In 1989, Murphy wrote, directed, exec-produced, and starred in a crime comedy-drama set in the 1930s called Harlem Nights. The film was his bid to join directors like Spike Lee in the black filmmaking vanguard, and when it was greeted with scathing reviews and dismissed as a vanity project, he felt stung. He began to pull away from Hollywood. By the next year, when he starred in the sequel Another 48 HRS., looking bloated and disinterested, he seemed to have lost his spark. ''The happy guy I knew on the first one was gone,'' says director Hill. ''He was just very disengaged…way late, way slow coming out of his trailer. I remember I ran into Keenen Wayans after the movie came out, and he said to me, ' You should have called it Another 48 Pounds.''' (Wayans declined to be interviewed for this story.)

Not everyone in Hollywood was sympathetic. ''Eddie was overpriced, his pictures had underperformed, and he just wasn't that well liked,'' says one former studio executive. By 1995, following duds like The Distinguished Gentleman and Vampire in Brooklyn, Murphy's popularity had sunk so low, he was mocked on his old show, Saturday Night Live. During ''Spade in America,'' a photo of Murphy appeared on the screen as David Spade said snarkily, ''Look, children, it's a falling star! Make a wish!''

Reginald Hudlin, who directed Murphy in the 1992 film Boomerang, says the actor felt his career wasn't being properly nurtured: ''Eddie was this enormously successful guy, but he was treated like a piece of business, not like this artist who has a vast range of talent. I think the industry was very content for him to essentially be Axel Foley forever. He would see his white counterparts get a kind of emotional investment that he was not getting. I think that's typically the case for many black actors.''

In the mid-1990s, realizing he needed a comeback vehicle, Murphy came up with the idea of remaking Jerry Lewis' 1963 Jekyll-and-Hyde takeoff The Nutty Professor. Though he had once vowed he would never do a role in drag (''That dressing-up-like-a-woman s--- is just not funny to me''), he now told Universal he wanted to play several of the film's roles, including some of the female ones, burying himself under heavy makeup and prosthetics. ''The studio said, 'Why don't we just get other actors to play the characters?''' says Grazer. The time and labor involved in the elaborate makeup work added millions of dollars to the budget, Grazer admits, but Murphy ''felt he had something to prove.'' The Nutty Professor went on to become a resounding $129 million hit, giving Murphy — who had once bragged of being chided by Bill Cosby for spouting too much profanity on stage — an improbable new career as a family-friendly star.

In the wee hours of May 2, 1997, Murphy's fragile comeback was nearly derailed when he was pulled over by police officers in West Hollywood with a transvestite prostitute in his SUV. Murphy claimed he was simply being a Good Samaritan (''It's not the first hooker that I've helped out''), but the public relations damage couldn't be undone. Murphy retreated with his wife, Nicole, and their children to a resort in Hawaii, where Sheffield and Blaustein visited him to begin work on the story for a planned Nutty Professor sequel. ''Out of politeness, we hadn't mentioned a word,'' Sheffield says. ''We're walking along the beach and Eddie, without preamble, just turned to us and said, ' I didn't know she had a d---, okay?' That was all that was ever said about it.''