Edward Regan Murphy is an American comedian, actor, and singer. He shot to fame on the sketch comedy show Saturday Night Live, for which he was a regular cast member from 1980 to 1984. He is widely recognized as one of the greatest comedians of all time. Murphy has received accolades such as the Golden Globe Award, a Grammy Award, and an Emmy Award as well as nominations for an Academy Award and a BAFTA Award. He was honored with the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor in 2015 and the Cecil B. DeMille Award in 2023.
Coming to America is a 1988 American romantic comedy film directed by John Landis and based on a story originally created by Eddie Murphy, who also stars in the lead role. The film also co-stars Arsenio Hall, James Earl Jones, Shari Headley, and John Amos. The film was released in the United States on June 29, 1988. Eddie Murphy plays Akeem Joffer, the crown prince of the fictional African nation of Zamunda who travels to the United States in the hopes of finding a woman he can marry and will love him for who he is, not for his status or for having been trained to please him.
Christopher Julius Rock is an American comedian, actor, and filmmaker. Rock first gained prominence for his stand-up routines in the 1980s, where he tackled subjects including race relations, human sexuality, and observational comedy. His success branched off into productions in film, television, and on-stage, having received multiple accolades including three Grammy Awards for Best Comedy Album, four Primetime Emmy Awards, and a Golden Globe Award nomination. He was ranked No. 5 on Comedy Central's list of the 100 Greatest Stand-ups of All Time. He also ranked No. 5 on Rolling Stone's list of the 50 Best Stand-Up Comics of All Time.
Charles Quinton Murphy was an American comedian, actor, and writer. He was best known as a writer and cast member of the Comedy Central sketch-comedy series Chappelle's Show as well as the co-star of the sitcom Black Jesus. He was the older brother of actor and comedian Eddie Murphy.
Dolemite is a 1975 American blaxploitation crime comedy film and is also the name of its principal character, played by Rudy Ray Moore, who co-wrote the film and its soundtrack. Moore, who started his career as a stand-up comedian in the late 1960s, heard a rhymed toast about an urban hero named Dolemite from a regular at the record store where he worked, and decided to adopt the persona as an alter ego in his act.
Rudolph Frank Moore, known as Rudy Ray Moore, was an American comedian, singer, actor, and film producer. He created the character Dolemite, the pimp from the 1975 film Dolemite and its sequels, The Human Tornado and The Dolemite Explosion. The persona was developed during his early comedy records. The recordings often featured Moore delivering profanity-filled rhyming poetry, which later earned Moore the nickname "the Godfather of Rap." Actor and comedian Eddie Murphy portrayed Moore in the 2019 film Dolemite Is My Name.
John Andrew Davis is an American film producer and founder of Davis Entertainment.
Craig Brewer is an American filmmaker. His 2005 movie Hustle & Flow won the Audience Award at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival and achieved commercial success, along with an Academy Award for Best Original Song, "It's Hard out Here for a Pimp". He is also known for directing the 2011 remake of Footloose, the 2019 film Dolemite Is My Name and the 2021 film Coming 2 America; the latter two starring Academy Award-nominee Eddie Murphy.
Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski are an American screenwriting duo, best known for writing postmodern biopics with larger-than-life characters. They coined the term "anti-biopic" to describe the genre they invented: Movies about people who don't deserve one. They are uninterested in the traditional "great man" story, focusing instead on obscure strivers in American pop culture. Their works in this genre include Ed Wood, The People vs. Larry Flynt, Man on the Moon, Big Eyes, Dolemite Is My Name, and the series The People v. O. J. Simpson: American Crime Story.
The Human Tornado is a 1976 American blaxploitation film directed by Cliff Roquemore. The film is a sequel to Dolemite.
D'Urville Martin was an American actor in both film and television. He appeared in numerous 1970s movies in the blaxploitation genre. He also appeared in two unaired pilots of what would become All in the Family as Lionel Jefferson. Born in New York City, Martin began his career in the mid-1960s and soon appeared in prominent films such as Black Like Me, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, and Rosemary's Baby. Martin also directed films in his career, including Dolemite, starring Rudy Ray Moore.
The Front Page is a 1974 American black comedy-drama film directed by Billy Wilder, and starring Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau. The screenplay by Wilder and I. A. L. Diamond is based on Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur's 1928 play of the same name.
Blaxploitation is an ethnic subgenre of the exploitation film that emerged in the United States during the early 1970s, when the combined momentum of the civil rights movement, the Black power movement, and the Black Panthers spurred black artists to reclaim power over their image, and institutions like the UCLA to provide financial assistance for students of color to study filmmaking. This combined with Hollywood adopting a less restrictive rating system in 1968. The term, a portmanteau of the words "black" and "exploitation", was coined in August 1972 by Junius Griffin, the president of the Beverly Hills–Hollywood NAACP branch. He claimed the genre was "proliferating offenses" to the black community in its perpetuation of stereotypes often involved in crime. After the race films of the 1940s and 1960s, the genre emerged as one of the first in which black characters and communities were protagonists, rather than sidekicks, supportive characters, or victims of brutality. The genre's inception coincides with the rethinking of race relations in the 1970s.
Petey Wheatstraw is a 1977 American blaxploitation comedy film written and directed by Cliff Roquemore, and starring comedian Rudy Ray Moore alongside Jimmy Lynch, Leroy Daniels, Ernest Mayhand, Ebony Wright, and Wildman Steve Gallon. It is typical of Moore's other films from the same era, such as Dolemite and The Human Tornado.
Ron Cephas Jones was an American actor, best known for his role as William Hill in the drama series This Is Us (2016–2022), which earned him a Screen Actors Guild Award; along with four consecutive Primetime Emmy Award nominations, winning twice for Outstanding Guest Actor in a Drama Series in 2018 and 2020.
Jasmine Cephas Jones is an American-British actress, singer, and producer who is best known for originating the dual roles of Peggy Schuyler and Maria Reynolds in the Broadway stage musical Hamilton. Her work on Hamilton's accompanying cast album earned her a Grammy Award for Best Musical Theater Album. In 2020, Cephas Jones won a Primetime Emmy for portraying Tyisha in #freerayshawn.
The Politician is an American comedy-drama television series created by Ryan Murphy, Brad Falchuk, and Ian Brennan and released on Netflix. The trio also serves as executive producers with Alexis Martin Woodall, Ben Platt, and Gwyneth Paltrow. The series centers on the story of Payton Hobart (Platt), a wealthy Santa Barbaran, and each season revolves around a different political race his character is involved in.
Coming 2 America is a 2021 American romantic comedy film that serves as a sequel to the 1988 film Coming to America starring Eddie Murphy and directed by Craig Brewer, from a screenplay by Kenya Barris, Barry W. Blaustein, and David Sheffield, and a story by Blaustein, Sheffield, and Justin Kanew, based on characters created by Murphy. It co-stars an ensemble cast of Arsenio Hall, Jermaine Fowler, Leslie Jones, Tracy Morgan, KiKi Layne, Shari Headley, Teyana Taylor, Wesley Snipes, and James Earl Jones. Coming 2 America was the final film appearance of Louie Anderson before his death in 2022, reprising his role as Maurice from the first film.
The 24th San Diego Film Critics Society Awards were announced on December 9, 2019.
William Clifford Brown, who went by the name Big Brown, was a mid-twentieth century American street poet, performer, and recording artist. Prominent among the Beats in New York City from the late 1950s to the late 1960s, his distinctive language and style influenced a number of artists and musicians, including Bob Dylan, who declared Brown's to be the best poetry he had ever heard. Brown also influenced the later genres of hip hop and rap. In 1973, after moving to California, he recorded an album, The First Man of Poetry, Big Brown: Between Heaven and Hell, produced by Rudy Ray Moore. Brown was murdered in Los Angeles seven years later.
