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Good movies that haven't held up.


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10 hours ago, Bender Bending Rodriguez said:

I never realized until recently that there was an Eddie-Landis feud. This is from a Playboy interview in 1990:

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PLAYBOY: You could have directed Coming to America but didn't. Why? 

MURPHY: I wanted to help out [the director, John] Landis. I figured I'd give this guy a shot because his career was fucked. But he wound up fucking me. 

PLAYBOY: What happened? 

MURPHY: As it turned out, John always resented that I hadn't gone to his Twilight Zone trial. I never knew that; I though we were cool. But he'd been harboring it for a year. Every now and then, he would make little remarks, like, "You didn't help me out; you don't realize how close I was to going to jail." I never paid any mind. 

PLAYBOY: Did you think he was guilty? 

MURPHY: I don't want to say who was guilty or who was innocent. [Pauses] But if you're directing a movie and two kids get their heads chopped off at fucking twelve o'clock at night when there ain't supposed to be kids working, and you said, "Action!" then you have some sort of responsibility. So my principles wouldn't let me go down there and sit in court. That's just the way I am. If somebody in my family was guilty of something, I wouldn't sit there for them in a courtroom and say, "You've got my support." Fuck that. The most it would be is, "Hey, you go work that out. I still love ya; I'm still your friend." 

PLAYBOY: So you hired Landis out of friendship despite thinking he'd been irresponsible? 

MURPHY: Yes. He'd done four fucked-up movies in a row and I knew he'd spent a lot of money on his trial. I went to Paramount and said I wanted to use Landis. But they had reservations: His career was fucked up. But I said, "I'm gonna use Landis." I liked the guy. I used to always say that the one fun experience I had with a director--and I've worked with directors I really liked: Marty Brest, Walter Hill, Tony Scott--was with Landis, because he plays around a lot on the set. I made Paramount hire him. 

PLAYBOY: Was he grateful? 

MURPHY: He came in demanding lots of money. Paramount was saying, "Hey, come on, Eddie, we're getting fucked here," but I made them pay his money. They bent over backward. But after he got the job, he brought along an attitude. He came in with this "I'm a director" shit. I was thinking, Wait a second, I fucking hired you, and now you're running around, going, "You have to remember: I'm the boss, I'm the director." 

One of his favorite things was to tell me, "When I worked with Michael Jackson, everyone was afraid of Michael, but I'm the only one who would tell Michael, 'Fuck you.' And I'm not afraid to tell you, 'Fuck you.'" And sure enough, he was always telling me, "Fuck you, Eddie. Everybody at Paramount is afraid on you." 

PLAYBOY: But Landis just gave you grief? 

MURPHY: It got worse and worse. What first put a bad taste in my mouth about him was when, after he hired [co-star] Shari Headley and all these other people, I said I wanted to take everybody to dinner. I didn't know anybody. But Landis grabbed Headley and said, "You stay away from Eddie. Don't go near him, because he's gonna fuck you and ruin my movie. He just wants your pussy." I'm thinking, Wait, ooohhh, nooo, that has nothing to do with being a fucking director. He's control freak. Just assuming that I was trying to get the pussy is one thing; and even if I was trying to get the pussy, for him to try to stop me from getting it because he was directing the movie.... He's got a lot of nerve. Plus, it wasn't even about pussy. 

 

Not sure if you listen to the Bill Simmons/Ringer podcast the Rewatchables, but they discussed this recently in the Coming to America one.  The funny part is after all that, they actually worked together again in Beverly Hills Cop 3.

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6 minutes ago, Don Johnson said:

Not sure if you listen to the Bill Simmons/Ringer podcast the Rewatchables, but they discussed this recently in the Coming to America one.  The funny part is after all that, they actually worked together again in Beverly Hills Cop 3.

Yep! That’s where I heard about their feud. I’ve probably listened to 90% of their episodes over the past few years. I googled this stuff a few days ago and found the interview trascript online. 

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On 4/20/2021 at 10:53 AM, Bateshorn said:

Verhoeven is such an interesting director.  The run of movies he had from Robocop, Total Recall, and Basic Instinct is incredible. I suspect Starship Troopers has nearly as many BFA thesis papers as Citizen Kane.  I'm not sure there is a more prescient film than Robocop.  His last film, Elle, was a huge critical smash.

But he also has Show Girls and Hollow Man just sitting there as total turds. 

I watched basic instinct the other day for the first time.  that had to be a product of its time, because i thought it was pretty bad.  i figure it must be just because it was so explicit, and that was a lot harder to access back then or something.  Movie-wise, though, it is a pretty lame non thrilling thriller story.

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