101 Funniest Screenplays

Daniel Petrie, Jr. had advanced from the mailroom at ICM to become an agent, but it wasn’t until he was fired after five years that he returned to screenwriting. His first produced effort was a studio rewrite on Beverly Hills Cop, “which was then in development hell at Paramount,” he recalled for wordplay.com. One of the most successful comedies of all-time, Beverly Hills Cop gave the budding star Eddie Murphy the most indelible role of his career. Axel Foley, a Detroit cop, invades the 90210 to search for his best friend’s killer. “I saw Beverly Hills Cop more as a comedy just because I had been a starving writer living and working in Beverly Hills,” Petrie told Esquire magazine. “It seemed like a cop from a blue-collar area would be so struck with amusement about Beverly Hills and all the pretentiousness, that some great fish-out-of-water comedy could be mined from that.”