Barry Blaustein Matt Carr/Getty Images Barry Blaustein, the former Saturday Night Live writer whose decades-long collaboration with Eddie Murphy included Buckwheat, Gumby and Mr. Robinson sketches and the Coming to America and Nutty Professor films, has died. He was 72.
Blaustein’s death was announced by Chapman University’s Dodge College of Film and Media Arts, where he was a longtime professor. After a rigorous battle with Parkinson’s disease — he was diagnosed in mid-2016 — he was told in April that he had stage four pancreatic cancer.
“It was one of the great pleasures of my life to know Barry,” former THR editor and writer Stephen Galloway, now dean of Dodge College, said in a statement. “He faced his declining health with a level of stoicism I’ve never seen and kept his warmth and humor throughout. Even when he could no longer drive, he kept on teaching. It’s a sign of how beloved he was that a group of faculty created a shuttle service to take him back and forth to Chapman. He’s irreplaceable. We’ll miss him enormously.”
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In what he called “the favorite thing he had ever done,” Blaustein wrote, directed, produced and narrated the 1999 documentary Beyond the Mat, a look inside the Vince McMahon-led World Wrestling Federation and another circuit, Extreme Championship Wrestling. It was one of the 12 finalists for the Oscar for best documentary.
He also helmed the features The Ringer (2005), featuring Johnny Knoxville, Brian Cox and Katherine Heigl in a comedy revolving around the Special Olympics, and Peep World (2010), a dysfunctional family dramedy starring Michael C. Hall, Sarah Silverman, Rainn Wilson and Ben Schwartz.
Blaustein, who grew up on Long Island, and David Sheffield, who was raised in Biloxi, Mississippi, were hired for SNL before its sixth season kicked off in 1980, and Murphy was new to the show as well. (This was the year producer Jean Doumanian took over for Lorne Michaels, but she lasted just 13 episodes before being fired.)
Blaustein and Sheffield became writing partners, and as they were promoted to head writers and then to supervising producers before they left SNL after three seasons in 1983, they clicked with Murphy and wrote exclusively for him, contributing to some of the most memorable work of his career.
With their help, Murphy hilariously riffed on an iconic cartoon character (“I’m Gumby, dammit!”), a popular Little Rascals actor (Buckwheat, who they would wind up assassinating) and a legendary kids show host (Fred Rogers from Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood).
“Mr. Rogers actually came up to the offices one day,” Blaustein told NPR’s Terry Gross in a 2000 interview. “He basically said, ‘You’ve had your fun, now stop doing the sketches.’ We were tired of doing them anyway.” So Mr. Robinson, he of the inner city, was retired.
The pair also penned bits that had Murphy playing James Brown (in a Celebrity Hot Tub), Stevie Wonder, Jesse Jackson and the pitchman Velvet Jones.
When Murphy had an idea for the film that would become Coming to America (1988), he asked Blaustein and Sheffield to write the script, and the John Landis-directed, R-rated movie finished No. 3 at the worldwide box office that year.
The pair then wrote on the Murphy starrers Boomerang (1992), the 1996 remake of The Nutty Professor and Nutty Professor II: The Klumps (2000) before reuniting one more time on Coming 2 America (2021).
Born on Long Island on Sept. 10, 1954, Barry Wayne Blaustein grew up in Westbury, New York. Murphy, meanwhile, was from nearby Roosevelt, and he told Blaustein he used to come to his town and steal bicycles. “I had my bike stolen as a kid,” he said, “so I always accused him of having my bike.”
Blaustein graduated from W.T. Clarke High School in 1972 and NYU and after a brief stay in Los Angeles landed a writing job in 1979 on The Mike Douglas Show, a syndicated daytime program he used to watch with his grandmother.
When Murphy began on SNL in 1980, he was a lower-tier “featured” castmember, “like the rookies on the bench who never get into the game,” as Blaustein put it in a 2023 interview. “The [main] cast wasn’t setting the world on fire, so [he and Sheffield] felt, ‘Why not try writing for this guy?’ And man, the minute he stepped on camera, it was like, ‘Whoa, he’s got it.’”
For their first movie, Blaustein and Sheffield wrote Police Academy 2: Their First Assignment (1985) before hitting it big with Coming to America.
A year later, they (and former SNL producer Bob Tischler) wrote a pilot for a Murphy-produced CBS series called What’s Alan Watching? that the critics loved, but it didn’t get picked up.
Blaustein and Sheffield also wrote on the ill-advised 2005 feature remake of The Honeymooners, starring Cedric the Entertainer and Mike Epps, and returned to SNL some 36 years after they left to write for Murphy when he hosted in 2019 for the show’s most-watched episode since 2008.
They never considered a film sequel to Coming to America until they exhausted their efforts to bring it to the stage. By then, Blaustein had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s.
He said he didn’t tell Paramount about his illness “because I didn’t think they would hire me if they knew,” he said in an interview for the Parkinson’s Foundation. “Plus, I’m past an age when they hire [writers]. I finally told Eddie about it, and he was very supportive.”
He added: “You’ve got to be realistic, but you’ve got to stay upbeat because you can’t let this disease defeat you. It wants you to stay home, it wants you to lie down, to go into your shell. That’s not a way to live a life. You’ve got to fight it.”
Blaustein was always a big pro wrestling fan but embarrassed to let people know it — until his then-wife threw him a surprise 40th birthday party and got legendary grappler Dusty Rhodes to attend. He decided to embark on a documentary.
“I knew the behind-the-scenes life was interesting, but how does it affect their families?” he said on a 2021 episode of The Gary and Kenny Show podcast. “How does pretending to be a superhero for 15 minutes a day, when you are in control of everything … what happens the rest of the day?”
Blaustein spent two years getting funding and approval, then took another year traveling around the country with WWE wrestlers — but without cameras to earn their trust. His Imagine Entertainment doc winds up focusing on three wrestlers at different stages of their careers: Mick Foley, aka “Mankind,” Terry Funk and Jake “The Snake” Roberts. (He would give Funk a role in The Ringer.)
McMahon was not happy with the film and threatened to sue to stop it from ever being seen.
Blaustein also directed the 2009 documentary Guys N’ Divas: Battle of the Highschool Musicals and over two summers helped create a Russian TV comedy called Fizruk, or Gym Teacher.
Survivors include his wife, Debra, whom he married in 2021; his children, Corey and Kasey; and his granddaughter, Daisy.
Blaustein taught screenwriting as a full-time professor at Chapman University since 2012. A memorial service will be held at the school, with details to be announced.
“There was a student [in his class] who was struggling with her script, and I knew she had talent,” Blaustein said in 2015. “The same day they announced the filming of Coming 2 America, that student handed in a version of her script where she finally got it. I was more excited about that than I was about Coming 2 America.
“I find teaching students really inspiring, and I hope to make them better writers, because I know they make me a better writer.”
Scott Feinberg contributed to this report.
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