Trading Places

Trading Places is a 1983 American comedy film directed by John Landis and written by Timothy Harris and Herschel Weingrod. Starring Dan Aykroyd, Eddie Murphy, Ralph Bellamy, Don Ameche, Denholm Elliott, and Jamie Lee Curtis, the film tells the story of an upper-class commodities broker (Aykroyd) and a poor street hustler (Murphy) whose lives intersect over the Christmas and New Year holidays when they are unwittingly made the subjects of an elaborate bet to test how each man will perform when their life circumstances are swapped. Harris conceived the outline for Trading Places in the early 1980s after meeting two wealthy brothers who were engaged in an ongoing rivalry with each other. He and his writing partner Weingrod developed the idea as a project to star Richard Pr