USA TODAY International Edition
How true is ‘ Dolemite Is My Name’?
LOS ANGELES – Eddie Murphy has always wanted to do a story about the unbelievably outrageous career of Rudy Ray Moore – even if many people wouldn’t know who the comedian and filmmaker is.
“I would say, ‘ I would like to do the Rudy Ray Moore story,’ “says Murphy, pretending to give a pitch to movie executives. “And they were like, ‘ Who the ( expletive) is Rudy Ray Moore?’ And then you tell them who Rudy Ray Moore is and it’s like, ‘ What, are you crazy?’”
Murphy finally convinced Netflix to allow him to produce and star in “Dolemite Is My Name,” which arrives Friday on the streaming site. However wild the comedy is, Murphy, who had met with Moore decades before to discuss making a movie about his life, says it’s “really close to what happened.”
Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski based their screenplay on extensive research and interviews with Moore, who died in 2008 at age 81. The final result was enough to impress David Shabazz, author of the biography “Dolemite: The Story of Rudy Ray Moore.”
“The movie was very close to the mark,” Shabazz says. “And Eddie Murphy did an excellent job capturing the man and telling the story of what Rudy Ray Moore went through.”
Here are three key elements of the movie that are based in fact:
Rudy Ray Moore found sudden success with his raunchy Dolemite persona
Moore was a struggling musician and comedian, working as a club master of ceremonies and at Dolphin’s of Hollywood record store, where the neighborhood wino Rico would regale customers with unpublishable rhymes about the fictional pimp Dolemite ( named for the mineral dolomite).
As seen in the film, the middle- aged Moore was inspired to perfect these skid row toasts. He took the flamboyantly attired Dolemite persona into his 1970s comedy act and explicit comedy albums, and eventually poured the profits from these records into making cult classic films.
“He knew he had to carve out his niche. So he took those toasts and they became his brand,” Shabazz says.
Moore’s work was so influential that he’s referred to as the “Godfather of Rap.” Snoop Dog ( who has a cameo in “Dolemite Is My Name”) wrote in the liner notes of the “Dolemite” soundtrack reissued in 2006: “Without Rudy
Ray Moore, there would be no Snoop Dogg, and that’s for real.”
The movies were made by the seat of his pants
Moore had no experience making films, but made his first movie, 1975’ s “Dolemite,” with $ 100,000, utilizing UCLA film students as the crew and featuring D’Urville Martin ( played by Wesley Snipes), an actor who had starred in films such as “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?”
Moore’s movies were outrageous, with laughable martial arts sequences and scenes such as a man having his guts ripped out.
“Rudy Ray Moore was a guerrilla filmmaker. If you watch a movie by Rudy Ray Moore and a movie by Fellini, you will have the same reaction. It’s like what the ( expletive) am I watching, what is happening?” Murphy says.
In the biopic, Murphy, clad identically to Moore’s character, is approached by FBI agents in a scene shot at the same location of the original “Dolemite” film. “That’s the real house,” Murphy says. “And the director of photography from the original movie was on set that day.”
That insane sex scene happened, but in a different movie
Moore’s over- the- top sex scene happened as depicted in “Dolemite Is My Name” with the walls shaking and the ceiling coming down. But the scene took place in director Cliff Roquemore’s 1975 Dolemite movie “The Human Tornado.”
“We realized a lot of the fans’ favorite scenes are from ‘ Human Tornado.’ And we figured Rudy Ray Moore is only going to get a biopic once,” Alexander says. “So we threw in these gumdrops into the scripts.”
The tribute is close to the mark. “People will assume we made that up,” says “Dolemite Is My Name” director Craig Brewer. “But we made that room exactly the way it was, with the exact same effects.”
The original scene is shown during the “Dolemite Is My Name” credits.