Craig Brewer to direct Eddie Murphy in Netflix movie
Memphis filmmaker Craig Brewer will direct superstar Eddie Murphy in a biopic for Netflix about Rudy Ray Moore, the “chitlin circuit” comedian and adult party-record pioneer who achieved lasting cult fame with a series of low-budget “blaxploitation” comedy movies showcasing his kung fu-fighting pimp alter ego, Dolemite.
Set to begin production Monday in Los Angles, according to Brewer, the movie will mark a high-profile feature film comeback for both Brewer and Murphy, albeit one that largely will bypass theaters for home viewing via the Netflix subscription service.
Brewer, 47, has not directed a feature film since the 2011 “Footloose” remake, working instead mostly in television as a writer, director and producer on the hit Fox series “Empire.” That program reunited Taraji P. Henson and Terrence Howard, the stars of “Hustle & Flow,” the 2005 movie that brought the Memphis-based writer-director to national attention and to the Oscars ceremony, where the Best Original Song Academy Award went to the “Hustle” street anthem, “It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp.”
The 57-year-old Murphy, meanwhile, who was probably the most popular actor in America in the 1980s, has confined his movie work during the past decade
mostly to independent films (his last starring role was in 2016’s “Mr. Church”), supporting roles and voice acting (Donkey in the “Shrek” films).
Tentatively titled “Dolemite Is My Name,” the Netflix film was scripted by the Memphis-connected team of Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, a duo that specializes in funhouse-mirror reflections of the conventional American success story via movie biographies about offbeat characters in the worlds of art, entertainment and celebrity.
Probably best-known now for the television limited series “American Crime Story: The People v. O.J. Simpson,” the team also wrote the screenplays for “Ed Wood,” “Big Eyes” (about the artist Margaret Keane), “Man on the Moon” (a movie about comedian Andy Kaufman that included scenes set in Memphis) and the shot-in-Memphis “The People vs. Larry Flynt” (about “Hustler” magazine publisher Larry Flynt). Karaszewski. meanwhile, has been a frequent guest at the Indie Memphis Film Festival, appearing on panels with Brewer long before their current collaboration.
Born in Fort Smith, Arkansas, Rudy Ray Moore (who died in 2008 at 81) developed his comic style in the Army and on the African-American nightclub scene known as the chitlin circuit.
Before the development of rap music, the raunchy nursery rhymes of Andrew “Dice” Clay or the X-rated stand-up extrapolations of Murphy himself, Moore developed a signature style of racy rhymes that were made to order for such adults-only comedy albums as “Below the Belt” and “Eat Out More Often.”
But unlike such relative contemporaries as Redd Foxx and Moms Mabley, Moore never received the recognition from the white-controlled entertainment industries that would have enabled him to emerge from the underground.
Using his own money, in 1975 Moore wrote and starred in “Dolemite,” which was at once a parody, a wish-fulfillment and an earnest would-be apotheosis of the already almost exhausted “blaxploitation” trend in filmmaking. Although the paunchy, middle-aged Moore was an unlikely action hero, the movie was so successful it spawned four followups, the last of which was 1979’s beautifully titled “Disco Godfather.”
In the biopic, Murphy will play Moore throughout the “Dolemite” actor’s career, from the comedian’s early era of struggle to his latter days as a cult hero.