Eddie Murphy is busy tying down rights with the Parliament-Funkadelic leader and he and fellow producers John and Catherine Davis, of Davis Entertainment, will then look for writers and begin shopping the project.
The film is described as a “passion project” for Murphy. George Clinton is widely considered to be one of the biggest innovators in funk, alongside James Brown and Sly Stone, and the film will explore his rise to fame from humble beginnings in North Carolina in the 1940s to the formation of his seminal bands Parliament and Funkadelic, to his major influence on a generation of hip-hop stars including Snoop Dogg, Dr. Dre, OutKast, Wu-Tang Clan and others.
He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1997 alongside 15 other members of the Parliament-Funkadelic collective, and in 2019, they were given the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award.
Meanwhile, Murphy previously spoke about the radical transformations he undergoes for his movies, admitting spending up to six hours a day in the makeup chair is a “thankless” task because most audiences don’t “appreciate” the “drudgery.”
He said: “Every time I do it I say, ‘that’s the last time, I’m never doing this s— ever again’ and then I’ll get an idea and ‘Ah s—, where the make-up chair?’ And I’ll end up sitting in the chair again but I never forget and it never gets any easier. The process didn’t get any easier on Coming 2 America than on Nutty Professor, it’s still six hours in the chair [to] put it on and an hour and half to take it off after everybody left at the end of the day, you’ve had this s— glued on your face for 12 hours and then you have to go and sit and have them peel it off for an hour.
“It is work, it is drudgery and it’s even kind of thankless because the audience doesn’t appreciate it. If it’s really, really, really done righ.t the audience doesn’t think ‘oh it’s a makeup, how much work is it?’ They just watch it, they get the laugh but they’re not seeing all the work that goes into it, so you kind of take it for granted, you know?” he said.
