“He fucked me over”: How John Landis betrayed Eddie Murphy over ‘Coming to America’
Hollywood is a difficult place to make friends when, at the end of the day, everybody is only looking out for number one. Eddie Murphy found that out the hard way after extending an olive branch to a friend and prior collaborator, only to get stabbed in the back for his troubles.
Few stars have risen as fast as Murphy, who went from a Saturday Night Live cast member to the biggest movie star on the planet within four years. His brash, confident, and borderline arrogant persona was backed up by so much confidence and success that everything he touched for the first decade of his career turned to gold.
That came in handy when the actor and comedian opted to offer a lifeline to a struggling filmmaker. John Landis was already a known quantity through The Blues Brothers, An American Werewolf in London, and Murphy’s Trading Places, but he’d fallen on hard times.
It was Landis who was directing the segment of Twilight Zone: The Movie involving the helicopter accident that killed Vic Morrow and two child actors, and after denying culpability, he was publicly disowned by former friend Steven Spielberg. After nine months on trial, Landis was one of four acquitted on manslaughter charges, and it goes without saying his position in the industry was affected.
Murphy had originally planned to direct Coming to America himself but stepped back in favour of giving Landis the job instead. It was a decision he came to regret when the pair repeatedly butted heads throughout shooting, with the director criticising the star who he previously found to be “young and full of energy and curious and funny and fresh and great” but was now “the pig of the world.”
For his part, Murphy said Landis “was doing some silly shit that made me mad.” Reflecting on how he felt about being called out by a filmmaker he’d reached out to specifically to try and rehabilitate their standing in Hollywood after the high-profile Twilight Zone incident, he was borderline apoplectic.
“I was gonna direct Coming to America myself,” he told Rolling Stone. “But I knew that Landis had just done three fucked-up pictures in a row, and his career was hanging by a thread after the Twilight Zone trial. I figured the guy was nice to me when I did Trading Places, so I’d give him a shot. I’m a popular actor in this town, and to have a guy who was as fucked up as he was get a job with me gave him some renewed credibility.”
Still, it didn’t go according to plan. “I was going out of my way to help this guy, and he fucked me over,” Murphy raged. “Now he’s got a hit picture on his résumé, a movie that made over $200million, as opposed to him coming off a couple of fucked-up movies, which is where I’d rather see him be right now.”
Needless to say, Murphy wasn’t happy about being dragged over the hot coals of bad press by Landis after lending him a hand. Not that it stopped them from putting it behind them when they reunited for Beverly Hills Cop III, a movie that the returning Axel Foley absolutely despised.
