Furious Cool: Richard Pryor and the World That Made Him

by David Henry

  —————

  What’s so striking about these movies—however uneven or ill-conceived—is that directors and producers cast Richard Pryor because of his brilliance as an actor, because of what he could actually do. They allowed him to bring his rage, his mischief—his badass self—and they gave him room to occupy his characters with pathos and human foible. That’s why they hired him. As Pauline Kael wrote, “Pryor shouldn’t be cast at all—he should be realized. He has desperate, mad characters coming out of his pores, and we want to see how far he can go with them.”

  This was the artistic capital he would trade on a few years later when his name had become a box-office draw and studios began throwing millions at him. At those rates, the stakes were too high. He had to tone it down. Instead of going inside and embodying his characters, he had to stand outside where he could keep an eye on them.

  “The movies that they had him ultimately do were very forgettable,” says Franklyn Ajaye. “Hollywood always takes the bite out of any comedian. If you’re a comedian they just bring you on to do something silly. Woody Allen did the best because he did his own thing. Richard was a phenomenal comedian, but they softened the edges when they brought him the money for the movies. But, look, I don’t know how anyone can turn down three, four million dollars.”

  If the studios and networks weren’t willing to risk his mayhem, it was only because they didn’t need to. His name—the Richard Pryor brand—was by that time worth more than any performance, worth more than they were paying him. All he had to do was show up and hit his mark. By then, there was no going back.

  “LET IT STAY HEAVY IF NOT HARD”

  Mel Brooks initially turned down the chance to do Blazing Saddles when his agent David Begelman showed him the screen treatment—then titled “Tex X”—written by fellow Begelman client Andrew Bergman. Brooks was only interested in developing projects of his own. But he was at a career low. No acting jobs were coming his way, he couldn’t get his own projects off the ground, and Warner Bros. would pay him well to shape the treatment into a script that he would then direct. “I figured my career was finished anyway,” he said.

  To help him with the script, he hired Bergman and the team of Norman Steinberg and Alan Uger, writers he had worked with before. The script would also need the contributions of an authentic black voice. After Dick Gregory turned him down, he went to Richard Pryor.

  Richard, by all accounts, threw himself into the project with abandon, spinning out gags and situations like an inspired Rumplestiltskin—even offering up bits from Black Stranger, a cowboy screenplay he’d written while in Berkeley. What’s most impressive, he showed up every day and on time.

  “I decided this would be a surrealist epic,” Brooks told Kenneth Tynan in a New Yorker profile. “It was time to take two eyes, the way Picasso had done it, and put them on one side of the nose, because the official movie portrait of the West was simply a lie. For nine months we worked together like maniacs. We went all the way—especially Richard Pryor, who was very brave and very far out and very catalytic. . . . They wrote berserk, heartfelt stuff about white corruption and racism and Bible-thumping bigotry. We used dirty language on the screen for the first time, and to me the whole thing was like a big psychoanalytic session.”

  Impressed by what he’d seen from Richard during their months of writing the screenplay together—the way Richard would jump up and act scenes out—Brooks became convinced that he would be outrageous in the title role of “Black Bart,” as the script was then called. Brooks had been delightfully surprised when the studio accepted their profane, illogical, irreverent, madcap script, requesting only a few minimal changes to rein in the running time. So he was perhaps more stunned than he might have been when Warner Bros. flatly refused to consider Richard for the part. He lacked acting experience, they said. What they didn’t expressly say was that he had a reputation for being erratic and uncontrollable and was known to have drug problems. There was no telling what he might do.

  Richard was dumbstruck when he got the news from his friend Cleavon Little that he’d signed on for the role. That Richard would later share a Writers Guild of America award for Best Comedy Written Directly for the Screen did little to ease the pain. His name was inadvertently left off the early prints of the film.

  “Richard wrote it and Mel Brooks chased him out,” director Michael Shultz said at the time. “Mel Brooks was trying to get total credit for the picture. . . . To be outmaneuvered and ripped off at that early stage in his career is something that’s a little hard for him to get over. I’d feel the same way.”

  Knowing that Richard had been slated for the role makes watching the movie a bit of a disappointment, says film scholar James Monaco. “You keep thinking what Pryor could have done. He is exactly what’s missing from Blazing Saddles. He might have injected the necessary evil gleam. Little was too rational and simply too attractive to energize the film.” Had he played the role, Pauline Kael wrote, Richard would have made the sheriff “crazy—threatening and funny both.”

  Besides all that, it would have teamed Richard with Gene Wilder two years before Silver Streak.

  Cleavon Little did a fine job, Mooney allows. “He’s okay, but he’s not a genius. On the other hand, can you picture Blazing Saddles with Richard Pryor in the lead? Ridiculous, right?”

  Take a look at the televised performance of Richard playing both a man and a woman going through a breakup in his routine “When Your Woman Leaves You” or embodying all participants in a bar fight in “Nigger with a Seizure,” and then imagine what he could’ve done with the scene in Blazing Saddles where Bart holds off a mob of angry townspeople by putting a gun to his own head and taking himself hostage, barking them back with, “Hold it! Next man makes a move, the nigger gets it.” The crowd recoils with a collective gasp. The town doctor says, “Listen to him men, he’s just crazy enough to do it.” Bart then embodies both hostage and hostage-taker simultaneously.

  AS HOSTAGE-TAKER: Drop it or I swear I’ll blow this nigger’s head all over this town!

  AS HOSTAGE: (terrified “darkie” voice) Oh, lordy, lord! He’s desperate! Do what he say, do what he say!

  It broke Richard’s heart that he never got to play it. It was his scene.

  Richard was further devastated to learn that the studio wanted to cut his cowboys-farting-around-the-campfire scene and that Brooks had agreed to it.

  Yes, Brooks agreed to cut the fart scene—and the scene where the horse gets punched in the face and all derogatory references to black people—but he never had the slightest intention of following through. “It’s what I always tell young filmmakers,” he said. “Say yes, yes, yes to every damn fool thing the producers ask, then ignore it all. No one ever notices.”

  —————

  After the heartbreak of Blazing Saddles, Richard fell into a dark and bitter depression. Mooney urged, pestered, and cajoled him to get back up on his feet. Stand-up was the only forum in Hollywood where a black man could speak his mind without the town “going all Frankenstein on his ass.” Frankenstein’s monster was their in-joke metaphor for Hollywood:

  Just like Dr. Frankenstein, producers want to stitch together body parts and build their own stars, their own monsters. . . . I always thought of Frankenstein’s monster as a black man. All the white people are always chasing him. “Get him! Get him!” . . . The villagers are terrified of him, just like crackers are terrified of the black man. And when they catch him, he whups villager ass, just like a black man. He throws motherfuckers all over the place.

  But Richard had to be a movie star. Anything less would be failure in his eyes.

  Contemplating the spectacle of Richard Pryor—a solo performer without peer—setting his true gifts aside to perform in such arid fare as Adiós Amigo, incomprehensible camp like The Phynx,* and nearly everything he did after 1979 is even more mind numbing than that of Elvis Presley abandoning his country-stewed brew of roots, blues, and gospel rhythms to star in insipid teen mov
ies with barely functioning story lines held together with bubble-gum pop confections and rear-projection backdrops. (On the flip side, consider that Shakespeare, according to a theory put forth by professor Felix Schelling, wanted most of all to be a poet, only resigning himself to writing crowd-pleasing plays because he couldn’t make a living from his verses.)

  And then in February, while Richard grieved through the theatrical release of Blazing Saddles and the attendant reviews praising Cleavon Little, he got a call from Forest Hamilton at Stax West. Buoyed by the success of Wattstax, and perhaps egged on by Motown’s Lady Sings the Blues—if Berry Gordy could make Oscar-caliber movies, then Stax owner Al Bell figured he could, too—Stax produced Darktown Strutter’s Ball, directed by William Witney and starring Trina Parks, under the Stax-Netter Films banner (a partnership with former MGM vice president Doug Netter, despite Netter’s having threatened Stax with a lawsuit over the inclusion in Wattstax of Isaac Hayes’s performance of the MGM-controlled “Theme from Shaft”). Darktown Strutters (as it was eventually released, then reissued in the 1980s as Get Down and Boogie!) turned out to be not at all what Stax’s vice president of advertising and publicity Larry Shaw had envisioned when he read the script.

  As the head of Stax West in Los Angeles, Forest Hamilton was tasked with monitoring the progress of the film. He called Shaw up and said, “This film is crazy. It ain’t going nowhere we thought it was going.”

  “It was going into very white folks comedy,” Shaw concurs. “Slapstick, pies in the face, weird Batman sounds—horrible. We couldn’t stand it.”

  Everyone agreed that Richard had elevated Wattstax, taking it from being a mere document of a historic event and turning it into a genuine movie. Shaw wondered if maybe Richard could work the same magic on Darktown Strutter’s Ball. Hamilton arranged a special screening for him. Shaw was there, watching from the back of the projection room and, at some point, noticed that he didn’t see Richard’s head anymore. He found him on the floor, crouched down below seat-level, crawling toward the door. He said, “Please, Shaw. I know I owe you a few favors, but don’t ask me to do this.”

  Fair enough, Shaw said. How about doing a record instead?

  Stax’s new comedy label Partee Records had released only a handful of LPs, mostly minor efforts by major comics such as Timmie Rogers, Moms Mabley (I Like ’Em Young), and the now highly collectable At Last . . . Bill Cosby Really Sings.

  Richard gave them That Nigger’s Crazy, recorded live at Don Cornelius’s Soul Train studio in San Francisco with all new material he’d been developing at the Store.

  My uncle said, “Boy, don’t you ever kiss no pussy. I mean that. Whatever you do in life, don’t kiss no pussy.”

  I couldn’t wait to kiss a pussy. He’d been wrong about everything else. Woman had to beat me off. “That’s enough, that’s enough! Please. Two days . . .”

  “You crazy!” some guy in the audience yells.

  “Huh?”

  “YOU CRAZY!”

  “Yeah!” Richard agrees. Absolute glee in his voice.

  —————

  That Nigger’s Crazy was a phenomenon, marking the emergence of Richard in full possession of his genius, the Richard Pryor we know today. Greg Tate, looking back on the LP in an obituary piece for the Village Voice, wrote:

  You have to go to Chekhov or Edward P. Jones to find small lives rendered with as much epic detail and epiphanal force as Pryor unveils on “Wino & Junkie,” a hellacious and ruthlessly hilarious vision of life beneath the underdog that erects a totem to Black male oblivion out of the parsed lines his Boswell wino relates about his junkie Johnson.

  James Alan McPherson wrote that Richard “enters into his people and allows whatever is comic in them, whatever is human, to evolve out of what they say and how they look into a total scene. It is part of Richard Pryor’s genius that, through the selective use of facial gestures, emphases in speech and movements, he can create a scene that is comic and at the same time recognizable as profoundly human.”

  Richard renders his downtrodden characters in purely human terms, unsullied by any trace of sentimentality. “These portraits were wonderfully specific,” writes Richard Zoglin, “yet evocative of a whole community—unmistakably black yet too recognizable to be mere instruments of a racial agenda. . . . stand-up comedy had never seen anything like it.”

  JUNKIE: Pops . . . nigger, listen to me!

  WINO: Don’t you hit me no more, boy. I’ll dust your junkie ass off. You know I will, nigger. You rile me, boy. I’m ashamed to see you like this.

  JUNKIE: Ashamed to see me? What about this shit out here? Niggers just fuckin’ with me, man . . .

  (trails off, long silence)

  Was I finished?

  The self-validating logic of Richard’s junkie at times recalls Shakespeare’s Sir John Falstaff.

  JUNKIE: I went to the unemployment bureau, baby. Bitch sittin’ behind the desk—ugly motherfucker come tellin’ me talkin’ ’bout, “You have a criminal record.” I say, “I know that, bitch! I’m a criminal!”

  (In Henry IV, Part 1, when Prince Hal chides Falstaff as a rogue and a stealer of purses, the corpulent and debaucherous knight reasonably answers, “Why, Hal, ’tis my vocation, Hal; ’tis no sin for a man to labor in his vocation.”)

  His junkie goes from comedy to pathos with whiplash-inducing abruptness.

  JUNKIE: My father say he don’t want to see me in the vicinity. Just ’cause I stole his television. That’s the politics, baby. I’m sick, pops. Wonder can you help me? My mind’s thinking about shit I don’t want to think about. I can’t stop the motherfucker, baby. Movin’ too fast for the kid. Tell me some of that ol’ lies of yours, make me stop thinkin’ about the truth.

  Richard Lewis remembers Richard workshopping these routines at the Comedy Store. “He was absolutely fearless. He would say anything.” And reveal anything.

  You ever be with a woman you wanted to be with for a long time, man, and you finally get with her and you come in about four seconds? And you be panicked, jack, trying to be cool. “Oh, God! Lord don’t let her know . . . just let it stay heavy if not hard.” (as woman) “You’re not moving as much as you were . . .”

  “Uh, I’m just resting a little. I want you to enjoy this.”

  Richard’s characters were no less “real” when confronting vampires or space aliens. As metaphors, they really were not that much of a stretch.

  Nothing can scare a nigger, not after four hundred years of this shit. A Martian wouldn’t have a chance. A nigger would warn a Martian. (as old man, foreshadowing Mudbone) “You better get your ass away from around here. You done landed on Mr. Gilmore’s property.”

  If he land in New York, a nigger would take his shit from him. “You got to give up the flyin’ saucer, baby. Cause I’m a macaroni.” Nigger’d be cruising, “Oh, yeah, this sweet! How much is petrol? Eighty-two million a gallon? Fuck this machine!”

  Al Bell and Forest Hamilton knew that with Richard’s new recording they had a crossover hit on their hands, but Stax’s distributor CBS recoiled at the very idea of taking That Nigger’s Crazy, based on nothing more than the title. And once they listened to it, John Smith says, “They were absolutely certain. They didn’t want anything to do with it.”

  Partee released the LP through independent distributors in April 1974. Richard, at that time, was out on the road. He got his first inkling of how huge the record was when people in the audience started calling out requests, speaking lines along with him, or even beating him to the punch.

  Girls weren’t givin’ up no pussy in the fifties. It was very seldom you got any parts of pussy. You’d be tongue-kissing and shit, your dick get harder than times in ’29. Nuts get all up in your stomach . . . You ever have that? You’d be like, “Ooooh, you gotta give me some now.”

  (as girl): “I’m not giving anything, I’m on my period.”

  “You on your period again?”

  (now everybody, in unison . . .)

&nbs
p; “You gonna bleed to death, bitch.”

  “It was quite a surprise,” Richard said. “Niggers was in the audience doing my shit. And you better not change nothing, cause they be like, ‘Wait, motherfucker, you didn’t say that on the album. Don’t bring us no original shit. Bring the shit on the record, motherfucker!’ ”

  White folks do things a lot different than niggers do. They eat quiet and shit. You be over there they be, “Pass the potatoes. Thank you, darling. Can I have a bit of that sauce? How are the kids coming along with their studies? Think we’ll be having sexual intercourse this evening? We’re not? Well what the heck.”

  The album quickly went gold and took that year’s Grammy Award for Best Comedy Album, despite the then-common record store practice of keeping X-rated or potentially inflammatory titles under the counter. This presented an additional hurdle to Bell’s hoped-for hip young white record buyers faced with the prickly—and quite possibly dangerous—dilemma of having to ask for the record by name. The break-through sales came too late for Stax. Within just a few months of its release, the album had sold out, and there were no more copies to be had. Facing foreclosure from Union Planters National Bank, trouble with the IRS, and an injunction from CBS, Stax simply couldn’t find a pressing plant willing to fill its orders. Reluctantly, on September 23, 1974, the company returned the master tapes to Richard in lieu of two hundred thousand dollars in royalties it had no hope of paying him. Richard turned around and licensed it to Warner Bros.—but not before he had, in frustration, shot up his framed gold record with his .357 Magnum. It was, for Richard, the first of at least a half-dozen inanimate objects he would take down with that gun.

  —————

  Back in 1970, finding himself in dire financial straits, Richard had signed an unvetted deal with Louis Drozen’s Laff Records for “a substantial four-figure advance.” From that time on, Laff seemingly recorded every club date Richard played, and they kept the tape rolling. In crafting its contract with Richard in 1974, Warner Bros. allowed Drozen to retain the rights to the trove of tapes he had stored away in Laff’s vaults. It turned out to be massive.