![]() ![]() “And then he wrote something up and he showed it to David Sheffield and myself. “I asked Eddie if he thought he could do anything with it,” he says. That guy, Blaustein figured, would be the perfect person to make fun of the ugly situation in Ohio. “We were just like, ‘Boy, that guy’s funny.’” “The joke was that he always went to the wrong theater in the multiplex,” Sheffield says. But one day, when Blaustein and Sheffield were hanging out with him at work, he began effortlessly riffing as a character named Raheem Abdul Mohammed, an aspiring cultural commentator and film critic. The late-night series’s overwhelmingly white writing staff barely seemed to know that the young black man existed. Kept to himself.”īack then, Eddie Murphy was all of 19 years old. He didn’t appear in anything to speak of. “He was not a member of the regular cast. “He was only a featured player,” Sheffield says. Fortunately, they had a colleague itching for screen time. He and his writing partner, David Sheffield, just needed someone they could pitch the idea to. “But it does not live up to the highest values in sports.”ĭesperate for material, Blaustein decided that this notoriously misguided attempt at integration would be the perfect thing to skewer in a sketch. “The directive indicates that Cleveland basketball teams may eventually be chosen by casting directors from The White Shadow,” New York Times columnist George Vecsey wrote, name-checking the television series about a racially mixed Los Angeles high school squad. Waldrip, who as part of a larger desegregation plan, had ordered the city’s mostly black high school basketball teams to diversify their rosters with more white players. The report focused on court-appointed administrator Donald R. In the fall of 1980, during the disastrous sixth season of Saturday Night Live, first-year writer Barry Blaustein’s father sent him a story out of Cleveland. It began with-of all things-a newspaper article. ![]()
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