Editorial Staff
With “Beverly Hills Cop” celebrating it’s 30th birthday this year (a great new Blu-ray release is out next month!), chances are you’ve forgotten some of the hows, whats and whos about the movie. For instance, do you remember that Sylvester Stallone was the original pick for Axel Foley? And do you remember that Sly dropped out of the original film because of orange juice!? He did! Stallone was originally in the Axel Foley role, but reportedly pulled some diva behavior and dropped out weeks before production was to begin over a dispute about the particular brand of orange juice in his trailer.
Check out 10 other facts about the legendary “Beverly Hills Cop” :
• Axel Foley was originally going to be played by Sylvester Stallone or Mickey Rourke. Stallone left the project and used some of his script ideas to make Cobra (1986). Other actors who were considered for the role of Axel Foley were Al Pacino and James Caan.
• During his tirade at the Beverly Palms Hotel, Axel pretends to be writing an article called “Michael Jackson: Sitting on Top of the World” for Rolling Stone magazine. In real life, Playboy ran an article called “Eddie Murphy: Sitting on Top of the World.”
• director Martin Brest notes that they were unable to gain access to actually see the Beverly Hills Police Department, so they had to simply guess what it might look like inside. Brest says he wanted it too look as different from the Detroit set as possible and the set crew was told to make it look like “private security for rich people.”
• The movie held a theatrical record for 25 years – it replaced National Lampoon’s Animal House as the highest-grossing R-rated comedy film in Hollywood history. Eddie Murphy’s action/comedy would hold that record in the U.S. for 25 years, until it was in turn surpassed by 2009′s The Hangover.
• Beverly Hills Cop was the first comedy movie in history to simultaneously play in more than 2,000 U.S. movie screens.
• The city hall building seen in the film is the actual Beverly Hills City Hall. However, the exterior was very run-down and the plants were dying, so the film crew had to clean it up and grow new plants so it would look better on film.
• When trying to find Foley and Rosewood, the LAPD use a “satellite tracking system” (the ancestor of the modern-day Global Positioning System or GPS). Such a system did not exist at the time and was made up to advance the plot, but later did come into existence in real life.
• Richard Pryor was also considered to star.
• The director Martin Brest: appears at the end of the movie as the clerk who checks Axel out of the hotel.
• The film’s producer Jerry Bruckheimer is best known for his mega television and film productions including CSI, Without A Trace, The Amazing Race, Flashdance, Top Gun and Pirates of the Carribean.
