Wachs, who has just enjoyed a ten-second window of opportunity to introduce himself to Pollock, is having a tiny bad moment. Great box-office gimmick: spot them if you can. And in miraculous makeup by Oscar winner Rick Baker, the buddies each play three other roles. It’s a buddies-in-a-strange-land caper: the Zamundans come to Queens, New York, looking for a queenly bride. James Earl Jones is Eddie’s father, the king. Eddie plays Akeem, a wealthy prince from the mythical African nation of Zamunda Arsenio plays Semmi, his friend/factotum.
It was Arsenio, Eddie’s kind, talented, loyal, and best friend, who won a part in the new Eddie Murphy Vehicle, Coming to America, Paramount’s $40 million entry in this summer’s sweepstakes.
(The network, which has lost more than $75 million so far, was reduced to airing “The Best of Arsenio Hall” when its other replacements failed.) Fox tried to lure him back with seven-figure offers to no avail. When his run ended in December, Arsenio was medium hot. The night Eddie stopped by, the Late Show ratings rocketed. They’d hang out in the dressing room, sit in the audience, do walk-ons, stand-ups. When Arsenio Hall took over the Fox network’s Late Show this past fall after Joan Rivers’s departure, the Fox studio on Sunset became a kind of Black Pack clubhouse. They work with Eddie, and they work with one another.
#EDDIE ILINER MOVIE#
Paul Mooney, the elder statesman of the group, opened the show for Eddie on his last concert tour and is currently writing a movie for him. He asked Townsend to direct his concert film, Eddie Murphy Raw, after seeing Shuffle. Within the last year, all of them have worked with Eddie.
#EDDIE ILINER ZIP#
Wayans is writing another film, which spoofs blaxploitation flicks.Īll were brothers from another Zip Code, trucking their belongings from New York, Chicago, and San Francisco to find a place in the Hollywood sun. Townsend has just finished working on a comedy-thriller in Jamaica called Finding Maubee. Both Mooney and Wayans were in Hollywood Shuffle. We basically hang out together, and bounce ideas off each other.” He listed the Black Pack membership as himself, Arsenio, Paul Mooney (who was for fifteen years head writer for Richard Pryor), actor-filmmaker-comic Robert Townsend ( Hollywood Shuffle), and writer-comic Keenen Ivory Wayans. During a press conference for Beverly Hills Cop II last August, he explained: “We have a group that I like to call the Black Pack. It was Eddie Murphy who took the phrase “Black Pack” public. “Brothers,” he said, “let the good times roll!” They all have talent, but Eddie’s got the real estate.Īnd so it was that high on Bubble Hill, with ’88 just minutes old, Black Pack member Robert Townsend raised a glass of orange juice and toasted the year for all of them. Eddie’s bodyguards watch them at the clubs. They meet at Eddie’s hotel room, Eddie’s house, Eddie’s office, Eddie’s table at Spago. The Pack enjoys a moveable feast, but nearly always the centerpiece is Eddie Murphy.
#EDDIE ILINER TV#
And that night, Arsenio Hall and company-the Black Pack-a black comic elite now generating films, TV shows, HBO specials.Įvery member of the Black Pack had cause to celebrate ’88 as a year of promise, which is why they had flown to New Jersey from their homes in L.A. It’s a modular male entourage of relatives, employees, pals. He calls them his boys, and like his idol, Elvis, he keeps them close at hand. Eddie was throwing a party to usher in 1988, and to inaugurate the recently completed indoor-pool wing.įrom beneath the dance floor a machine sent clouds of merry, sticky orbs wafting upward, goosing the dancers, exploding in the excitement and the heat.Įverywhere, amid the bubbles and the women, were Eddie’s boys-the men he will not be without. “Help us get in.”īubble Hill is Eddie Murphy’s East Coast house, a lavishly hospitable place named after the homeboy slang for party: bubble. He noticed a friend’s agent amid the mob, was set upon by dozens of frantic women. When the car neared the gate, Arsenio heard shrieks, saw people beseeching the uniformed guards as he presented his numbered invitation with the plastic bubble wand attached. The limo climbed a hilltop in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, up, up toward a Tara-esque mansion called Bubble Hill. This past New Year’s Eve, a young comic named Arsenio Hall found himself partying with a beautiful woman in a stretch limousine. And when Arsenio makes his screen debut this month in Eddie’s new movie, Coming to America, Little Money is going to be Very Big. They are the red-hot epicenter of a rising power pack of black comics, writers, and actors. In Hollywood’s newest gold rush, Eddie Murphy is known as Money, and his number-one sidekick, Arsenio Hall, is Little Money.
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