DON, SLY STALLONE AND EDDIE MURPHY

THE DON Season 2: Maverick, Top Gun, Don’s Greatest Hits, And The Addictions That Killed Him”  

In this episode, we learn just how close Sly Stallone came to starring in Beverly Hills Cop. We dive into Don's failure in trying to make Richard Pryor into a movie star. We look at his courtship of Eddie Murphy. And efforts to de-sexualize Eddie Murphy in order to make him a movie star. And why critics like Pauline Kael cried racial insensitivity after seeing the movie.  

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
Episode five, slides Alone, Beverly Hills Cup and Eddie Murphy.
In this episode, we learned just how close slides Alone
came to starring in Beverly Hills Cup. We dive into
Don's quest to de sexualize Eddie Murphy in order to
make him a movie star, and why critics like Pauline
Cale cried racial insensitivity after seeing the movie. You know,

(00:28):
the truth is, you're scared shitless of going to that place,
aren't you. I am not. Yes you are, and you're
using me as an excuse not to go. Get out.
I'm just gonna piss it all the way out. Do
you understand? You give up your dream? You're dying. Flash

(00:50):
Dance played in movie theaters for over a year. It
would gross a staggering three hundred and forty million dollars
in revenue. After being fired from param Out one year earlier,
Don was now back in the inner circle. Flash Dance
had fallen into his lap, a script that nobody wanted.
Now Don wanted to make the one script he really

(01:12):
wanted to make. Eddie Murphy is a Detroit Cup on
vacation in Beverly Hills. I just got off the phone
with him, inspector Can Detroit. He says, if you're out
here investigating the Tandean murder, you need h while coming
back Don, Beverly Hills cup was Don's idea. According to Don,

(01:39):
Don came up with the idea in seven. He had
Danilio Bark to write the first draft. I knew Danilio
Oxford I was a brilliant guy. But if you ask
Michael Eisner, it was Eisner's idea, later to be confirmed
by Barry Diller, it was. It was definitely done, no
question Don was the idea. Beverly Hills Cop can be

(02:02):
traced back to one of Don's memos at Paramount. The idea,
if you can call it, that was based on a
white guy driving a beat up car Eisner or Don,
depending on who you believe, who gets stopped in Beverly
Hills by a cop and given a traffic ticket for
the sole reason that the white guy in the beat
up car looks suspicious. Now, it seems quite unlikely that

(02:24):
both of these white men were targeted and stopped in
Beverly Hills. But even if one of them was telling
the truth, why would they tell anyone about it, let
alone pitch it as an inspiration for a movie plot.
With so many countless stories of black people being pulled
over and harassed by cops simply because they were black,
what could be more racially insensitive? But back then, the

(02:47):
white guys at the studio thought it was a real winner.
They had no issue as to how insensitive the story
might be. This was, of course, the early eighties, the
decade of black face, when white guys like the future
Governer of Virginia could paint his face black and get
a laugh at a college party. And why not. He

(03:07):
was probably just mimicking what he saw in the movies,
like dan Ackroyd dressing up in black face and trading places.
I suddenly wept enough spears on the train for me
naked from Cameroon. Do you remember me? It's Lionel Joseph

(03:29):
from the African Education Conference, right, yes, Simon, and I
was director of cultural events at the Highly Salon. I
remember the pavilion. We had big fun there. Or Gene
Wilder adopting black face next to Richard Pryor in Silver Streak.

(03:51):
I can't pass for black, Utah. I didn't say I
was gonna make you black. I said I was gonna
get you on the train. Now we got to make
them cops. Thank you black. It will never work. Never
what are you free? It won't come home. That's a
good joke, that's humorous. May I speak? This is crazy.
It will never work. Don't you understand? Are you kidding?

(04:14):
Look at that? Al Joseph made a million bucks looking
like that. None of the sketches compared to the movie
soul Man, where the entire premise was based on black face.
In the movie, the white kid played by c. Thomas
Howell takes tanning pills to darkness skin so he can
pass for black and obtain a scholarship meant for black
students at Harvard Law School. Some people wanted him to

(04:34):
get into Harvard. It's gonna be great. These are the eighties? Man?
Is it Cosby decade? For Mark Watson? All it took
was a little soul Despite protests from the end l
a c P. The studio released the movie. It turned
out to be a huge hit with white kids across America,
And so was it any wonder that eighties Hollywood would
make a movie about a poor white guy being hassled

(04:55):
by the police. The only question was who would star
as the underdog here Row taking on the establishment Rambo.
Of course, Sylvester Stallone was originally signed on for Beverly
Hill's cop Stallone with Paramount's biggest star. He had just
done First Blood and was set to play Rambo. No
project passed through Paramount without going to Sly first. Don

(05:18):
and everybody else thought that Sly would for sure pass
on the script. But not only did he sign on,
he offered to rewrite the entire script himself. Don was
in shock John Rambo and Beverly Hills. He knew how
difficult it would be to rain in Sly. It would
become a Sly Stallone movie, and there was nothing Don
would be able to do about it. Sly had already

(05:39):
taken on casting approval, and he had changed his character
from Axel Foley to Axel Cobretti. He offered the script
to Scorsese to direct. Don couldn't believe that Sly was
taking over his producing duties. Scorsese, Stallone, and Don, of course,
all knew each other from working on Don's first movie, Cannonball.
To you, No, Lester Welton, unless you know we've got

(06:00):
all the money writing on this thing. I'm just so sure.
Benny is going to deliver back on my time, and
I'm gonna tell you something looked very good, you know,
and does something for I'll tell you something else that
creepers running. The boy don't better know what's going to
have a dormant his brother don't come in for at all,
isn't it. Don knew his only chance to dump Slide

(06:20):
was to try and put some pressure on Scorsese. He
had an in with Don's former protegee, Dawn Steele. She
was a VP at Paramount and dating Marty Ah. Poor Dawn,
she was caught in the middle. She couldn't discourage Marty
off a Paramount project at the same time she wanted
to make the movie with Don. In the end, Scorsese

(06:42):
couldn't make sense of the senseless violence or slides elaborate
action sequences. In one sequence, he had himself hanging out
on the wing of a Lamborghini racing against a train.
Scorsese would pass on the script and would go on
to make the Last Temptation of Christ. But Scorsese's passed
didn't discourage Slide from becoming Beverly Hills Cop. He was

(07:03):
all in on the rewrite. Don had been developing the
project for nearly six years, and now Rambo was set
to hit the streets of Beverly Hills. Don made a
plea to Ron Meyer, Stallone's agent at CIA, the movie
was a comedy and Slide didn't have a funny bone
in his body, and he was taking out all the
good jokes. Don had hired Sam Simon, later a writer

(07:25):
for Cheers and co creator of The Simpsons, to polish
the dialogue. Meyer agreed and pleaded with Stallone to get
off the picture, but Stallone had fallen in love with
the scripts he had written. From all accounts, it was
actually really good. In Stallone's version, he was Axel Cobretti,
an Italian cop from Detroit who was transferred to Beverly
Hills to investigate the shooting of his girlfriend. He would

(07:46):
call his opening sequence his Saving Private Ryan sequence, as
his character has to rescue his buddy from a shootout
in Detroit. There were chase scenes as intricate as the
French connection, but all the action made the film really,
really expensive, and that worked in Don's favor. The budget
was fourteen million dollars, and Eisner and Diller weren't budging

(08:08):
on the number. With the film two weeks away from production.
Stallone would bow out of the movie on one condition
that he could take his kick ass action sequences from
cop and use them in his next movie, Cobra. Society
is breeding a new kind of criminal. It's also breeding

(08:30):
a new kind of cup Meet Cobra. He does the
job nobody wants. Did you use unnecessary? Gedly forced? With

(08:56):
Stallone out, Don was already on a plane to New York.
Behind the scene, Don had been courting a comic from
Saturday Night Live Yet Cool. When we return, we go

(09:18):
back to the day that Richard Pryor sets himself on
fire and the fallout from Sydney Potier's Kiss with Abby Lincoln.
Eddie Murphy was famous by the time. He was nineteen.
By twenty and with no film experience, he was hired

(09:41):
to co star in Forty eight Hours opposite Nick Nolty.
The buzz around the film was so strong that Paramount
exact Jeffrey Katzenberg called John Landis to revive a project
called Black and White. The project originally had Richard Pryor attached,
but died quickly after Prior nearly died setting himself on fire.
The movie would become eating places. Paramount thought that they

(10:02):
had the next Richard Pryor. Eddie didn't like the comparison.
Although Eddie worshiped Prior as a comedic genius as a
movie star, he thought Prior had wasted his opportunities. He
had seen how drugs had destroyed him. It was June nine.
Eddie was only nineteen and just starting out on Saturday

(10:23):
Night Live when he heard Richard Pryor was on fire,
I mean literally on fire. The press reported Prior had
accidentally burnt himself after knocking over a bottle of run.
In truth, Prior had actually tried to kill himself. On
that day. Richard Pryor was in a state of paranoia.
He thought people were lying to him and trying to

(10:44):
steal his money, so he went into a bank on
Sunset and Vine and tried to withdraw every cent from
his bank account. When the bank manager told him he
couldn't authorize such a withdrawal on short notice, Prior drove
back to the valley and smoked the rest of his cocaine.
Delusions and madness to cord of him. And when he
ran out of cocaine, he dused himself in rum and
fired up his Later it took three tries for him

(11:07):
to become a human fireball authorities saying Richard Prior either
Walter ran nearly a mile and a half from his
house to this location, where an ambulance rescued him. His
skin was burned completely off. I was working at the
National Standard, which at the time was the tabloid rival
to hard copy. We've gotten word that Richard Pryor was

(11:27):
on fire, and he'd been spotted by a dog walker
who reported that he was staggering through his neighborhood in
north Ridge. And what nothing but white people staring at
me was dismission and wound up in the rum. Eventually

(11:48):
an ambulance arrived. All the news trucks were out there.
By then. It was like he was already dead. Friends
and family were saying goodbye to him. The bitteries were
being written. There were fights over his possession. Some were
already being taken from his house. I mean, everyone thought
he was gone, but Prior survived. In Eddie's view, it

(12:11):
was the fame and stardom that drove him to drugs.
Don knew Eddie was a kid wise beyond his years.
He knew he could handle the fame. Eddie was filming
on sound stages at Paramount and his office was right
next door to Don's office. He would come by the
office after shooting and complain about the miserable experience he'd
had working on Best Defense. But then, yeah, I read

(12:33):
the script at first, and the script was terrible. I
was like, what, how dare you give me a script
like this? No that much money, Let's go. So I
read the script of Best Offense. I went out and
did Best Defense. Best Defense turned out to be the
worst movie ever done in history of anything, and all
of a sudden, I wouldn't have had no more so.
Tom Cruise had done two clunkers, Losing It and Legend

(12:55):
before working with Don on Top Gun. Eddie likewise had
his own box office. But I'm in the film Best Defense.
He had only done the movie for the money, a
staggering amount of money, one million dollars for a week
of work. Well, Eddie Murphy's pretty much a shell now
because Best Defense just came out and he's just wandering around.
Next time you see a check, don't just take it

(13:16):
because the script is If the script ain't going, I
will I'll I don't think I'll do another movie just
for money anymore. Hopping on a slice stalone movie two
weeks before production wasn't how Dawn or Eddie envisioned his
path to stardom. The risk was, you know, considerable for
Dawn in the studio. Can a black act to become
a modern day movie star? There were land mines everywhere.

(13:38):
I mean, look what happened to Sydney Poisier. Sydney Potier
was the biggest movie star in the world in nine.
Two of his films were nominated for Oscars. In the
Heat of the Night, where he played a black cop
trying to solve a white murder in Deep Mississippi, and
the equally racially charged Guess Who's Coming to Dinner. To
win that role, he had to audition or more aptlete

(14:00):
form for Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy at not one,
but two dinner parties. Despite the racial messaging of his movies,
there were critics who called him an Uncle Tom shilling
for the studio system. He was criticized for being typecast
as an asexual black man with no flaws or character faults,
and then he made love to Abby Lincoln. After Potier

(14:21):
made those great films, in nineteen sixty seven, he had
real movie star cloud and so he went against type
and chose a romantic comedy for Love of Ivy opposite
Abby Lincoln. Abbey Lincoln would become one of the great
jazz singers of her generation. Back then, she had starred
in a small independent film called Nothing but a Man
that would be groundbreaking and showing black relationships on the screen.

(14:44):
Potier was clearly impressed with the intimacy of the storytelling,
just the simple shot of a close up with a
novelty in a black performance. Potier was rarely filmed, and
close up that was all part of his image. Show
a black man on the screen, make him a star,
but don't o too much. Nothing but a Man was
notable for its raw intimacy indelible images of Abby Lincoln

(15:06):
and Ivan Dixon in close up. Malcolm X would call
it his favorite film. Interestingly, it was filmed not by
a black director, but by two white Jewish directors, one
of whom Robert Young would go on to make the
great nineteen sixty nine Christmas movie JT. For Sydney Pottier,
the opportunity to now work with Abby Lincoln must have

(15:29):
been a revelation. In the movie, a rich white family
led by a hippie teenage son played by bow Bridges,
schemes to keep their maid from quitting by setting her
up with an eligible bachelor played by Potier. As long
as you're in the neighborhood, why don't you come up
to the house for dinner. We wouldn't love to have you.
I thought you weren't coming home for their night. I
just changed my mind. That's a great idea, which for

(15:50):
dinner tonight? I told you Patrow Ruby Jack Ivy's pot
roast is out of sight, man, I don't care. H
The film was a misfire, a race provoking film that
just didn't come together. For Potier, it was a devastating blow.
He would return to doing the typecast rules he was

(16:12):
famous for. And a leading black actor wouldn't have a
love interest in a mainstream movie until Richard Pryor start
in some kind of hero with Don at Paramount, And
we know what happened there, don't we. Choices had to
be made by choices pierced means sex. You had a
movie star playing a heroic cop in an action movie.

(16:33):
In every other action movie, the heroic cop gets a
love interest, but not Axel Foley. When we return, we
look into how Don made Axel Foley into the first
mainstream black movie star character and the rumors around his sexuality.

(16:56):
In the original Stallone script, the beautiful Lisa Eislebacker Acter
was Stallone's girlfriend, but with Eddie on board, Lisa became
just a friend. Why it was clear that the studio
didn't want to face another some kind of hero backlash.
The black guy couldn't have a white girlfriend because white
audiences I didn't want to see it. Pierce also had

(17:20):
a gay conspiracy theory. Imagine the filmmakers pitched you a
story of a Detroit cop whose best friend, Mikey, gets
murdered and the cop has to avenge Mikey's death. Now
you'd want to know what's so special about this relationship
with Mikey because typically in movies the hero is avenging
the loss of his loved one, wife, girlfriend, child. How

(17:45):
you doing as you're still breaking into people's houses? What
do you expect with that? Why dont you buy a
real fucking lock thread door like I got my pistol.
I probably having so much I can't gore an electrical
world refrigerate so loves men look at too. You want
to get out six you got have six months ago.

(18:06):
Here's coming to see me now. Mikey Tandino, fresh out
of prison, has broken into Axel's apartment. Instead of losing
his ship, Axel gives him a hug and an ear
to ear smile. It looks like Mikey's about to cry,
he's so overwhelmed to see his best friend. Later at
the bar, they're speaking literally six inches apart. There's no bromance,

(18:27):
no buddy buddy comedy, just the earnest, heartfelt emotion of
two men close talking. The vibe is pretty clear they
really really love each other. How come you didn't tell
on me when you got caught? Not can be telling
more together? You don't know because I love you. Man.

(18:54):
The absence of a love interest doesn't make Axel gay,
but the fact that there is a love interest and
Axel chooses to not pursue her while it's just unheard
of in a genre movie, You've got Lisa Eislebacker inviting
Axel up to her hotel room and nothing happens. They
don't even address it. She's lying on the hotel bed
and all he wants to do is order take out

(19:16):
for his partner's Taggart and Rosewood waiting in the car. Axel,
who is incredibly sharp, as evidenced by his ace detective work,
is clueless to the advances of a beautiful blonde draped
across her bed. Later, at the strip club, more of
the same. Axel has no interest in the strippers. He
tells the other cops to have a good time. The

(19:36):
question is, could Axel have been gay? Now? Considering Dan's
penchant for creating characters with gay subtext, it has to
be a possibility. Or was this the Sydney Pottier treatment
of a black movie star. The Racial Type wrote that
Don and Eddie Had to Walk was very risky, and
critics picked up on it. I mean some of them

(19:58):
wrote that it was an anti white v not an
anti black movie, but an anti white movie. And the
critic that led the charge of the movie's discrimination against
white people Don's nemesis the legendary film critic Pauline Kale.
She was back at The New Yorker reviewing movies after
her disastrous turn at Paramount working for Don. Don didn't

(20:19):
expect her to like his movie, but it was a
review that Nobody Saw Coming. Pauline Kale basically wrote that
Axel Foley was an insult to white people. The gist
of the review was that the movie was dumb in
name and plotless, not a surprise from the art house
lover Kale. What was disturbing was how she attacked the

(20:40):
stardom of Eddie Murphy, in which she said that eddie
star turn is due to the running joke he pleased
on white people. Axel Foley uses their stupidity to solve
the crime. Don't always love this element of the film,
The idea of a smart black man exploiting dumb white
folks in the whitest town in America. I mean that
was that was the best part of the movie. Don

(21:03):
didn't think white folks would get offended. Don thought white
folks would laugh at themselves, and that's what happened. White
audiences didn't know of black movie stars, but they knew
black TV stars George Jefferson and Benson and Isaac on
Love Boat and the Kids on Different Strokes and Webster.

(21:23):
White kids loved black stars, a certain type of black star.
They went into the movie ready to laugh, but black
audiences were less at ease. This was a black guy
walking around Beverly Hills and making white people look stupid.
They were laughing, yes, but holding their breath as well,
in part because, as other critics, including Kal had pointed out,

(21:46):
the movie was not accurate enough. Axel, they said, should
have had a harder time moving through a racist town
like Beverly Hills. Don's short answer to the critics was
that Axel Foley had to be cool. Axel was a
movie star and a detective genre, and in the detective genre,
the detective has to have, you know, a certain swagger,

(22:07):
but he also has to be very comfortable with himself.
Eddie was a movie star, did what all movie stars
did of a certain age. They played a version of themselves.
Eddie was smart enough to know that all he had
to do was be a regular guy who wears a
sweatshirt and sneakers the whole movie, a guy who was
going to walk into Beverly Hills and enjoy himself despite

(22:30):
the racist guy behind the hotel desk and one step
ahead of very character in my picture. And there are
movies like that, you know, usually black guys like so
what happens now? You know in most pictures and my
guys like running the show. Eddie is the guy in
high school that was so cool that you really wanted
to be like him. I'm a like Axel Forward and yes,

(22:51):
if the hotel clerk gave him some ship, he was
going to have some fun with it. Despite the blowback
in critical reviews, Don's idea, stemming from his traffic stop
in Beverly Hills, became well the biggest movie of the year.
It would beat out Indiana Jones, Ghostbusters, and The Karate Kid.
It would be the number one comedy of all time

(23:12):
if you account adjusted gross for inflation. But more than that,
it would become like flash Dance, a cultural phenomena. Everybody
wanted to be like Axel Foley. Don had the secret
sauce for turning young actors into movie stars. Eddie was
all of twenty two, the same age Tom Cruise would
be when Don offered him Top Gun. The Down season

(23:37):
two is executive produced by Will McCormick and David Harris Klein.
Klein also wrote and created the series. Mike Jursits is
the editor, sound designer, and producer of the series. The
podcast is produced and narrated by Malia Rivera, Drew that's
Louis Weymouth, voices the character of Pierce and also produces
the series. For more episodes of the Down season two,

(23:59):
listen to the series on the I Heart Radio app
or wherever you listen to podcasts.