[Watch the video interview on YouTube here]
Film Courage: Why aren’t you a credited writer on Beverly Hills Cop?
Ken Estin, Showrunner/Screenwriter: When they had Sylvester Stallone committed to the movie, I don’t think it had any jokes in it.
It had a humorous idea that he was a Detroit cop from a tough area working to solve a crime in Beverly Hills.
That was an amusing idea that some writer wrote who I don’t think ended up with credit on the movie either.
There were about seven writers between the original writer and when they came to me.
What happened was Sylvester Stallone wanted more action and more special effects.
He wanted one time to shoot up a Tiffany’s.
He wanted to shoot up the whole place.
I know they wouldn’t use real Tiffany’s.
But it’s still very expensive to make the copies instead and he wanted to do a semi-truck that goes airborne.
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He just wanted to do a lot of stuff and Bruckheimer and Simpson, who were the producers of the movie said, “Look, it’s not on our budget. We’re not going that way.”
And he was very unhappy.
At the same time, Paramount had just signed Eddie Murphy with a deal with Paramount.
They went to Eddie and said, “Would you do this? Would you do this movie?”
And he said, “Well, it’s not a comedy, but if you can make it into a comedy, I’ll think about it.”
So they came to me.
They actually went to my agent, Bob Broder, and they came to me when I was running Cheers at the time and said, “Will you turn this script into a comedy for Eddie Murphy?”
And I said, “No.”
For a couple of different reasons.
One, I was working on Cheers and I was making a ton of money, getting a lot of accolades, I just didn’t need to work on what I thought was a crappy movie…it was a crappy movie at the time. I did read the script and I said, “No.”…(Watch the video interview on YouTube here).
About:
Ken Estin began his career as a freelance writer whose first professional script was a Taxi episode that earned him the Writers Guild Award for the best episodic comedy script of the year. Ken became a staff writer on Taxi and then the showrunner (head writer producer) within two years and won his first Emmy when he was twenty-seven. After Taxi, Ken became the showrunner of Cheers and ran the series until leaving to create and run The Tracey Ullman Show, which earned Ken another Emmy. He developed short animation segments for the show with an aspiring cartoonist, Matt Groening. Those segments evolved into the spinoff series, The Simpsons, which became television’s longest running, most profitable comedy. Ken took a brief hiatus from TV to transform a troubled Sylvester Stallone project into Eddie Murphy’s blockbuster movie, Beverly Hills Cop. Ken created seven network pilots, five of which became prime time series. He ran several award-winning series, earning him eleven Emmy nominations, two Emmys, nine Writers Guild Award nominations, and a Writers Guild Award. He took a break from Hollywood to create and teach television writing courses for a decade at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco before irresistible TV projects brought him back to Los Angeles to resume series production.
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