Beverly Hills Cop

Watching Beverly Hills Cop in 35mm is the closest I will ever get to actual time travel. There are a lot of reasons that this is one of my 100 favorite movies. Of course, a lot of them have to do with simple nostalgia, as I was the perfect age when this film came out in December of 1984. I saw it many times in the theater in the last month of that foundational year and then countless times on VHS in 1985 and the ensuing decades. But I can't chalk my love for this film solely up to the Pavlovian responses watching the movie and hearing to its soundtrack evokes in me. Like so many of my favorite pictures, this is one of those ultra-rare movies in which all the ingredients magically came together to produce something that even its creators could never have dreamt would turn out so well. It's especially wild in the case of Beverly Hills Cop since this film was made under such last-minute circumstances, and no one involved would disagree that it wound up coming together far better than it would have had everything followed the plan as designed.

Beverly Hills Cop transformed action movies and Hollywood cinema in general. The concept of the action/comedy certainly existed prior to this picture, but it was always a strange genre hybrid. It was far more typical to see a segregation between comedy and action, much as there was a segregation for movies made for Black audiences and "mainstream audiences" prior to this film. For a brief time, Eddie Murphy occupied a space in pop culture as the one Black actor who could crossover into areas that were essentially whites-only beforehand. Michael Jackson did this at roughly the same time when MTV had an unspoken but obvious rule against playing "Black music" unless it was the music of Michael Jackson, a performer who seemed virtually made for the visual music medium but also possessed some kind of qualities that were unthreatening to White executives. With Eddie Murphy, I think it had less to do with a lack of threat, since Murphy's stand-up was very "raw," I think Hollywood just saw money when they looked at him, and that was enough. It took some time after Murphy had kicked open the door for African-American actors to get more solo-vehicle lead roles in tentpole pictures, but there's no question he did kick down that door in terms of making movies that were tailored around him rather than fitting himself into established formulas. Unlike Sidney Poitier, Murphy didn't have to play an idealized version of a Black man—Murphy was one of the most foul-mouthed entertainers of all time, and unlike his idol Richard Pryor, he didn't need to share billing with a white co-star when making mainstream Hollywood fare.

Murphy had made two hit films prior to this one, 48 Hrs. in 1982 and Trading Places in 1983. In both films, he had equal billing with his established white co-stars. But Beverly Hills Cop was a straight-up star vehicle for the 23-year-old stand-up comedian, who had been the undisputed breakout star of the lambasted seasons of Saturday Night Live that came after the original cast, producer, and writing staff left the show upon completion of its initial five-year run. Murphy was already a popular cultural figure in comedy, late-night TV, and a couple of movies, and it was obvious he was going to be a mega-star. Still, his earlier 1984 film, Best Defense, proved that he wasn't going to turn any turkey he touched into box office gold. He needed the right project as a showcase for his unique talents. Paramount Pictures was developing a few projects for Murphy, but none of them were coming together. Beverly Hills Cop was never meant to be an Eddie Murphy star vehicle, but at the last minute, that's what it became.

According to producer Don Simpson, who was notorious for exaggerating his creative contributions to many films, the project was initiated in 1977 when Simpson was a Paramount executive. He claimed he came up with an idea for a fish-out-of-water action movie about a blue-collar cop from East L.A. who gets transferred to swanky Beverly Hills and has to climate to the radical difference in police culture in such a posh city. Screenwriter Danilo Bach wrote the screenplay in 1981, though he had the cop come from Pittsburgh. Bach wrote a straight action movie picturing Al Pacino or James Caan as the lead. Simpson teamed up with partner Jerry Bruckheimer and started producing movies for Paramount. They scored a massive, unexpected success with their first film, Flashdance, and began to develop more projects with similar aesthetics featuring slick, MTV-style visuals and pop music soundtracks. Their first release was 1984's Thief of Hearts, which was a big flop, but they knew they had something special in Beverly Hills Cop.

Daniel Petrie, Jr. was a young screenwriter who had just sold his first script, which Jim McBride would eventually make as The Big Easy in 1986 with Dennis Quaid and Ellen Barkin. Petrie was brought in to rewrite Bach's script for Mickey Rourke, who was signed to a holding contract to star in the film. Petrie was not a comedy writer, but he was a struggling writer living in LA who found the city strange and hard to take seriously, especially its culture of haves and have-nots. He would constantly drive past people who'd crashed cars that looked more expansive than any home he'd lived in, and he'd look in the windows of high-end clothing stores and art galleries, not believing anyone would ever wear or display the merchandise they had on display. He put this attitude into his draft, and the fish-out-of-water and class-clash aspects got funnier and funnier. Paramount and the producers loved Petrie's humorous script, and Rourke left the project to make another film. Paramount had a standing deal with Sylvester Stallone wherein he was given first refusal on any script for which he could be even remotely appropriate. They sent him Petrie's screenplay, assuming he'd turn it down, but Stallone surprisingly wanted to do it. Beverly Hills Cop became a go-picture with Sylvester Stallone in the role of Axel Elly, a cop from Detroit whose brother Mikey, back home from LA with stolen bearer bonds in his possession, gets murdered, causing the rough, tough Axel to unofficially investigate his brother's Beverly Hills employer in an attempt to find the killer.

As was Stallone's modus operandi, he started to do rewrites. First, giving notes to Petrie on how to tailor the role for his persona and then taking over the writing of his own screenplay drafts. Stallone had renamed the lead character Axel Cobretti so he could go by the nickname "the Cobra." Stallone's explosion-packed screenplay required a sizable increase to the film's budget, which Paramount was not eager to approve. However, their deal with him was pay-or-play, so if they canceled the film or replaced him at this point, they were contractually obligated to pay him his $3M salary. So, the film continued into pre-production. To direct, Simpson and Bruckheimer hired Martin Brest, a graduate of NYU film school and The American Film Institute whose first commercial feature Going in Style—a heist comedy/drama he'd written that starred George Burns, Art Carney, and Lee Strasberg as three senior citizens who rob a bank—had been a commercial and critical hit. Brest had been fired off of his second movie, WarGames, two weeks into shooting because the producers felt he was making the movie much too dark. The experience left Brest pessimistic about his career in Hollywood, but he jumped at the chance at redemption these Paramount producers were offering him.

Nearly every actor, every location, and every production decision was made with the intention of Beverly Hills Cop being a Sylvester Stallone action thriller. But Brest read all the earlier drafts and loved their comical ideas. He especially liked that the very initial concept of having all the Beverly Hill cops look like glamour models rather than cops had been abandoned by Petrie in favor of writing the two main supporting cops as more of a comedy duo—one green and eager, one older and frustrated with the job. A fan of Laurel and Hardy, he set out to cast two actors who could play this "odd couple." Brest had been at AFI with director Amy Heckerling and had seen Judge Reinhold in her first feature, Fast Times at Ridgemont High. He thought Reinhold had the right look for the younger Beverly Hills cop and tested him with various older actors. Casting Director Margery Simkin (Times Square, Baby It's You, Reckless) brought in John Ashton, who'd had small roles in An Eye for an Eye, Breaking Away, and Borderline, and the two clicked. Lisa Eilbacher (who played one of Richard Gere's fellow Officer Candidates in An Officer and a Gentleman) was hired to play Stallone's love interest, Jenny Summers.

Steven Berkoff had just starred as a villainous, power-mad Russian general in the 1983 James Bond film Octopussy, which Simkin happened to catch on a flight and thought he'd be perfect for the main baddy, Victor Maitland. Berkoff is an actor known for playing things at a high intensity to an almost comical degree. But Brest wisely has him play this role with a quiet, controlled reserve, making this one of Berkoff's best screen roles. He was partially responsible for the trend of suave European actors playing villains in '80s action movies. As Maitland's right-hand henchman and the man who would kill Stallone's brother, they cast Jonathan Banks, who'd had a small role in 48 Hours. Beverly Hills Cop launched Banks on a decades-long career playing slimeballs and killers, culminating in his roles on the acclaimed TV series Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul.

Things were shaping up nicely, but the ballooning budget was still a concern, and Brest was clearly more interested in Ashton and Reinhold's comic relief supporting characters, detectives Taggart and Rosewood, than he was in Axel Cobretti. With just two weeks left before the start of principal photography, the producers hit upon the idea of offering Stallone a graceful exit that wouldn't cost them anything. They explained their money issues and offered him the option of either going back to the Daniel Petrie, Jr. script he'd initially said yes to or taking all the revised drafts and materials he and the other writers had created and making a different film at Paramount the next year. He agreed to the latter and took all his work on Beverly Hills Cop un leu of the $3M they technically owed him. Stallone made his cop movie as Cobra in 1986, and he cast Steven Berkoff as the villain in the first Rambo: First Blood Part II. Simpson, Bruckheimer, and Brest were now free to make the action/comedy they knew this script wanted to be. Knowing Murphy's SNL and stand-up background, as well as his status as a rising star, it was a no-brainer to offer it to him. They flew to New York to pitch Murphy, who agreed right away, stepping in with just two weeks left before cameras rolled.

It sounds like a crazy way to embark on such an expensive endeavor, but so many films were made this way back when the studios were run by crazy, coked-up people who loved making movies. While the script needed some reimagining, the rewrites were fairly minor. Not a single cast member was replaced. Axel's brother and love interest became childhood buddies from the old neighborhood who'd moved out to Beverly Hills. The only people brought on after Murphy came aboard were Ronny Cox as Taggart and Rosewood's superior officer, Lieutenant Andrew Bogomil, and Gil Hill as Axel's Detroit boss, Inspector Todd. Cox was a veteran of many acclaimed movies like Deliverance, Bound for Glory, and The Onion Field. Gil Hill was not an actor but an actual Detroit homicide detective whom Brest had met while researching and scouting locations in the city he was determined to shoot the film's early sequences, though the budget didn't allow for it. Brest loved Hill's demeanor. Though Hill had never yelled at anyone on the job like his character does, he had been on the receiving end of such tongue-lashings, so he knew what it was like. Hill didn't show much promise as an actor, but Brest thought he had great paternalistic chemistry with Eddie, so he worked with him and got better. He parlayed his role in this movie into running for Detroit City Council, becoming its president, and eventually running for Mayor (though he didn't win).

James Russo, who plays Axel's friend Michael Tandino, whose murder incites the story, played his few early scenes with Eddie Murphy with real heart. You really believe these two young guys had a close childhood friendship, with Axel becoming responsible and "Mikey" never really growing up. And while the love story was completely dropped from the film, Eilbacher is still able to establish Jenny as a major character whom we care about when she's kidnapped in the third act. Putting the female lead in jeopardy is pretty boilerplate stuff for an action movie, but it somehow feels less cliché when the character is an old friend rather than a girl the hero has recently gotten romantically involved with.

Watching the film, you might think the many comedians that pop up were all brought in after Murphy was cast, but they were all picked by Brest and Simkin as ways to bring out the humor in the movie when it was going to be a Stallone picture. Paul Reiser was a comedian hungry to get into movies who was constantly pestering Sinpkins to get her to come see his stand-up act. She felt his annoying quality was perfect for Axel's worrywart fellow Detroit cop, Detective Jeffrey Friedman. Rick Overton was cast as the Bonded Warehouse Night Supervisor who Axel surprises because he had a great "surprised face." Simkin knew Bronson Pinchot from his roles in Risky Business and The Flamingo Kid. Originally, there were two characters who worked in the art gallery with Jenny. They were cast with the idea that they'd play off each other, baffling the blue-collar cop played by Stallone. But when Murphy was cast, he could play off Pincho, so the other actor was let go. Pinchot claims he based his characterization on "one of those guys who works on Rodeo Drive who you just have no idea where they're from—is it the Middle East? Is it France? Is it Morocco?" The only comedian Murphy added to the cast was Damon Wayans, who plays a hotel employee who lets Alex take some bananas to stuff into the tailpipe of the unmarked police car of Taggart and Rosewood.

This brief scene is a prime example of how things came together perfectly and seemingly effortlessly by the talented folks who made Beverly Hills Cop. The script had a scene in which Axel (then Stallone) sneaks into his hotel's kitchen and swipes a potato, which he then places in Taggart and Rosewood's car while they are sitting in during their stakeout. It was hardly a complicated scene, but it required a whole kitchen and could easily have taken half a day to shoot. Brest was determined that he was going to shoot the opening scenes on location in Detroit, but Paramount would only allow this if the director brought the initial shoot in under budget. Brest was constantly looking for places to cut a few corners in ways that wouldn't damage any scenes. One example was a shot where Axel is in a jail cell, which he grabbed while shooting another scene by putting some bars in front of a wall rather than bringing a crew to an actual jail cell. Many of the comical scenes of Axel walking down the streets of Beverly Hills, including the iconic long lens shot where Axel walks past two guys dressed in matching Michael Jackson's Thriller outfits, were just grabbed run-and-gun style during lunch hours with Murphy or Brest calling in friends to be extras. That was the case with the "banana man" scene. Brest saw a chance to save some time by shooting the scene in a part of the hotel where the crew was already set up. Rather than lighting a separate location for a physical scene of Axel sneaking into a kitchen and stealing a potato from a chef, it could be a flat, locked-off shot of a guy with a bunch of fruit that Axel asks for a banana. Murphy called in Damon Wayans for a one-shot part because he knew Wayans could help make this perfunctory shot into a funny scene. The potato in the tailpipe became the banana in the tailpipe, which is inherently funnier, and got called back a few times for additional laughs later in the movie.

Everyone loved playing scenes with Eddie Murphy, and the set was often filled with laughter. Those laughs translated effortlessly to the screen. I'm always miffed when I watch comedies made in the last twenty years (what few comedies get made) at how strained and labored the jokes feel. The improv aesthetic that was in vogue in the late 1990s and was further enabled by shooting digitally as opposed to on film, in which comics and comics actors make up dozens of new optional lines for every joke in an attempt to make things fresh and spontaneous leads to horrendously edited scenes that feel like exactly what they are—actors desperately trying to get laughs rather than characters who are intrinsically funny. Eddie Murphy certainly did a hell of a lot of improv around the screenplay in Beverly Hills Cop—not only was this his stock in trade, but it was also a requirement to make sense of scenes written for Sylvester Stallone to feel authentic to him. But this '80s approach to improv was all about working things out with one's fellow actors in rehearsal and on set and then changing things up within the established beats of each scene, not just pointing multiple cameras at each actor and watching them try to surprise each other in the hopes that things will feel spontaneous and hilarious when slapped together later on. Almost all contemporary comedies also seem to struggle with basic narrative concepts like exposition and plot development. It's as if modern comedy filmmakers have all collectively agreed that exposition is a necessary evil that needs to be mocked or ironically pointed out rather than folded artfully into the movie. It's amazing when you compare how effortlessly copious amounts of exposition and key narrative information are ladled on in scenes by the actors in Beverly Hills Cop to pretty much any scene in a comedy of the last two decades. There's a whole lot of shoe leather that has to be conveyed by Murphy and his fellow actors, not all of it elegantly scripted, but this cast makes delivering info to the audience seem as effortless and natural as a casual conversation.

This is another thing I love about '80s action/comedies, which Beverly Hills Cop really set the standard for. The plots in these movies are not complex—this ain't Chinatown—but they're not perfunctory either. They don't exist strictly as a framework on which to hang jokes. This is, at least in part, the case in this movie because it was written and developed as a Stallone thriller. However, Beverly Hills Cop was not a straight-action movie that became a comedy when a different actor was cast in the lead. These filmmakers always intended to refine a blend of action and comedy that had started in films like Busting, Hooper, and 48 Hrs. (which were action movies with comic elements) or Silver Streak, Smokey and the Bandit, and The Blues Brothers (which were comedies with action elements). Beverly Hills Cop has legit steaks. We never take the danger the characters are in all that seriously, but we do get invested in what they're up to. And when violent things happen, it doesn't feel like a radically inappropriate tonal shift. Beverly Hills Cop paved the way for movies like Lethal Weapon and Die Hard and all the films that followed in their footsteps. Just as Die Hard would do four years later, it reinvented an existing genre and then remained the gold standard of the genre it created for decades.

So much of what makes this movie go down so smoothly is the editing by Billy Weber (whose work ranges from the meditative films of Terrence Malick—Badlands, Days of Heaven, and The Thin Red Line to fast-paced '80s action comedies like 48 Hrs., Midnight Run, Pee-wee's Big Adventure, and Top Gun). Perhaps the film's most distinctive ingredient is the score by German synth-pop virtuoso Harold Faltermeyer. A session musician, arranger, producer, and songwriter, Faltermeyer had worked with numerous pop stars, including Donna Summers on her album Bad Girls, for which he co-wrote "Hot Stuff'. That record was produced by the Italian composer and "Father of Disco" Giorgio Moroder, who was then just getting into movie soundtracks with Alan Parker's acclaimed Midnight Express in 1978. Faltermeyer worked on many of Moroder's scores, including 1980's American Gigolo, which was produced by Jerry Bruckheimer. The producer took note of what a great problem solver Faltermeyer was. Four years later, it was that skill that led to Bruckheimer calling him in on Thief of Hearts, which Simpson and Bruckheimer were struggling with. That became the first soundtrack by the composer and the two producers immediately brought him over to their '84 movie that wasn't in trouble. The main instrumental theme to Beverly Hills Cop was as successful as the film. "Axel F," as it was called on the soundtrack album, became a rare instrumental top 40 radio hit with an MTV music video and DJ's remixing it for dance clubs. It is so catchy and unmistakable that it ranks with Henry Mancini's "The Pink Panther Theme" in terms of its instant association with not only a character from a movie but also the vibe of that movie. You hear that music, and it makes you smile.

Faltermeyer's style and approach to film music felt entirely fresh in 1984, and it became extremely influential for a brief period. He would go on to score Fletch, Top Gun, Fatal Beauty, Beverly Hills Cop II, and The Running Man. He also produced Beverly Hills Cop's "signature" pop song, Patti LaBelle's "Stir It Up," and co-wrote the hit opening title song, "The Heat Is On," which was performed by Glenn Frey. "The Heat Is On" is about as ridiculous and cheesy as an '80s movie title song can be, complete with a wailing saxophone prominent in the mix. Yet, this song flawlessly sets the tone for the movie we're about to watch. And the movie is filled with pop tunes that instill a good-time vibe. Even during the car chases, the soundtrack is breezy pop music that underscores the comedy of the chase. One of the reasons action movies have become so monotonous and interchangeable in the new millennium is that film music has become a background color as opposed to a primary one. Aurally, modern action movies, even action comedies, are all about sound FX editing with generic music mixed so far down you can't even notice how nondescript it is. Just as modern action comedies rarely have any sense of place because they're all shot in the same handful of cities and reliant on CGI backdrops, they have no sense of time period, in part because they only use pop songs as overt needle drops, usually of older tunes, as opposed to action movies of the '80s and '90s where contemporary songs are placed in the foreground.

Beverly Hill's Cop launched Eddie Murphy into the stratosphere and went on to become the top-grossing movie of 1984. Danilo Bach and Daniel Petrie Jr. were nominated for the Best Original Screenplay Oscar—a rare instance of the Motion Picture Academy recognizing a comedy. It might seem strange that a movie most people assumed was just improvised by the actors on the set would land a writing nomination, but this is why I've always maintained that the Oscars matter to some degree because the nominees, if not the winners, are chosen by people who work in each respective field who understand their various crafts. It means something for an editor to be nominated by their fellow editors more than by a bunch of critics who likely will give an award to the "most edited film" rather than the best-edited film. It's not surprising to me that the members of the Academy's screenwriting branch saw this movie and were impressed at how nimbly its story was woven around its comedic set pieces (or vice-versa).