldn’t have said’, this is depicted as proof of his inner sensitivity beneath his gruff (read: ‘racist’) shell, and how he is actually more perceptive than the other cops who just see Reggie as a ‘con’ – although no one in the film other than Jack uses racist slurs about him.
48 Hours
is one of the most influential cop movies ever made, and its pairing of unlikely guys, one white, one black, was copied so extensively in the eighties (
Lethal Weapon
,
Die Hard
,
Miami Vice
) and later (
Men in Black
), it’s easy to forget just how original it once was. But not one of the movie’s many copies took inspiration from Jack’s racist language, and for a goddamn reason.

Decades later, Murphy spoke about the racist language in
48 Hours
:

You know why it worked then and the reason why it wouldn’t now? My significance in film – and again I’m not going to be delusional – was that I’m the first black actor to take charge in a white world onscreen. That’s why I became as popular as I became. People had never seen that before. Black-exploitation movies, even if you dealt with the Man, it was in your neighbourhood, never in their world. In
48 Hours
, that’s why it worked, because I’m running it, making the story go forward. If I was just chained to the steering wheel sitting there being called ‘watermelon’, even back then they would have been like, ‘This is wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong!’

And he’s right, to a certain extent: Murphy positively chews up the screen in this movie, which is no easy thing to do when you’re acting alongside a certified ham like Nolte doing his usual gruff-old-goat Nolte thing. He absolutely dominates the film, and this in turn renders the abuse, according to Murphy, less appalling. But he’s slightly mixing up cause and effect. Murphy is making the movie go forward, but no one thought that would be the case when he was cast. In fact, Richard Pryor was originally envisaged for the role and, for all Pryor’s undoubted gifts, he was never able to break out of the limited (read: racist) boxes in which he was put in films (see the aforementioned
The Toy
). So the fact remains Murphy’s first big film was one in which the sympathetic protagonist is a big ol’ racist – and he triumphs over him. Readers who like metaphors are encouraged to make their own connections here.

In Murphy’s next film, the still completely delightful
Trading Places
, he plays Billy Ray Valentine, a poor black con artist who switches places with a wealthy white dude called Louis Winthorpe III (Dan Aykroyd). Here, when Mortimer Duke (Don Ameche) uses the n-word about Valentine, this is depicted as proof of his evilness, and it’s what motivates Valentine to take revenge. However, the other good male protagonist in the film, Louis, does have a tendency to refer to Valentine as a ‘negro’, much to Valentine’s understandable irritation. Strangely, though, Valentine seems totally fine when Louis later blacks up when he adopts the disguise of a Jamaican stoner in order to trick the guy who played the evil principal in
The Breakfast Club
and the stupid police chief in
Die Hard
^fn13
(do try to keep up).

‘That was very controversial, even back then, and [the studio heads] Barry Diller and Ned Tannen hated that we did that,’ says
Trading Places
’ director, John Landis. ‘But the point is, that it’s supposed to be ridiculous and pathetic, and it is. Danny can do a very good Jamaican accent, but he’s doing a terrible one here.’ And this is true – but again, it does mean that we have a mainstream movie featuring a protagonist employing an offensive black stereotype that would not even be used by villains in movies today. But I do have some sympathy with Landis when he adds, referring to the ending of
Trading Places
in which the bad guy is trapped in a cage with a gorilla, ‘I was fascinated that [studio heads] were outraged by [the black face] but not some guy being fucked in the ass by a gorilla.’
^fn14

Murphy’s career began when he was turned down at the age of nineteen by
Saturday Night Live
in 1980. Even though
Saturday Night Live
prided itself on being ever so cutting edge, the show had yet to be convinced that its audience could handle more than one black cast member at a time, and when Murphy turned up he was told that Robert Townsend had already been cast and so the role of ‘the black guy’ was filled. Instead, Murphy was half-heartedly assigned as a featured player, as opposed to a regular cast member. After a year and a change of boss, Murphy’s talent and popularity were simply impossible to ignore and so he was promoted – and he promptly saved the TV sketch show.

‘If not for Eddie’s talent and popularity,
SNL
would probably have died in the early 80s,’ Tom Shales and James Andrew Miller write. And if that had happened, comedians who got their start on
SNL
after Murphy’s era, including Chris Farley, Chris Rock, Mike Myers, Will Ferrell, Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, might well have never been launched. Many, many comedians today stand on Murphy’s shoulders.

Being ‘the black guy’ was pretty much par for the course for black actors in America in the early 1980s. ‘The status of the black person in pop culture in the early eighties reflected a kind of tokenism on some levels,’ says Mark Anthony Neal, a Professor of Black Popular Culture in the Department of African and African-American Studies at Duke University. ‘You look at TV shows that started up then, such as
The Facts of Life
[in which one black girl is at a posh all-white girls boarding school] or
Diff’rent Strokes
[in which two poor black boys are adopted by a rich old white man], and you have token black bodies in strange, white situations. I think many black audiences appreciated the move away from the blaxploitation images that were very popular in the seventies, but I think there was also concern that a lot of the characters you saw were not fully rounded at all.’

Being ‘the black guy’ on
SNL
was about as thankless a job as it sounds. Garrett Morris, the first black cast member, was, according to original cast member Jane Curtin, ‘treated horribly, horribly – by the writers, by some of the performers, and by Lorne [Michaels, the show’s creator]’, which is demonstrably true. During his
SNL
tenure Morris was repeatedly humiliated in sketches that did more than border on racist: he was made to wear a monkey suit and one time the writers wrote a parody commercial for him in which he advertised a toothpaste called Tarbrush to darken black people’s teeth (Lorne Michaels cut it from the show after seeing it in rehearsal although, according to Morris, two black technicians walked out in protest that it was even considered). For his part, Morris said he built ‘the only non-white chair in that whole thing, and I shed blood for that’. It cost him more than blood. The comedian became so depressed about his situation, and so bored from being under-used by the writers, that he started freebasing.

Even after Murphy proved that ‘the black guy’ could be a real asset to the show,
Saturday Night Live
continued to treat black cast members as mere tokens, there to impersonate black celebrities and little else. Damon Wayans (on the show from 1985 to 1986) got so annoyed with the programme he started wearing sunglasses inside and telling people, ‘It’s too white in here, it hurts my eyes.’ Eventually, he sabotaged a skit while on air and was duly fired and soon after established
In Living Color
, a comedy sketch show featuring mainly black comedians. Chris Rock (
Saturday Night Live
cast member from 1990 to 1993) also got frustrated with ‘this weird, Waspy world of a show’ – and that was in 1993, thirteen years after Murphy arrived.

This was the world in which Murphy got his start. And yet, despite all these seemingly insurmountable hurdles, he became
SNL
’s biggest breakout star of all time. But as Bill Simmons points out, ‘Eddie never catered to
SNL
’s white audience, that’s for sure.’ His jokes were about specific African-American tropes and icons, from the ghetto to James Brown to, most famously, his imitations of Stevie Wonder. He broke through
SNL
’s white ceiling, and the lagging racism of America in the eighties, not by being reductive or offensive about black people, but simply by being so incandescent that no one could resist him.

‘He was young and he was tuned into what was happening in young black America, and he wasn’t Cosby, but he wasn’t Richard Pryor,’ says Professor Neal. ‘You never got the sense that he was whitewashing who he was, or what his experience was.’

Murphy looked up to both Cosby and Pryor as mentors, and a large part of his success came from synthesising the lessons he learned from them: he wasn’t quite as dangerous as Pryor, but nor was he as conservative as Cosby. In his stand-up, he talked about working-class black experiences, like Pryor did, but not in a way that would alienate white audiences, as Cosby feared. His mentors, perhaps unsurprisingly, had some reservations about his tactics. Cosby, according to Murphy’s very credible account in his 1989 live show,
Raw
, thought Murphy used too much dirty language. Pryor wrote: ‘I never connected with Eddie. People talked about how much my work influenced Eddie, and perhaps it did. But I always thought Eddie’s comedy was mean. I used to say, “Eddie, be a little nice,” and that would piss him off.’

But despite his predecessors’ reservations, he was more successful than they ever dreamed of being. ‘Eddie was making jokes in high school when he was sixteen, he was playing in comedy clubs at eighteen, he was on
SNL
at nineteen, he was a movie star at twenty and he was a superstar by twenty-two. He was just an unbelievable meteorite,’ says John Landis.

He is also, as Bill Simmons points out, the only cast member of
SNL
to break into movies properly while still on the show. Even before
48 Hours
had been released, he was cast in
Trading Places
, a film that had originally been envisioned for Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder but, as the film’s director John Landis delicately puts it, ‘Richard unfortunately set himself on fire, so the project went on hold.’ When the studio previewed
48 Hours
, test audiences went completely nuts for Murphy. Studio boss Jeffrey Katzenberg called up Landis, best known then for directing
Animal House
and
The Blues Brothers
, the movies that launched former
Saturday Night
comedian John Belushi, and asked him to repeat this trick with Murphy, and Landis agreed. So, for the second time, Murphy was cast in a role that had been Pryor’s, and, unlike Pryor, Murphy was smart enough to know that his success depended on him staying clean.
^fn15
In Hollywood’s eyes, Murphy was taking over from Pryor as ‘the black guy’.
^fn16

Unfortunately, Paramount ‘hated everyone’ else Landis cast. They didn’t want Aykroyd because Belushi had just died and Aykroyd’s last film,
Doctor Detroit
, had flopped. ‘So conventional wisdom was that it was over for Danny. It was like when Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis broke up, everyone was like, “Poor Dean Martin, we’ll never see him again.” But I cast him anyway and the studio was furious but I said, “I’m sorry, you gave me final cut and that’s who I want,”’ recalls Landis. ‘People forget what a good actor Danny is. Winthorpe has nothing to do with Elwood [his character in
The Blues Brothers
], they’re on a different planet from one another. If you give Danny direction he’s great; if you leave him to his own resources, you get this strange Danny thing. But such a brilliant guy, really smart and funny.’

The studio was even more outraged when he cast Jamie Lee Curtis, then known only for horror movies, as Ophelia, the kindly prostitute. ‘The script is wonderful but the big flaw in it is Ophelia, the hooker with the heart of gold, which is a total Hollywood cliché and a false character. So I knew I needed someone special to play her and when I met Jamie I could immediately see how funny and smart she is, and very sexy in a totally unorthodox way,’ says Landis.

Paramount, though, was so unimpressed by Landis’s choice to hire ‘a B-picture actress’, as studio boss Barry Diller put it, that they docked $2 million from the film’s budget.

For the role of Coleman the butler, Landis desperately wanted to hire Ronnie Barker, as he was ‘a huge fan’ of
The Two Ronnies
. However, Barker told Landis that he never worked ‘more than twenty-five miles from home’, so Denholm Elliott was hired instead. Finally, Landis wanted to include some old Hollywood in the cast, so he hired Don Ameche and Ralph Bellamy as the wicked Duke brothers. ‘And they were so supportive of Eddie, so good to him, who, you gotta remember, was still only about twenty when we made this, and the two of them were huge Hollywood legends who had been working for fifty years,’ says Landis. ‘I remember one day we were shooting the scene when Eddie’s in the back of the Rolls-Royce with Don and Ralph and I have headphones on outside to hear them. Don says, “You know, this is my ninety-ninth motion picture.” And Ralph says, “That’s funny, this is my hundredth feature film,” and Eddie shouts, “Hey, Landis! Between the three of us we’ve made 201 movies!”’ Murphy was, Landis recalls, ‘so happy when we were making
Trading Places
, just bouncing off the walls and so, so gifted. He just popped on screen.’