![]() Simpson ripped the page out, held it up to Bruckheimer, and said, “Isn't he great?” Calls were made, hands were shook, signatures were signed, and Mickey Rourke was signed on to play the lead cop who went through yet another name change, in a movie that had received a new title: Axel Foley in Beverly Hills Cop. And then one day Don Simpson was looking through a magazine and ran across a picture of an extremely handsome young man who had just come off of Barry Levinson's Diner. Richard Pryor was considered Al Pacino, hot off his incredible run in the '70s, was contacted, but he was already signed on for a little film directed by Brian De Palma playing a Cuban drug lord James Caan and Harrison Ford were looked at but they weren't “out-of-water” enough. Now came time to cast the lead fish of our fish-out-of-water story. The biggest change? Elly Axel was now Axel Elly, and instead of Pittsburgh he came from Detroit. “It was wonderful,” recalled Bruckheimer. That year, another young writer named Daniel Petrie Jr., whose father Daniel Petrie directed cult favorites like Buster and Billie, Lifeguard, and Fort Apache, The Bronx, was hired by Simpson to rewrite Bach's story and ended up handing in a script that was better than anything that had been submitted previously, and as close to anything Simpson had imagined. In 1983 Simpson teamed up with his friend and future partner Jerry Bruckheimer and got his first screen credit as producer on Adrian Lyne's Flashdance. While they felt they had the basic gist of a story, the script still wasn't what they were looking for. With the working title “Beverly Drive,” Bach wrote a story about a cop from Pittsburgh named Elly Axel. Then a young writer named Danilo Bach delivered a treatment that struck a chord with Don Simpson. For the next five years, different writers took their turn with the script, but none were suitable. Whatever and whenever the genesis of the story of a working-class cop operating among the rich and famous in Beverly Hills, it would still take multiple writers, multiple leading men, and nearly a decade to get the finished product. Scenario 3: In 1977 Don Simpson, then a young executive at Paramount, had an idea of a cop from East L.A. “I went to the office and said we have to do a movie about a Hollywood cop.” He was pulled over by a Beverly Hills police officer, and remembers the cop as being “extremely efficient, reasonably rude, with an air of superiority and quiet condescension.” Eisner assumed he was pulled over because “his battered station wagon wore its New York City heritage on its body and was unsuitable for symbol-conscious Hollywood.” The next day, Eisner traded in the wagon for a Mercedes and decided to commemorate the entire incident in a movie. Scenario 2: One afternoon Eisner was driving on the freeway in his beat up station wagon he had brought with him from the east coast. Eisner suggested to Don Simpson, then an up and coming executive within the Paramount ranks, there may be a film somewhere in that idea. He then started to think about how different being a police officer in Beverly Hills must be from being a cop in, say, downtown Los Angeles. The first day Eisner was driving his new car he was pulled over and given a speeding citation. In 1976 his boss, Paramount chairman and CEO Barry Diller, gifted Eisner a brand new Mercedes convertible as a congratulations. Scenario 1: Michael Eisner had just been transferred from his job as the senior vice president in charge of programming at ABC to president and COO of Paramount Pictures movie studio. The origin of Beverly Hills Cop is a stereotypical they said-he said-he said scenario.
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