The new documentary about Eddie Murphy, Being Eddie, which you can watch with your Netflix subscription, is great. It’s filled with wonderful history and great interviews with the comedy legend. It touches on Murphy’s entire career, from his beginnings as a stand-up comic in New York as a teenager to starring on SNL in his early 20s to becoming one of the biggest box office draws of all time in now-legendary movies like Trading Places, Coming to America, and the Shrek franchise.
There is one bit towards the very end of the movie that really piqued my interest. It mentions that Murphy has agreed to star in a biopic about funk music legend George Clinton. There isn’t a ton of information about the biopic, but it does seem like it’s going to happen. To be clear, I personally have to see this happen. It’s just too perfect, one of my favorite actors playing one of my favorite musicians. Yes, Please!
George Clinton Is A Hero Of Mine
I grew up in the ‘90s and, like many people my age, my first exposure to George Clinton’s music wasn’t from hearing one of his songs, like “Tear The Roof Off The Sucker” or “Chocolate City.” No, it was in a more roundabout way, as it was from listening to Dr. Dre’s classic 1992 album, The Chronic, which samples heavily from Clinton’s music. I spent hours and hours listening to that seminal West Coast hip hop album (that was terrifying suburban America) before I ever realized that the music underneath Dre and Snoop Dogg’s rapping was mostly Parliament and/or Funkadelic, Clinton’s two collectives.
Once I did discover where the samples were coming from, I dove headfirst into original music, and for the last 30 years, both Parliament and Funkadelic’s music, which are really the same band (but I won’t get into the difference here), have been among my most-played songs and albums. I’ve seen Clinton and company in concert multiple times over the years, and without fail, it’s always a wild and outstanding show. The story of George Clinton is just as wild as the music.
A Career That Has Spanned Decades
George Clinton’s first band, The Parliaments, started in the mid-1950s when Clinton was just a teenager. Now, at age 84, he’s still performing, 70 years later. It’s pretty astonishing. Of course, he’s best known for basically inventing 1970s funk, alongside his cohorts Bernie Worrell and Bootsie Collins in Parliament-Funkadelic. That music has not only proven timeless, but, like on The Chronic, has proved incredibly enduring as the basis for dozens of hip hop hits over the years as samples.
That Clinton has made it to age 84, even appearing on The Masked Singer a few years ago, is somewhat incredible as well. He isn’t exactly the poster child for clean living. He’s infamously struggled with drug addiction over the years, even getting arrested in 2003 for cocaine possession, but it’s never slowed him down. In fact, that arrest in Florida came just a couple of weeks before I saw him join Phish on stage in Miami later in the month, and he still brought the funk, of course.
His work in the 1970s is, in my opinion, and the opinion of plenty of others, some of the best and most important music of the 20th century. Clinton and P-Funk’s mishmash of funk, soul, and rock is right in my sweet spot. It’s danceable and perfect for parties, but it’s also interesting. You hear something new almost every time you listen to it. That can’t be said for a lot of dance music. The band’s wild live shows, especially in the 1970s, would make for a total spectacle on the big screen. I mean, who doesn’t want to see “Diaper Man” (guitarist Garry Shider) on a giant IMAX screen? I know I do!
Eddie Murphy Would Nail It
Murphy has played musicians in the past, not just in comedic roles like Randy Watson in Coming to America, but also in an Oscar-nominated performance as James “Thunder” Early in Dreamgirls. That character is honestly not too far off from Clinton’s early days in The Parliaments. For me, I’d really love to see Eddie Murphy take a swing at winning an Oscar, and music biopics have proven to be fertile ground for Oscar nominations.
Murphy is also a musician himself, of course, scoring a top ten hit in 1985 with “Party All the Time,” and has released multiple albums over the years. His work with another funk legend, Rick James (who wrote and produced “Party All The Time”), is well documented, especially for fans of Chappelle’s Show. He’s also been great impersonating musicians over the years, notably Stevie Wonder and James Brown on SNL.
Will It Actually Happen?
Now, we haven’t heard much about this project. It was first announced in 2022, but in the years since, information has been scarce. In November of last year, Dreamgirls director Bill Condon was attached to direct, according to Variety. That is the perfect choice, given Murphy’s history with Condon and Condon’s filmography that includes movies like Chicago and The Greatest Showman. The article also revealed the movie would be produced by Amazon MGM.
Since then, there hasn’t been a lot of news, but in the lead-up to the release of Being Eddie, Murphy spoke to Netflix’s Tudum and said:
I’m getting ready to do the George Clinton biopic, and I’m looking forward to that.
So that’s encouraging news, for sure, though we still don’t know when the movie is set to begin filming or if it’ll appear on the 2026 movie schedule. Murphy also said he’s going to be starring in an upcoming reboot of the Pink Panther franchise, which also sounds pretty amazing. But first, let’s tear the roof off the sucker, because we want the funk!
