Playing in Court, an Inside Look at an Eddie Murphy Movie Deal

In a trial that alternately resembles a sitcom and a primer on Hollywood back-stabbing and big-buck negotiations, the trial of Art Buchwald vs. Paramount Pictures Corp. gave onlookers a glimpse last week into the “creative process” that brings stars like Eddie Murphy to the neighborhood bijou.

From quips by talk show host Arsenio Hall (“I’m kind of an only child. I have a brother in a coma.”) to humorist Art Buchwald (“An East German guy says, ‘What business should I go into?’ and an American capitalist guy tells him to get into the S&L; business . . . but he has to get five senators to help him.”), the laughs just kept coming at the start of Buchwald’s $5-million breach-of-contract action against the film studio.

The 64-year-old Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist and film producer Alain (“Buddy, Buddy,” “Racing With the Moon”) Bernheim have accused Paramount of stealing Buchwald’s 1982 story about an African king left stranded in Washington to use as the basis of the 1988 Eddie Murphy hit “Coming to America.” Hall, Murphy and Murphy’s manager, Robert Wachs, all maintain that Murphy never even saw Buchwald’s story, “King for a Day,” let alone plagiarized it.

He didn’t need to, said Hall, a Murphy sidekick.

In 1984, when Murphy had just had back-to-back hits in “48 HRS.” and “Trading Places,” the comedian could “break wind and they’d make it into a movie,” Hall boasted in a deposition.

“It’s just to say that Eddie’s so talented,” Hall tried explaining during his turn on the witness stand. “It’s kind of a joke . . . a compliment to his talent.”

But later in the week, when a parade of high-ranking movie industry executives began taking the witness stand, a darker and more sobering drama of Hollywood unfolded as details emerged on just how a movie is molded for a star.

Former Paramount production chief Ned Tanen confirmed in his testimony that Murphy earned an $8-million salary for his role in “Coming to America” while the combined salaries of the rest of the cast came to $906,000.

“Eddie Murphy is a major, major star,” Tanen explained. “He gets what the market will bear and this ($8 million) is what the market will bear.”

On top of his acting fee, Murphy also gets 15 cents of every dollar that Paramount earns on “Coming to America”--a contractual deal known in Hollywood jargon as “pure” gross profit participation. Since “Coming to America,” Murphy has boosted his acting fee to $9 million per picture plus 15% of the gross profit, and he is still unhappy with his current five-movie deal with Paramount, according to exhibits and testimony entered into the court record.

Ironically, neither Buchwald nor Bernheim would have made any money on their own profit participation agreement with Paramount if it had been in force during the making of “Coming to America.” According to the agreement, they were to have received 19% of the net proceeds from any movie made from Buchwald’s story “King for a Day.”

But, despite the film’s blockbuster status, its gross take of more than $300 million still has resulted in no net profit, and may never do so.

“My view was it was a very tough film to get to net profits,” Tanen testified.

Those with the clout to negotiate for a part of gross profits--that is, the actual ticket revenue that comes back from theaters to the studio before expenses--get their share before anyone else. As a result, box office hits like “Coming to America” can and do remain money losers on paper for years.

The gross vs. net lesson was one of the first that Murphy learned when he came to Hollywood.

After the success of “48 HRS.,” Tanen and several other Paramount executives threw a dinner party at Ma Maison restaurant in 1984 for Murphy to give him “a gift” of a “couple of net profit (percentage) points” from that film, Wachs testified. The chief reason for the dinner, however, was to pitch Murphy on a dozen more Paramount projects to get him to commit to even more movies. One of those projects was Buchwald’s “King for a Day.”

According to Touchstone Pictures President David Kirkpatrick, then a Paramount film development executive, Murphy went into a bored trance in which he assumed a “glazed-over” expression, showing his disinterest in the projects.

Murphy soon learned how worthless Paramount’s “gift” of net profit points really was. In his deposition, the actor called net profits “monkey points” and said only fools would accept net points in their contracts.

Buchwald’s story was developed into three different scripts for Paramount, first under the working title “It’s a Crude, Crude World” and, later, “King for a Day.”

At one point in 1984, Kirkpatrick testified, he urged Bernheim and screenwriter Francis Veber to have lunch with child actor Emmanuel (“Webster”) Lewis and his mother in the Paramount commissary. Lewis, who sat on telephone books to be able to participate in the discussion, had a part written into “King for a Day” because Murphy had allegedly met him on an airplane once, liked him and wanted him to be in his movie, according to Kirkpatrick and Bernheim.

Murphy said in his deposition that he never knew anything about Lewis wanting to be in his movie and that Paramount executives probably just wanted to exploit the box office potential of the next Eddie Murphy movie by pairing “Webster” with him.

“It’s Paramount’s show, you know,” Murphy said of the “Webster” sitcom. “ ‘They’re both on the lot. They’re both black. We can make all this money.’ That’s probably what happened, you know.”

Wachs, an attorney and former New York comedy club owner who helped discover Murphy in the late 1970s, testified that he hated “King for a Day” and the scripts that Paramount spent $500,000 developing. By 1985, “King for a Day” was off the Paramount lot as an Eddie Murphy project.

The next year, Bernheim took it to Warner Bros., where another $250,000 was spent working up a new screenplay.

But in the meantime, Murphy and Hall came up with what they said was their own original idea for a screenplay: a black fairy tale about an African prince who comes to New York in search of a queen. This story, originally titled “The Quest,” was developed into “Coming to America” by David Sheffield and Barry Blaustein, a pair of screenwriters Murphy met during his stint on “Saturday Night Live” in the early 1980s.

Sheffield and Blaustein received screen writing credit. Murphy was given story credit. Hall did not receive credit for his part in developing the story, according to testimony, though he outlined several scenes on the witness stand that he said he came up with during story conferences.

If there was a link between “The Quest” and Buchwald’s story about a black African king who comes to Washington, winds up in the ghetto, has a series of misadventures and returns to his native land with his American bride, Paramount’s hierarchy from 1983 to 1985 either didn’t know about it or forgot about it, according to testimony of the executives.

Neither Paramount Pictures Chairman Frank Mancuso nor former Paramount production chief (now Walt Disney President) Jeffrey Katzenberg could remember “King for a Day” specifically being developed for Murphy or Murphy giving his approval to the project. A sheaf of Paramount interoffice memos, however, were entered into evidence in the case which indicate that it was, indeed, being molded for Murphy.

In November, 1987, Bernheim had lunch with Tanen in the same Paramount commissary where he and screenwriter Veber huddled with Emmanuel Lewis and his mother three years earlier. In what Bernheim described as a shouting match and Tanen described as “raised voices,” the producer protested that Murphy, Paramount and Tanen had stolen Buchwald’s story idea. Though Tanen testified that he and Bernheim remain friendly and that Tanen has great respect for the French-born producer, neither of them have spoken to each other until the trial.

When Warner Bros. production head Bruce Berman heard about “The Quest” in January, 1988, he dropped the Buchwald-Bernheim project, Berman testified.

And later that year, when “Coming to America” came to Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts where Buchwald was vacationing, the columnist saw the movie and agreed with Bernheim that they should sue Paramount for breach of contract. When Buchwald told his friend, Paramount Communications Inc. Chairman Martin Davis, of his intentions, Davis sent him a bottle of Champagne and a record titled “Sue Me.”

So, in November, 1988, he did. He went on Larry King’s national radio show the same week and blasted “Coming to America” as a badly made and poorly executed comedy.

Outside the courtroom last week, Buchwald said he might write a book about “Buchwald vs. Paramount.” He sarcastically hinted he might even eventually turn the “Buchwald vs. Paramount” book into a movie.

As every Hollywood veteran knows, a movie needs an exit line if it’s going to be memorable. Tanen may have supplied it in his final quip for the court record:

“Everyone’s in two businesses: their own and the movie business.”