Comeback?

But can he regain his position at the top of the industry so effortlessly? Murphy has spent much of the last few years holed up at Bubble Hill and spending time with his 3-year-old daughter, Bria, and her mother, Murphy's fiancee, 24-year-old model Nicole Mitchell, who is expecting their second child, a boy, in the fall. ''I didn't feel like doing anything,'' he says about these limbo years.

Some say Murphy has become too isolated, cutting himself off from critical voices. One source close to the Murphy machine claims that when negative reports about Boomerang surfaced last April in the New York Post, employees were instructed to keep the paper away from Murphy. The actor is almost never seen without his sunglasses, sometimes even wearing them on Boomerang's indoor sets.

''When you have your sunglasses on, you have your privacy,'' he says. ''When the movie star walks in, everywhere he looks, someone will be looking at him. Sometimes you just want to chill. You don't want to wave 50 times. On your set, it's worse. Everywhere you look, you got to have some s--- or some dialogue.''

Suddenly Murphy takes a turn. ''Tell people I had dark glasses and this sullen kind of dark vibe like a vampire,'' he says. ''Make me seem like a really mysterious cat. Tell them, 'Eddie Murphy was in the room and he had on these dark sunglasses and I felt like he was a vampire. And he threw his head back and did his horselike laugh and I noticed he had fangs. And I ran from the room screaming.'''

It's no joke. Murphy is aware of his media image as a ''difficult'' star, a temperamental egoist who believes that the rules — like showing up on time — don't apply to him. What is surprising is how openly those who work with him confirm this behavior-before dismissing it as the price of working with Eddie Murphy.

''(Eddie's) being late is sort of the tax on genius. There's no free ride,'' says the boyish, high-energy Grazer, who also produced this summer's Far and Away and Housesitter, standing behind the desk in his Southwestern-decorated Century City, Calif., office. ''You have to have total respect for the guy. On the other hand, the process (of filmmaking) can be hard with him. Eddie will approve a scene on a Tuesday, then you get to Thursday and he'll rethink it. And you've already spent a lot of money. But to his credit, he's usually right about everything.''

When the filmmakers were ready to show the rough cut to Paramount last March, it was 3 1/2 hours long. And Boomerang was supposed to be a fast-moving comedy. It seems Reginald Hudlin's penchant for letting actors improvise, combined with Murphy's frequent creative suggestions, had allowed the film to get very bloated. ''The studio was upset,'' says Grazer. ''But it wasn't that they were creatively unhappy. They were nervous about making the release date.''

''I don't think the studio ever really understood what we were doing,'' says Reginald, ''which is why the first time they saw the film, we insisted they see it in front of an audience — and people went crazy. They said, 'Well, whatever our preconceptions about what a given scene was or was supposed to be, this clearly works.'''

The final decision on whether Boomerang really works is now up to audiences. There's no doubt that the effort to combine cutting-edge black humor with a lush, '40s-style romantic comedy was ambitious from the start. But even if the movie performs well at the box office — and no one expects it to bomb — it is unlikely to be viewed as an unqualified success for the Hudlins, for black filmmaking, and least of all for Eddie Murphy.

''I don't even trip on that,'' he says. ''I'll make movies until people stop going to see my movies. If that happens, I'll go back to Bubble Hill — and chill.''