Eddie Murphy in persons: right to left, Mama, brother Ernie, Sherman (aka The Nutty Professor), Papa Cletis and Granny. Far left, odd man out: Jamal Mixon as Ernie Jr.

GUESS WHO'S COMING TO DINNER

Like the rest of us, Peter Segal stood in line, bought his ticket and enjoyed Eddie Murphy’s remake of The Nutty Professor in a movie theatre. By then (the summer of ’96), Segal already had a couple of comedy hits under his belt as a director: the Leslie Nielsen spoof Naked Gun 33 1/3: The Final Insult (1994) and Tommy Boy, starring David Spade and the late Chris Farley, the following year. But he hadn’t done a big-budget holiday release starring Eddie Murphy.

Three years later, he has. Come October of last year, Segal found himself behind the camera for Murphy’s millennial return as the gentle, 400-pound science professor, Sherman Klump, for Nutty Professor II: The Klumps. As before, Murphy’s playing of Sherman brought with it such side dishes as the professor’s pappy, Cletis; his momma; his dirty-minded granny; and his little brother, Ernie. And then, of course, there is Sherman’s duplicitous, testosterone-driven alter ego, Buddy Love, the product of an experiment whose outcome should have been the betterment of mankind but which resulted instead in a smooth-talking egomaniac with the morals of an alleycat.

Like most of us, what Segal remembers from The Nutty Professor were the scenes with the Klump family. “One of the most memorable moments for me in the first movie was the family dinner-table scene,” he says. So, when producer Brian Grazer told him that the new movie would be mainly about the Klumps, he sat up and took notice.

“In the first film,” points out Murphy, “the Klump scenes were very static. But now they are really moving. It’s even more cool to watch.”

Although his alter ego’s egocentric schemes and rampant libido still provide the film with much of its plot, Nutty Professor II: The Klumps turns the focus from Sherman’s battle to suppress the Buddy in him to just what happens when a whole bunch of Klumps are let loose on an unsuspecting world.

“We’re really pushing the envelope with each of these characters, getting into their lives and seeing what they’re about,” declares Segal. “I think the audience is going to be blown away when they see the Klump family come to life.”

The big irony in all this is that the Klumps almost didn’t make it into Nutty I: the studio was initially sceptical about the idea of Murphy playing so many roles. Cost, it seems, was one of the factors: the transformation process - using the unparalleled skills of make-up maestro Rick Baker - took anything up to four hours, which meant that it was really only practical to shoot one character a day. So, in the end, Grazer put together a tape to show the studio.

“The Klump characters are very expensive to execute because the make-up process takes so much time,” he says, “and limitations are then imposed on the amount of work that can be done in one day. So, in the first movie we had to audition the Klumps for the studio to show just how funny and convincing these characters could be.”

But even Grazer was surprised by the results, which saw the Klump family at dinner emerge as the best-loved characters of the summer ’96 season. “Movies are entirely subjective,” the producer admits. “You just don’t know what will hit and be most liked. But when it became clear that the Klumps were the stars of the movie, the way to do a sequel was evident: make the family members three-dimensional characters, and develop a sub-plot for each of them.”