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David Sheffield is an American comedy writer who worked on Saturday Night Live and wrote several movies, including Coming to America and The Nutty Professor. Learn more about his biography, writing credits, and external links on Wikipedia.
- Where Did You Grow Up and Go to School?
- When Did You First Discover Your Interest in Working in Film?
- When Did You Realize You Could Do It from Mississippi?
- What Type of Training Have You Had and Where?
- How Did You Transition from Being A Reporter/Ad Man to Comedy?
- What Was Your First Job in The Industry? Was There Anything Before “Snl”?
- What Are Your Current and Recent Projects?
- Was It Like That For “Coming to America?”
- Who Has Been An Influence on Your Career and Why?
- Has Being from Mississippi Helped You Stand Out in Any Way?
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I claim Biloxi as my hometown, although we didn’t move there until I was about 13. I’m a Mississippian, but we moved all over. My father was a schoolteacher. And you think of schoolteachers as being people who don’t travel or move a lot. But he was nomadic by nature. And we moved all over hell. I lived in Tupelo twice, and a town called Belden, Mis...
Well, I’ll tell you the truth. I wanted to write for movies and television when I was in high school, and I said as much. I was elected “Boy of the Month” by the Biloxi High School Hi-Tide newspaper, and it said, “David wants to write television shows and movies.” So, I think my path was set when I was very young.
I was hired by “Saturday Night Live” as a staff writer in 1980. And then I stayed there for three years and became head writer and the second year and supervising producer of the show the third year. And then from there I met Eddie Murphy and my partner, Barry W. Blaustein, and we wrote most of Eddie Murphy’s material on the show. And then when I m...
Screenwriting courses were not available when I was in school. But I wrote my first play while I was a student at USM. I worked my way through school as a reporter for WDAM TV in Hattiesburg. And then I worked in advertising, and then I got the break in 1980 to write for “Saturday Night Live.”
Well, I always broke the news with a funny slant! But I’ve left out something important, which is that my brother, Buddy Sheffield, was also an accomplished comedy writer, the head writer for “In Living Color.” And he had his own show on Nickelodeon called “Roundhouse”that he created. Buddy and I wrote children’s plays. We had a theater company cal...
No, I just I did local commercials, and my biggest client at the time, when I was working for a little ad agency in Biloxi, was Yazoo Big Wheel Lawnmowers. (laughs) So, I did commercials for them, and industrial film, and political campaigns, and I wrote everything I could find to make a living. I wrote billboards, menus, political speeches, you na...
I’ve written a play which is being done around the state. When I was 19 and a freshman at Ole Miss, I took a job as the manager of a flophouse hotel called the Henry Hotel, just off the square in Oxford. And I’ve written a play, 50 years later, about all the characters that I met there. It’s called “The Heartbreak Henry.” And it was done on the coa...
No, that was a rare exception. We wrote that script in five weeks and started shooting the first draft. So we never had time to rewrite that one. We were on a hell bent for leather schedule. Eddie Murphy had a deal with Paramount for a movie, and that was it.
I was a fan of a screenwriter by the name of William Goldman. I’d say him more than anyone. I read and devoured his book “Adventures in the Screen Trade,” which is a kind of textbook for how to write screenplays and how to negotiate the treacherous waters of Hollywood. So, I think he was the writer who has influenced me most. He had an illustrious ...
Well, I’m unusual in that there aren’t that many screenwriters from the Deep South. From my experience, most of them came from New York, Philadelphia, Los Angeles.
Learn about David Sheffield, a Mississippi native who wrote for SNL and Eddie Murphy movies. He also created a play based on his experience as a hotel manager in Oxford.
David Sheffield is known as an Screenplay, Actor, Writer, Story, Characters, and Co-Producer. Some of his work includes Coming to America, The Nutty Professor, Coming 2 America, Police Academy 2: Their First Assignment, Nutty Professor II: The Klumps, Police Academy 3: Back in Training, Boomerang, and The Honeymooners.
The screenwriters of the original and sequel to Coming To America share their creative process and challenges. Learn how they developed the story, characters, jokes and music for the royal comedy.
Jun 20, 2018 · David Sheffield, one of the film's screenwriters, said Murphy, 57, came up with the concept, which he had scribbled out on eight to 10 pages of a yellow legal pad. A year before the film was released, Murphy had signed a five-picture deal with Paramount, estimated in the millions, but the studio had yet to settle on a summer film.
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David Sheffield is a writer and producer who has worked on films such as Coming to America, The Nutty Professor and Boomerang. He also wrote for Saturday Night Live and co-produced What's Alan Watching? and Boomerang.
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Jun 18, 2018 · Mississippi Public Broadcasting. Hollywood screenwriter and Mississippi native David Sheffield, who happens to be working on a sequel to the 1988 hit film “Coming to America,” is the featured guest on Conversations airing at 5:30 p.m. June 24 and 10 p.m. June 28 on MPB Television.
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