Word: appearance
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...stars begging for parts. What it is not used to is a part begging for a star. That is exactly what happened, however, when Producer Jerry Wheeler ran a pleading ad in Hollywood's trade publications earlier this year. Didn't anybody, he seemed to be saying, want to appear in his film The Front Runner...
...Front Runner's problem, ironically, may be that it depicts an ordinary world and that the gay coach is supposed to look and act like any other coach. In the past, the stars who have been injured by playing gay roles have been those who did not appear to be acting, who were so natural that they seemed to be playing themselves. Laurence Luckinbill's agent, for instance, warned him not to accept the part of a bisexual schoolteacher in Mart Crowley's movie of The Boys in the Band (1970), which took a pioneering look at the gay world...
Hollywood's moneymen surely love Murphy. Last week CBS signed him to a three-year contract for shows he will direct, produce or appear in. Coming to America is the first in a lucrative five-film deal with Paramount Pictures. Murphy also hopes to direct The Butterscotch Kid (a comedy starring Arsenio Hall) and co-star with James Earl Jones in a film version of August Wilson's drama Fences. Says Jerry Bruckheimer, who co-produced both Cop movies: "He's such a wanna-see guy -- you wanna see what he'll do next. If he was available, there...
...then, to stretch a talent best suited to the five-minute sketch to fit a full-length film? Until now, the answer has been either to have Murphy simulate a variety of roles while actually playing a single character, as in his cop/action flicks, or, perversely, to have him appear onscreen as little as possible, as in Trading Places. The first answer has proved inadequate to sustain an entire movie--else guns and flash would not be necessary--and the second defeats the purpose of a film serving as the vehicle for a particular actor...
...table in the Zamundan palace is so long that Akeem talks to his parents at the other end through an intercom. Hanging in a Black businessman's home is a copy of a famous Manet--only the girl in the picture is now Black. Ralph Bellamy and Don Ameche appear briefly as the Duke brothers, the heartless business kingpins from Trading Places, but now, they're panhandlers. Most of the gags are hilarious, which is good because they are the meat of this film...