Eddie Murphy will star in a biopic about Rudy Ray Moore, the comedian and actor who starred in Dolemite, one of the biggest blaxploitation films from the 70s.
The biopic, Dolemite is My Name, will be produced for Netflix and begin production on June 12, Deadline reported. The film will be helmed by Craig Brewer, the director of Hustle & Flow, and penned by Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, the writers behind well-known biopics The People vs. Larry Flynt and Ed Wood.
Moore was a musician and comedian during the 50s and 60s. But he began to gain a following when he self-released comedy albums in the 70s that were told from the raunchy and rhyming perspective of the character Dolemite, which was based on the stories about a pimp he heard from a friend while working in a record store in Hollywood.
With crude language and over-the-top descriptions of sex, the albums were considered to be so salacious, they were deemed more extreme than the most controversial comics of the day, including Richard Pryor and Redd Foxx. The albums also had cover art with adult language and nudity and were kept behind the counter in stores, covered in brown paper.
"I wasn't saying dirty words just to say them," Moore said in 1997. "It was a form of art, sketches in which I developed ghetto characters who cursed. I don't want to be referred to as a dirty old man, rather a ghetto expressionist."
Moore gained more mainstream recognition after he co-wrote and starred in Dolemite in 1975. The success of that film was followed by The Human Tornado, Petey Wheatstraw: The Devil's Son-in-Law and Money Hustler.
He died in 2008 at the age of 81.
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