For this movie, I talked to Cosby a lot, who actually owned the rights to it for a while. He and Francis Ford Coppola. Warren Beatty actually wrote Heaven Can Wait for Muhammad Ali, and he told me, when I was already in pre-production, it's a better movie for a black guy, point blank. And I talked to Cosby because you gotta get prepared. On movies, it's arguments and fights and everybody's got an opinion.
Studios are huge, they waste so much money, on so many people doing so little.
There are six execs on one movie, none of 'em can write, but they all got notes. You have to fight through all of them, and not get beaten up and have this homogenized product. Sounds like fun. One of the reasons the movie turned out good is because of one savvy thing I did do, which was to have me and Lance, Louie, and Ali write it for free. We didn't make the deal until we had written the script.