Continuing my plan to watch every Eddie Murphy movie in order, I come to Bowfinger (1999)
Plot In A Paragraph:
A low budget filmmaker (Steve Martin) makes a movie with the biggest action star in the world (Murphy) without his knowledge.
For his last movie in the 90's Murphy starred opposite comedy legend Steve Martin and Heather Graham in Frank Oz's under rated Hollywood satire. He plays a big action star and his goofy brother. I remember thinking it was ok when it came out, and then I never watched it again. I enjoyed it so much this morning, I'm probably going to keep it. I laughed out loud a few times. Murphy looks like he is having fun playing dual roles, which he filmed in six weeks between finishing Life and starting Nutty Professor 2. The freeway scene is the funniest thing I have seen in an Eddie Murphy movie for a long time. Incredibly, executives at Universal wanted to cut that scene, because they felt it would be too expensive!! Martin replied he would not cut the funniest scene in the film.
This is probably the last time Steve Martin was funny. Heather Graham plays an actress named Daisy, she is allegedly based on Anne Heche. Like Daisy, Heche is from Ohio, was briefly romantically involved with a significantly older man, Steve Martin. Daisy's last lines about being involved with "the most powerful lesbian in Hollywood" are a reference to Heche's relationship at the time with Ellen DeGeneres. Of the rest of the cast, Christine Baranski and Terrance Stamp are both fun whilst Robert Donwey Jr has three scenes. This was a bad time to be a Downey Jr fan. He was out on parole, but was constantly missing regular drug tests, resulting in him going back to prison. It was at this sentencing he famously said of his addictions "It's like I've got a shotgun in my mouth, my finger on the trigger and I like the taste of gun metal."
Amazingly this is based on a real life story from 1927. A Russian filmmaker, covertly shot footage of Mary Pickford on holiday, and made a full movie, based around what he had.
I remember this opening the same weekend as The Sixth Sense. It got very good reviews, but was not a runaway hit. Which is a shame because it may be the last really funny movie either Murphy or Martin ever starred in.
Bowfinger grossed $66 million at the domestic box office (on a $55 million budget) to end the year, the 35th highest grossing movie of 1999.
