Laura Jean Hocking
Director Craig Brewer (right)
Memphis director Craig Brewer has been secretly developing a film about Rudy Ray Moore for Netflix.
The film will star Eddie Murphy as Moore, the Los Angeles street comedian who gained fame as a fast talking pimp named Dolemite, who was featured in three groundbreaking blacksploitation films in the 1970s. This will only be Murphy’s second live action movie appearance since 2012.
David Shankbone – flickr, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=10220764
Eddie Murphy
Brewer will be directing from a script by Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski. The writers specialize in left-field biographical material, having penned The People vs. Larry Flynt, Ed Wood, Big Eyes, Man On The Moon, and The People vs. O.J. Simpson. In addition to filming The People vs. Larry Flynt in Memphis, Karaszewski is also a frequent guest and jurist at the Indie Memphis Film Festival.
C. Neil Scott from Columbia, SC, US CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5183785
Rudy Ray Moore aka Dolemite
Brewer’s made-in-Memphis 2005 film Hustle & Flow was a box office hit that earned an Academy Award for Best Song and a Best Actor nomination for star Terrance Howard. He has recently been writing and directing episodes for the Fox TV hit Empire and producing the You Look Like comedy show in Memphis for independent studio Gunpowder and Sky. According to a report in Deadline Hollywood, shooting for the as-yet untitled Rudy Ray Moore film will begin in Los Angeles on June 12.
