Dolemite Was His Name:
The Story of Self-Made Cult Film Icon Rudy Ray Moore (Preview)
Reviewed by Steve Ryfle

Sitting in a parking lot outside a South Central Los Angeles diner, small-time comedian and rhythm-and-blues singer Rudy Ray Moore faces his dim prospects as an entertainer. It’s the late 1960s, and he’s fortyish, working low-paying gigs as an emcee in small nightclubs, and the bosses won’t put him on the marquee because his jokes and his song-and-dance routines are too old-fashioned. He had arrived in Los Angeles a decade earlier with dreams of going to the top, but he’s going nowhere. Rudy wonders, “How did my life get so small?”

This early scene from Dolemite Is My Name catches Moore (Eddie Murphy) at a pivotal moment, torn between pursuing his elusive dreams of stardom or packing it in. Within a few short years, Moore would reinvent himself, adopting the outrageous stage persona of Dolemite, a foul-mouthed, rap-rhyming street pimp dressed in resplendent outfits that would have made Little Richard, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, or even jumpsuit-era Elvis proud. The gag catapulted Moore to the top; not the top of show business exactly, but of an underground world of African American clubs that were out of the main- stream yet packed with in-the-know fans of Moore’s string of self-financed-on-a-shoestring, X-rated comedy albums. Then Moore brought his alter ego to the screen in his ultra-low-budget cinematic masterstroke, Dolemite (1975), a film as beloved for its apparent amateurishness as for its over-the-top humor, action, and sex; it was, implausibly, a major hit in its theatrical run and has endured as one of the most influential Blaxploitation films of its era.

Written by Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, Dolemite Is My Name is based on the true story of the making of that film, and of Rudy Ray Moore’s rise from obscurity to fame on the margins of Hollywood. Though he lacked the typical leading man qualities—he was middle-aged, thick around the middle (“doughier” than other actors, as a producer in the film says), lacked connections and, arguably, lacked talent—the indomitable Moore borrowed and scraped together a meager budget and recruited a ragtag entourage of friends, many of whom worked multiple jobs in front of and behind the camera, and shot the movie with a film student crew, guerrilla style, without permits. Through it all, Moore emerges as an improbable success, a man who bucked the system and made his own dreams come true, and lifted up those around him, while making one of the most joyously so-bad-it’s-good movies of all time. It’s familiar territory for Alexander and Karaszewski, whose previous writing credits include Tim Burton’s Ed Wood (1994), Milos Forman’s The People vs. Larry Flynt (1996), and Forman’s Man on the Moon (1999), all stories of creative outcasts and misfits going against the grain.

“I think we’re drawn to people who are going the opposite way of society, and have some kind of crazy-ass goal whether it’s making a movie, or making a magazine, or wanting to be the funniest man around, whatever it is, but they’re doing it in a way that is so unconventional and so against the normal way of doing it,” said Karaszewski. “And the only thing that’s pushing it is their passion.”

Alexander and Karaszewski became Rudy Ray Moore fans as film-school students at the University of Southern California in the 1980s. Their then-roommate Daniel Waters (later the screenwriter of Heathers, Batman Returns, and other films) brought home The Best of Sex and Violence, a 1982 videotape compilation of 1970s exploitation film trailers, hosted by John Carradine, which included Dolemite, its even crazier sequel The Human Tornado (1976), and another Moore film, Disco Godfather (1979). “They literally were the most entertaining things we’d ever seen in our entire lives,” said Karaszewski. “We were all living together and those three trailers were on a loop for almost a year.” Adds Alexander: “Everyone who would come to the house, we’d say you’ve got to watch this, you’re not going to believe this. The Human Tornado trailer is the greatest three minutes of film ever created.”

Even though they were fans, and even as they went on to become Hollywood’s foremost writers of offbeat biopics, Alexander and Karaszewski never pitched a Rudy Ray Moore movie. The idea, they said, came from Eddie Murphy, who requested a meeting with them in or around 2003. Once there, Murphy told the pair how much he loved Ed Wood and quoted dialogue and characters from the film. “And [Murphy] finally said, ‘Do you guys know who Rudy Ray Moore is?’ Karaszewski recalled. “And we were both like, ‘Hell yes!’ It was one of those things. The second he said it, I was like, all right, we get it. That’s the most perfect idea I’ve ever heard in my life, the idea of Eddie Murphy playing Rudy Ray Moore.”

The writers met with Moore, then in his mid-seventies, who told stories from his decades-long struggles in the entertainment world. Having been ignored by mainstream Hollywood his entire career, watching other African American comics such as Redd Foxx and Richard Pryor become big stars while he worked in relative anonymity, Moore harbored a grudge, and hoped a biopic might bring the recognition he had long sought. But no studio wanted the project. “Sometimes you can’t get anyone to bite on your pitch,” said Karaszewski. “So years went by and Rudy ended up dying, and we felt bad we weren’t able to make a movie about him as we’d promised.” After Moore’s death in 2008 at age eighty-one, Karaszewski hosted a packed-house tribute screening of Dolemite at the American Cinematheque in Hollywood, including a discussion onstage with cast and crew members. But by that time, the writing duo had moved on to other projects. “We always assumed that somebody else was going to make this movie,” Karaszewski added. “We thought we’d blown it; we thought it was a great idea and we figured someone would do it.”

The project was reborn after the success of The People v. O. J. Simpson, the first season of FX’s American Crime Story (2016), developed and executive-produced by Alexander and Karaszewski, which won the Emmy for Outstanding Limited Series and numerous other awards. Suddenly, the duo was in a position of leverage. Karaszewski recalled, “We looked at each other said, ‘Maybe we can use that to get one of our passion projects done.’ And so through the producers John Davis and John Fox, we sent word to Eddie. ‘Would you be interested in reviving the Rudy Ray Moore thing?’ And within a week we were at Netflix, and they loved it. That happened very quickly.”

In the intervening years, Hollywood had become more receptive to African American stories and history, particularly following the #OscarsSoWhite controversy, and new platforms like Netflix had broadened the marketplace. “Netflix is just so singular,” Alexander said. “They’ll take a shot on anything that sounds good. They have no problem making those midbudget movies that we love, and that most studios don’t want to get near anymore.” The writers returned to their notes from a decade before, did some additional research, and wrote the script in 2017–18; the film was shot in mid-2018 with Craig Brewer (Hustle & Flow, Empire) directing. Dolemite Is My Name received a limited theatrical release in October 2019, with nearly universal positive reviews. Slate critic Inkoo Kang called Moore, “[An] unlikely folk hero, a winking vulgarian whose irrepressible drive for success more than makes up for his artistic deficiencies.” Greater praise, however qualified, than anything Moore received during his lifetime…

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Cineaste, Vol. XLV, No. 1