This is the elusive STALLONE scripted version of Beverly Hills Cop, that only recently surfaced.
Genre: Action (not Comedy)
Premise: When an esteemed Beverly Hills art dealer kills his brother, a Detroit cop heads to the prized zip code to enact some vigilante justice.
About: Like just about every project in the 80s, multiple actors were attached before the film went into production. In an ironic twist, today’s project mirrors what happened with the script I reviewed in my newsetter, The Instigators. The original script, with Sylvestor Stallone attached, was meant to be more of a straight-action movie. When they couldn’t get it exactly how he wanted, he bailed, Eddie Murphy came on, and they turned it into a comedy. This is the Stallone-written draft, which was lost for a long time and only recently uncovered.
Writer: Daniel Petrie, Jr. and Sylvester Stallone (my assumption of what this means is that Petrie Jr. wrote the original draft and this is Stallone’s rewrite of it. They did not work together. That’s what the “and” means. If they were working together, it would be “&”).
Details: 114 pages
It remains one of the most intriguing questions that hasn’t been answered in Hollywood: Can Sylvester Stallone actually write?
To answer that question, let me give you a quick peek behind the curtain of how Hollywood [used to] operate. Someone would write a decent script. The script would get purchased. The studios and production houses that purchased that script would now work with the writer to get that script into “movie shape.”
9 times out of 10, after a few drafts with the original writer, they’d fire the writer (or not renew them) and hire someone else, usually a writer they had worked with before and knew could deliver what they wanted.
Because it’s so hard to get a movie made in Hollywood, that new writer would often be fired as well and a new-new writer would be brought on. Then, if the script was so lucky as to get a production start date, bigger and bigger writers would be brought in to patch up the script’s lingering weaknesses.
Because of this, nobody really knows who wrote the script! This is why Ben Affleck famously quipped after winning the Oscar for co-writing Good Will Hunting that he felt like a fraud. It was rumored that a ton of writers came in and cleaned that script up, most notably a writer I mentioned in my newsletter, William Goldman.
But you have to understand that with Stallone in the 70s, it was a whole different level of fraudness because you could control the narrative exactly how you wanted to. They didn’t have any way to check it. This is why there were so many good stories about the industry back then. Because it was easier to make them up! The story of Rocky as a film is a lot better if Stallone wrote the the thing in a week and refused to sell it if he couldn’t star. That’s the kind of story that makes headlines in the trade papers.
But did it really happen? Has Stallone written anything Oscar-worthy since? No. He hasn’t written anything close to that.
Look, here’s what probably happened. Stallone wrote the first draft. Maybe he even did it in a week. But like a lot of newbie screenwriters or people who don’t dedicate themselves to the craft, it was mid. They then brought in REAL SCREENWRITERS, people who know how to maximize the drama and maximize the character development – people who know their sh*t. They came in and made it something great. But “Stallone Writes Okay Draft and Then A-List Screenwriters Come In and Fix It” isn’t as good of a headline, is it?
Either way, we now have yet another Stallone screenplay to add more context to the discussion. Here is… the Stallone version of Beverly Hills Cop!
Detroit cop Axel Cobretti busts a couple of low-lives with a fake stolen cigarette scam but, in the process, destroys an entire police truck, leaving him to get reamed out by his boss, who’s sick of Axel pulling these ridiculous scams without running them by him first.
That night, Axel finds his brother, Michael, who just got out of prison, waiting at his apartment. Michael shows him this very expensive-looking little statue that he says is going to make him rich. The two get drunk and when they come home, thugs are waiting in the shadows. After knocking Axel out, they brutally torture and kill Michael.
The next day, Axel traces the statue back to an old friend of theirs, Jenny, who made it big in Los Angeles working for an art dealer, Paul Fleming. Axel heads to Beverly Hills and immediately meets with Jenny, who’s freaking out that Axel has brought her into this. She begs him not to mess with Fleming, who’s a powerful dude.
Axel doesn’t listen and starts tracking Fleming around town. Fleming then sends guys to track *him*, and to make matters complicated, the Beverly Hills police send two of their own dudes to track Axel. Axel looks deeper into this statue that came from Fleming and begins to suspect Fleming is doing something illegal. Axel’s plan is to find out what, or kill Fleming in the process.
You know, they actually didn’t change much of the plot here. They did switch up a few areas though. In Stallone’s BHC, the person who gets killed, Michael, is his brother. In Murphy’s BHC, it’s a childhood friend. What’s the difference here? It’s intricate but it’s noteworthy. A brother’s death is going to create more of an emotional impact than a friend’s death.
So why did Murphy’s version change it? Simple, because Murphy’s BHC is a comedy. In a comedy, you want to be a little lighter with the major plot beats. You don’t want to make things too sad. So turning him into a friend makes sense. Stallone clearly wanted us to feel this death. So he didn’t just make him Axel’s brother, he had the bad guys ruthlessly torture the brother before killing him. And it worked! I was gung-ho about Axel getting revenge.
The downside of Stallone’s version is that the concept so aggressively covets a comedic treatment that it’s kind of a waste to set it in Beverly Hills, since we’re not really taking advantage of the difference between the two cities. That’s what Murphy’s BHC did so well, is it leaned into its concept and had fun with the fact that the most “Detroit” guy ever is operating in Beverly Hills.
It always makes me nervous when the genre is working against the promise of the premise. I remember working on the Black List script “Court 17” with Elad, which is about a tennis player who gets stuck looping his first round match over and over again, and when we started that script, it was a comedy. Cause it made sense to be a comedy.
We came up with a lot of fun stuff. The player starts to use his knowledge of the day as an, almost, superpower, and he’d do things like sneak into his opponent’s locker and cut the strings in his rackets. And some days he would show up to matches dressed and groomed (and mimicking) exactly like his opponent to throw him off.
But as the script matured, we ditched the comedic angle and went with a dramatic one. After a while, I got frustrated because we were no longer taking advantage of our premise. Things were happening that could happen in any movie, and not, specifically, a tennis looping movie. That always bothered me and something about the script was definitely lost through that transition.
With the comedic version of Beverly Hills Cop being so iconic, you can see, from reading this dramatic version, where it’s not popping as much as the movie. At times, we could’ve been in New York. We could’ve been in Miami. We could’ve been in New Orleans. It wasn’t specific enough to DETROIT—->BEVERLY HILLS.
I’m guessing that’s because Stallone was less interested in exploring the concept as he was writing a character he wanted to play. Which is fine. If you’re going to star in a movie, you want the character to be great. And Stallone’s Axel does have moments. At one point he charges into an expensive restaurant where Fleming is eating and hurls his bodyguard across Fleming’s table, destroying the intricately laid out dinner, and when Fleming stares at him in fury and asks him what he wants, Stallone’s Axel stares right back and says, “You.” And then walks out.
For a quick screenwriting lesson, I want to highlight a scene early in the script. In it, Axel and his brother, Michael, head to the bar. At the bar, they have a really (and I mean REALLY) long dialogue scene. It’s mostly boring stuff. They talk about the past. They talk about feelings. As I was reading it, I was thinking, “Why would Stallone write such a boring long dialogue scene?”
And then, right after that scene, when they go home, is when Michael gets tortured and killed. I realized, in that moment, is that’s the ONLY TIME IN SCREENWRITING you can write a boring five-page dialogue scene where characters talk about the past, and feelngs, and people they know. Is when you’re going to SLAM INTO US WITH A GIANT MOMENT RIGHT AFTERWARDS. If you try to write one of these scenes within the normal flow of your script, fuggetaboutit. You’ll lose the reader.
Another little tip from this script, which was included in both this version and Murphy’s version, was the Beverly Hills cops openly following Axel around. In storytelling, you’re always looking to flip the script, to do traditional things non-traditionally. That’s when moments stand out.
When people follow other people in action and crime movies, they do it secretly. The whole point of following is that they don’t want to get caught. But Axel comes straight up to these guys as they begin following him and says, “I can just tell you where I’m headed and you can meet me there.” Both sides knowing that they’re “secretly” following him added a fun little dimension to that relationship and they pulled that off by taking a known trope and playing around with it.
I have to say that while this script doesn’t work as well as the comedy version, it’s still solid. The structure is there. And while we don’t laugh as much, we’re more emotionally invested because of the slaughtering of his brother. I really wanted to see Fleming go down.
You can check out the script for yourself here: Stallone’s Version of Beverly Hills Cop
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[xx] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: After reading Stallone’s BHC, I kind of want to bring back these old-school longer character descriptions. I know Paul Fleming better from just this intro than any character I’ve read in a script over the last month.
