Crossover appeal
“Coming to America” was essentially two films in one. On one hand it was a romantic comedy, and on the other, a film about the black cultural experience, albeit laced with an element of fantasy.
The most prominent and culturally significant scenes took place in a barbershop and a “Miss Black Awareness” pageant.
As Ndounou points out, these scenes weren’t written in depth in the script and were heavily improvised, a nod to both Murphy and Hall’s experience as stand-up comics. There was an ethnic familiarity and authenticity in these scenes where the barbers convince Akeem not to get a Jheri curl and at the pageant, where the soul band sings “Sexual Chocolate.”
There has not been such a successful romantic comedy with a majority black cast since the film’s release. Plenty of wellknown urban romantic dramas have achieved a measure of popularity, such as “Love Jones,””The Best Man” and “Love and Basketball.” Yet, these films didn’t come close to reaching the kind of success or cult status that “Coming to America” did.
But Racquel Gates, a professor of cinema studies at CUNY, College of Staten Island, told The Post: “I think we always have to be very cautious about judging the success of a film, especially a black film, by box office numbers because studios are notorious for underselling black cast films and not promoting them.”
Paramount did not release advance screeners of “Coming to America” for critics “because they had a lot of hesitation about whether the film was going to do well because they considered it a black film,” Gates said.
But “Coming to America’s” success was largely due to its crossover appeal. As Ndounou wrote in her book, “Shaping the Future of African American Film” the “jokes in the film generate communal laughter among African Americans while establishing bonds between African Americans, white Americans, and the foreign market.” There are also no interracial conflicts between whites and blacks in the film.
Also unique, Ndounou noted, was that Murphy and Hall played lead characters, as well as several supporting characters. This served as a precedent for subsequent films. Many black comedians today play multiple roles in their films, including sometimes cross-dressing, such as Tyler Perry’s “Madea” franchise and Martin Lawrence “Big Momma’s House” films.
Wakanda in “Black Panther” and Zamunda in “Coming to America” have inevitably evoked comparisons.
As Zeba Blay wrote in HuffPost in February:
“The last time we saw the kind of opulence, grandeur and pure African style displayed in Marvel’s latest box office juggernaut ‘Black Panther’ was, perhaps, 30 years ago, in the classic Eddie Murphy comedy ‘Coming to America.’ The film overflows with images of Africans looking amazing — in (lion) furs, in raffia, in blinding gold. Never mind that Zamunda, protagonist Prince Akeem’s birthplace, is not a real country. Never mind that the costumes he and his cohorts wear borrow from all over the continent, from west to east to south Africa.”
The setting of Zamunda in the beginning of the film was profoundly important, Ndounou said. “You had this representation of an ancestral homeland that had not been impoverished, that had not been colonized, that had black people with exotic pets,” Ndounou said.
The unreal image offset the omnipresent TV ads of the era for charities seeking contributions for starving African children.
In the mid-1990s, a drama of another kind unfolded over the film. The late humorist Art Buchwald won a breach of contract lawsuit after demonstrating to a judge’s satisfaction that the original idea for the movie was his, not Murphy’s.
After an epic battle over the money due to Buchwald, he and co-plaintiff Alain Bernheim eventually settled with Paramount in 1995 for more than $1 million. The dispute has not detracted from the film’s standing and “Coming to America” endures. About30 years after the film opened, when “Black Panther” swept through the nation’s theaters, more than a few fans showed up to see it dressed as Prince Akeem of Zamunda.
And 30 years later, said Headley, “people still stop me on the street and call me Lisa.”