I suspect that Eddie Murphy is simply one of those "if you scratch my back, I'll scratch your back" type of people. What I mean is that he'll go out of his way to help people who he feels helped him on his way up or were always loyal or nice to him. I've always heard that Eddie put Redd Foxx in Harlem Nights and the sitcom The Royal Family to help out with his tax troubles. Eddie even paid for Redd's funeral in 1991.
He also put his childhood friend, Clint Smith in a role as one of the barbers in Coming to America:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ciUpELtzt2I
And Charlotte Lewis, his Golden Child co-star told about how Eddie Murphy came to her aid when she was broke:
https://laregledujeu.org/2010/05/27/1703/wild-child-charlotte-lewis-full-text-interview-2/
Charlotte was paid 150,000 dollars (a little under Pounds 100,000) for The Golden Child. But taxes and a bit of extravagant living soon ate that up. Soon she found herself virtually broke and down on her luck back in London-until Eddie Murphy came to her rescue.
She explained: « He’d asked me to come and visit his family in New Jersey, and I started to cry on the telephone and said, ‘Eddie, I’m totally broke, I don’t even have enough money to buy food’.
« He told me I HAD to go back to Los Angeles and restart my career. He sent me a one-way first-class plane ticket to LA, had a car meet me and take me to an apartment he’d rented for me.
« I was instructed to go to a local bank where I found an account opened for me with 50,000 dollars in it-that’s about Pounds 30,000. Let me emphasize that he and I have never been lovers. It was just a generous Eddie Murphy gesture. » Charlotte bounced back in the film Dial Help. Since then she has appeared in movies such as Excessive Force, Men Of War, The Glass Cage, Mutual Needs, Navajo Blues and Legion. She has also appeared in several TV shows, including a small part in hit comedy Seinfeld.
In the case of John Landis, I'm guessing that Eddie was trying to be generous since Landis was one of the directors that he worked with early on his his career (on Trading Place) and set him on-track to become a major movie star (which was all but solidified/cemented with the first Beverly Hills Cop in 1984).
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ebhaynz (3610)
3 years ago
I don't know, Eddie didn't ever scratch Joe Piscopo's back even though they were the only two stars of SNL when it was at it's worse. Eddie never put Piscopo in a movie, nor anything else.
Landis said he asked Eddie to do a specific scene in 1993's Beverly Hills Cop 3, it was a scene Eddie didn't want to do, and Eddie had been a big pain in the ass to Landis, telling him "Axel's a man, now" and wanting to basically kill what made Axel funny and likable. Eddie was at a low point in BHC 3 and he told Landis "I'll do this scene, but we're not friends anymore".
Landis also remarked that Eddie can still be funny "when he wants to".
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