Al Weisel
Summer Movie Preview: Bowfinger
By Al Weisel
Premiere, June 1999, p. 61
Will Martin and Murphy be the next Martin and Lewis? Like Dean and Jerry, the costars of Bowfinger make an odd comic couple. "Beforehand, I was like, 'I don't know if this is going to work,'" admits director Frank Oz, but he found the pairing of Steve Martin's elegant, white-bread goofiness and Eddie Murphy's hip, urban cynicism to be (what else?) "a terrific combination." Martin (who wrote the script) plays Bobby Bowfinger, a down-and-out director who needs action star Kit Ramsey (Murphy) to headline his next film. When Ramsey blows him off, he decides to shoot the movie with him anyway, stalking him (and making him increasingly paranoid); staging scenes in which he unknowingly interacts with other thespians (including Christine Baranski as a washed-up stage actress and Heather Graham as an ambitious ingénue), and filming it all with hidden cameras.
Murphy, who also plays Ramsey's dim-witted stunt double (he thinks the cars in that freeway scene are being handled by stunt drivers), was producer Brian Grazer's suggestion. Martin says he originally envisioned "a Keanu Reeves type. Brian sent [the script] to Eddie, [who] said it should be for a black action star. And I said, 'Does that mean you'll do it?'" Although the voyeuristic, life-becomes-art theme may recall such flicks as The Truman Show and Grazer's own EDtv, Martin says that's just a coincidence. The idea of making a movie about "the misuse and abuse of filmmaking" came to him while shooting 1981's Pennies From Heaven. "I had this little joke that after each take I would do one more and make an entirely different movie," he recalls. "Same costumes, same fabulous sets, but different lines. We did that for a couple weeks, but we got behind."
Oz, whose three previous films with Martin include 1988's Dirty Rotten Scoundrels ("Steve has gotten cooler and more easygoing, and he takes more emotional chances," he says), started to identify with the title character because Murphy was available for only six weeks of production. "Bowfinger would shoot scenes with Kit and then go back and shoot the other side of the scene," Oz says. "We had to do the same thing." But the limited time Murphy spent on the set belies his contribution to the film. "He ad-libbed great lines, many of which are in his dialogue," says Martin, who met with his costar while working on the screenplay. "I took down everything he said. Especially when it came to black culture, l needed some hip black dialogue," he says, adding self-consciously, "jiggy, baby."■
Al Weisel is the co-author, with Larry Frascella, of Live Fast, Die Young: The Wild Ride of Making Rebel Without a Cause, being published in October 2005.