New ‘Beverly Hills Cop’ burnishes Detroit ties

DETROIT — The first voice you hear in the new “Beverly Hills Cop” film is that of Bushman, the longtime WJLB-FM (97.9) host, who is on the radio of a car being driven through Detroit by Eddie Murphy’s Axel Foley.

WJLB is well-represented on screen — Foley sports a yellow WJLB T-shirt for a good chunk of the film’s runtime — and the Motor City’s presence is felt throughout “Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F,” the fourth film in the “Beverly Hills Cop” franchise, which arrived on Netflix Wednesday.

To wit: The movie’s opening sequence takes place at a Detroit Red Wings game inside Little Caesars Arena, there are shots of Detroit landmarks from the Renaissance Center to the Joe Louis fist sculpture to Lafayette and American Coney Islands, and Foley continually makes wisecracks about the city, which his character has long called home.

Even though he’s only a fictional character, Foley is one of Detroit’s favorite sons — as important to the city’s lineage on screen as his fellow police officer “Robocop,” or Eminem’s “8 Mile” character, B-Rabbit — and “Axel F” puts him back on screen for the first time in 30 years.

The original “Beverly Hills Cop” was a smash hit when it opened in theaters in December 1984. It topped the box office for 14 nonconsecutive weeks, grossing $234 million — that’s roughly $700 million in today’s dollars — and almost single-handedly ushering in the action-comedy genre. It also made Eddie Murphy a box office superstar, and his quick-witted Detroit cop would return for two sequels, in 1987 and 1994.

“Beverly Hills Cop” has a long tail in Detroit: The original film opens with a chase scene through the city, Foley’s Detroit Lions varsity jacket has become iconic in its own right, and the film features former Detroit Police Department Cmdr. Gil Hill as one of Foley’s superiors. (Hill died in 2016 at age 84.)

Bushman, who also played a role in “8 Mile,” was taken aback when he was asked to participate in the new movie.

“My reaction was, oh my God, is this real?” says Bushman, who gets a full name credit in the film, as Jonathan “Bushman” Dunnings. “I was excited to be a part of something that’s historic, in my opinion.”

Bushman knew about Detroit from “Beverly Hills Cop” before he arrived in town from North Carolina in 1995, but he didn’t know Mumford High School was real until he got to the city. (Foley famously sports a Mumford High sweatshirt in the original 1984 film.)

“I always loved the original movie, and I always loved the Axel Foley character,” says Bushman, who recorded his audio for the film about six weeks ago at Ozone Music & Sound in Southfield. “I always thought he was really cool.”

Bushman did wonder about the yellow WJLB T-shirt Foley wears in the film, saying in his 29 years at the station, there has never been, to his knowledge, a yellow T-shirt manufactured featuring the station’s logo.

That’s because the T-shirt was made by costume designer Nancy Steiner, who also created the faux-vintage baby blue WLLZ-FM (98.7) shirt that Foley wears in the film. (It’s high time for vintage Detroit shirts in pop culture; on the new season of Amazon Prime Video’s “The Boys,” a character wears an old-school Palace of Auburn Hills T-shirt.)

Steiner, whose credits include “Promising Young Woman,” “Lost in Translation” and TV’s “Twin Peaks: The Return,” worked with Grace LaVier, a shopper on the film who is from Detroit, who helped advise on Detroit brands and businesses with which Foley’s character would identify. (In the film, Foley also wears a red T-shirt from Jolly Bar, a former bar on East Davison in Detroit.)

While the film chiefly takes place in Los Angeles, Steiner says she used the T-shirts “to bring that connection to Detroit.” And they also give Foley a sort of timeless cool.

“For me, I wanted to keep Axel looking youthful, but only to a point. You don’t want to make him look silly,” she says. “He’s not a fussy dresser. He’s somebody who’s comfortable in his own skin. He can wear whatever he feels comfortable in. And he’s an iconic figure, so I didn’t want to stray too far from how we’ve seen him before.”

Foley still proudly supports his Lions; he wears a blue vintage Lions sweatshirt that Steiner was able to source online, as well as an updated version of his classic Detroit Lions varsity jacket.

There was talk of Foley wearing a reproduction of the original jacket, “but we decided that it shouldn’t be that old one, because that means he’s had it for 40 years, and it would have been really beat up,” Steiner says. The new jacket, which “does not exist in the world” and was custom-made for Murphy, updates Foley’s style. “I wanted him to look a little more fresh and modern,” she says.

Murphy, 63, did have input on his character’s wardrobe, Steiner says, and he did veto at least one look he was presented with, a vintage-looking T-shirt for a radio station he reasoned his character would not listen to. But for the most part, “we were quite lucky,” she says. “He liked most of the things we brought him, so it wasn’t a big struggle.”

Steiner says there were discussions about Foley bringing back the Mumford T-shirt from the first film, but she decided against it.

“I went round and round, and I was like, does he really need to wear the same thing that he wore 40 years ago? I just didn’t think it was necessary,” she says. “I thought, it’s Axel, people know who he is, we don’t need to bring those same things back. We need to put him in the present, we need to make him a little more modern. So for me, that felt correct.”

There are other ways the film throws back to the past. The cast reunites Murphy with his “Beverly Hills Cop” co-stars Reiser, Judge Reinhold, John Ashton and Bronson Pinchot. Franchise newbies include Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Kevin Bacon, Taylour Paige and Luis Guzman.

And the soundtrack to “Axel F” is full of throwback songs, including Glenn Frey’s “The Heat is On,” the Pointer Sisters’ “Neutron Dance,” Bob Seger’s “Shakedown” (from “Beverly Hills Cop II”) and composer Harold Faltermeyer’s instantly recognizable “Axel F” score.

Though he’s seen driving through the city and mixing it up inside the Detroit Red Wings locker room, Murphy was never in Detroit for the shoot, and the scene in the Wings’ locker room is a set. Chalk it up to movie magic. (Local filming took place in Detroit for six days in November and December 2022, and cameras were rolling when the Red Wings faced the Las Vegas Golden Knights at Little Caesars Arena on Dec. 3, 2022, a game the Wings lost, 4-1.)

Though the majority of the action takes place in L.A., one of Steiner’s goals was to make sure Detroit’s presence is felt in the movie.

“That’s where (Foley) lives, that’s where he’s from, and I really wanted to put that in the film,” she says. “I wanted Detroit people to have a connection to the film.”