That in turn led to The Jerk, the movie that made him famous. He was promoting The Jerk when something strange happened - something which might have led him off down a whole new career-path. He was in London and Stanley Kubrick called, wanting him to read a book called Dream Rhapsody (which, 17 years later, would become Eyes Wide Shut). Martin read it but Kubrick never called back.

“Eyes Wide Shut was meant to have starred Steve Martin and Nicole Kidman,” he jokes. “Of course, she was four at the time, so it would have been a very different movie.”

Bowfinger took slightly less long to come to fruition - a mere 15 years instead of 17 - because Martin was initially not quite sure where to go with it. He had a story about a producer who manages to shoot a movie with a major star without the star knowing he is being filmed. And he had another one about a producer with only a few months to live who decides to throw a big Hollywood party and then blow up his house, taking Hollywood’s finest with him (that one ended at the Oscars with only, like, 18 people in the auditorium). For a while, he tried to put the two together. Then he realised that the ending of the second film was too dark for the first. Thus Bowfinger was born.

Jiff Ramsey catches sight of heaven in the “Awesome!” scene.

For a while, Martin agonised over whether to send the script to Grazer: the producer was a friend and he might be putting him on the spot. On the other hand, what would happen if he offered it to someone else and that someone else really liked it but Grazer had wanted it after all and had never been offered it? In the end, he sent it to Grazer.

Grazer loved it, but Martin was still not sure. “I said, ‘Well, there’s a few ways to do this movie: low-budget, high-budget or normal-budget’. He thought about it for a couple of days and said he wanted to do it high-budget!”

That was because, at the time, Grazer wanted to do another movie with Eddie Murphy after the runaway success of The Nutty Professor. Bowfinger looked like it was it: Martin plus Murphy seemed irresistible. “The fusion of those two guys is quite amazing,” says the producer. “I mean, how could you not want to bring these two comedic icons together? There is an explosive chemistry there.”

Bobby Bowfinger reckons Chubby Rain - a screenplay written by his accountant and part-time receptionist Afrim (Adam Alexi-Malle) - is his last chance to make it in Hollywood, but he is smart enough to know that Ramsey or any other A-list actor is going to pass on it. Hell, B and even C list actors might have difficulty with it.