The photographer has Arsenio Hall down on the floor of one of the executive offices of Eddie Murphy Productions. He’s leaning over him, shooting straight down at his expressive, mobile mug.
“This is certainly the most interesting photo session I’ve ever done,” Hall said.
“Oh, really?” the photographer said. “OK now, lift your legs.”
“I beg your pardon!” He is being campy, outrageous. It breaks the photographer up.
Hall carries on like that a lot. For a young man who has just been struck by that brand of Hollywood lightning they call instant success, he still manages to stay loose.
You think that’s easy? We’re talking about a guy who turned down $2 million to remain as host of Fox Broadcasting’s The Late Show to sign a deal with Paramount that called for two pictures and an option on a third.
“Oh, I’m very blessed.” He says it as if he meant it. “You’re talking to a kid who … Listen, my mother reminded me a couple of weeks ago that when I was 12, she asked me what I wanted to do when I grew up, and I told her either be a lawyer or take Johnny Carson’s place when he was on vacation. Well, I’m not a lawyer, but I sort of realized that second ambition already. Now, a year later, I’ve got a movie opening, so I’ve gone beyond that already.”
And in a big way. That movie is Eddie Murphy’s latest, Coming to America. In it, Hall plays Murphy’s sidekick (a role he plays in real life, too) — in this case, Semmi, friend and companion to Prince Akeem of the exotic (and mythical) African kingdom of Zamunda. He accompanies the prince to New York to assist him in his mission to find a suitable wife for himself.
Murphy, as an African on the loose in the borough of Queens, is about as funny as he used to be playing a similar character on Saturday Night Live. But the real surprise in the movie is Hall, who proves a perfect foil and gets lots of laughs on his own.
“A lot of people have asked me in interviews if I mind playing second banana to Eddie,” Hall said. “Why should I? I don’t mind being a co-star. What I want to know is, ‘Was I good?’ I want to be good more than I want to be popular — which is why we get along so well. And believe me, I know my name is there someplace in the cast.”
It sure is — four times.
One of the gimmicks in Coming to America is that Murphy and Hall play many parts in the movie. Wearing makeup by Rick Baker, they will be almost impossible to recognize in a couple of instances. For instance, in the barber shop.
“Well, Rick Baker sat down with us and looked at us and studied us and took pictures. He said, ‘Now, Arsenio, you have a huge smile and tiny ears. These are the things we’re going to work on the most.’ So as the barber, I got a different nose and different teeth and a beard — and, well, it all took about an hour and a half to turn me into the barber.”
As he talks about his roles, Hall — who made his mark as a stand-up comic before getting his Late Show break — falls quite naturally into character, tossing out lines from the movie and a few he makes up on the spot. And seeing how naturally all this comes out of him, it becomes clear how the routines he did in character with Murphy had come about.
“Oh, yeah,” Hall said, “improvs, definitely improvs. Eddie and I worked with a tape recorder doing whole hours of these guys. Then we sent the tapes of us talking to John Landis, the director, and they shaped them into scenes.”
Landis gave Hall his first film break with a five-minute cameo in Amazon Women on the Moon.
But for all intents and purposes, Coming to America is Hall’s first picture, and it looks as if it’s going to be the next big step in a career that has gone up and up and up since New Year’s Day 1980, when he set off on a long drive across the country to Los Angeles from his home in Cleveland.
Following his graduation from Kent State University, he had been working in advertising until he tried stand-up comedy — and then he never looked back. Once in Los Angeles, he made himself known at the Comedy Store and the Improv, and in a relatively short time he was opening for top musical acts, such as Tina Turner, Anita Baker, Aretha Franklin and Tom Jones. He also had managed to do a little television.
“Eddie’s mom saw me on the tube,” he said. “She told him, ‘I thought I saw you, but it was some guy who looks like you or acted like you. His name was Arsenio Hall.’ Well, that made him want to see me, too. So one night when he was out on the coast and had just signed to do 48 Hrs., he came in to see me at the Improv.
“He came up afterward — I knew who he was from Saturday Night Live — and he said, ‘You don’t look like me.’ I looked at him and laughed. ‘Who said I did?’ And then he said his mother did, and I guess he was kind of embarrassed because he said, ‘Hey, let’s hang out.’ And we did, and we’ve been buddies ever since.”
The connection proved a fortunate one back when he was doing The Late Show. After he had been told by Johnny Carson’s production staff that his brand of humor was “too barbed” for The Tonight Show, he was welcomed as a guest on the new Fox Broadcasting show by Joan Rivers.
Hall did spectacularly well as host on The Late Show, outdrawing Rivers’ earlier audience ratings by a considerable margin.
But he gave it all up to be an actor — and right now he’s feeling very good about his decision. “I really enjoy acting,” he said. “I thought I’d never like anything more than The Late Show. But I like what I’m doing now.”
And what he’s doing now is getting ready for his next movie, The Butterscotch Kid, a Murphy reject.
“It was written for him and Richard Pryor,” he said. “It was a slightly different image for Eddie, kind of a fill-in stepfather, and Eddie just didn’t see himself with a kid. But it’s good for me, and it looks like it’s going to happen — only without Richard Pryor.
“But Eddie’s going to direct. Great, huh? It’s something he’s wanted to do for a long time. He said to me, ‘Hey, just because this script wasn’t good for me doesn’t mean it’s not good for you. And I’d sure like to direct it.’ I think he’ll be the best around.”
