Furious Cool: Richard Pryor and the World That Made Him

by David Henry

  A few months later Richard asked for and received the unheard of sum of four million dollars for his role in Superman III—a million more than Christopher Reeve got for reprising the title role. The Superman franchise seemed exhausted and director Richard Lester was counting on Richard to carry the film, which he did. Again, once they had Richard, they weren’t sure what to do with him. The filmmakers never decided for certain whether they wanted it to be a Richard Pryor movie or a Superman movie with Richard Pryor in it. There are a few moments of inspired comedy, clearly put in for no other reason than to capitalize on Richard doing what he did best, as they had nothing to do with the story. The movie essentially had to stop and wait while they let Richard do his thing.

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  It did not escape Richard’s notice that the more he screwed up, the worse his movies were, the more money the studios threw at him. Billy Wilder made the droll observation in 1982 that studio executives looking for a hit movie “approach it very scientifically—computer projections, marketing research, audience profiles—and they always come up with the same answer: Get Richard Pryor.”

  Following the box-office bonanza of Live on the Sunset Strip, Columbia Pictures offered a five-year, forty-millon-dollar deal giving Richard full creative control over four films to be produced by his own Indigo Productions, presided over by his friend and former NFL star Jim Brown. Rather than make Indigo an exclusive showcase for Richard Pryor films, Brown wanted to diversify, using as his template Desilu Productions, a co-venture between husband and wife Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball. Desilu quickly moved beyond their own I Love Lucy series to produce a diverse slate of shows that came to include Star Trek, My Three Sons, Mission Impossible, The Andy Griffith Show, I Spy, and Hogan’s Heroes. That’s what Jim Brown wanted, for Indigo to be an umbrella for African American writers, actors, producers, and directors to realize their dreams. They had forty million dollars to spend on whatever they wanted to do. At the press conference announcing the company’s launch, Richard said no one was excluded. They wanted to make quality films. They were open to anything. The only film Indigo made before Richard unceremoniously relieved Brown of his duties was Richard Pryor: Here and Now.

  “Richard wasn’t a filmmaker,” Penelope Spheeris says, thinking back to their work together on Uncle Tom’s Fairy Tales. “Richard was a comedian and a brilliant one. And a good actor. But I don’t think filmmaking was a priority for him. And it’s hard to have anything else as your first priority when you have cocaine and Courvoisier in battle for number one.”

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  Although Live on the Sunset Strip had been a shaky, uncertain effort—three of four filmed performances spliced and patched together, actually—it ultimately delivered twenty riveting minutes of pure devastation. Richard Pryor: Here and Now, filmed at the Saenger Theatre in New Orleans in 1983, finds him off his stride and out of his depth, low on energy and retreating at times to old material. He never really takes off or gives the impression that he could. The junkie routine that ends the film affirms that this is indeed a man once possessed by genius.

  A young woman leaving the cinema at Briarwood Mall in Ann Arbor on the film’s opening weekend spoke for many when she said, “He was funnier when he was on drugs.”

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  It’s worth remembering that, for all he gave up, Richard did, in fact, make some good movies. He played Billie Holiday’s strung-out piano player, an auto assembly-line worker who robs his union and sells out his friends, champion race-car driver Wendell Scott, a petty thief who seizes an opportunity for adventure, a shipyard welder who teams up with an FBI agent to avenge his wife’s murder, a pimp’s enforcer, and a Vietnam vet who comes home to find what’s left of his life in shambles. Then he played an unemployed actor falsely—and utterly implausibly—convicted of a bank robbery in a comedy that started out promisingly enough, then promptly ran off the rails. That movie, though, made him a bona fide movie star. His lifelong dream. That done, he settled into making Richard Pryor movies, and thereafter, Richard Pryor was the only character he played.

  Not that he never again had the opportunity to play meatier roles. Superstar producer Robert Evans—a failed actor who, without ever having produced a movie, was named Paramount Pictures’ head of production at age thirty-five and oversaw films such as The Godfather, Chinatown, The Odd Couple, Love Story, Rosemary’s Baby, and Marathon Man, to name a few—relentlessly courted Richard for the role of Sandman Williams in what Evans believed would be the jewel in his crown, Francis Ford Coppola’s The Cotton Club. Based on a Jim Haskins book of the same name, The Cotton Club re-created the verve, elegance, and violence of the white gangsters and black entertainers who populated Harlem’s most famous nightspot of the 1930s. “Gangsters, music, and pussy,” Evans reasoned. “How could I lose?”

  Evans invited Richard to dinner to discuss the part, but all through the meal, Richard broke down in tears talking about Jennifer. The next day, Evans sent a limo for her and spent five hours trying to charm her into having dinner with Richard. She agreed finally to a double date that included Evans and his ex-wife Ali McGraw. Every day of the week leading up to the dinner, Richard called Evans to ask his advice on what he should wear, what he should say. At the last minute, Richard canceled the date, telling Evans he just wasn’t ready. Still, he was so grateful for all Evans had done that he agreed to The Cotton Club.

  Evans was elated. “In 1982,” he writes in his memoir, “there wasn’t a hotter box-office star than Richard Pryor.”*

  Then he got a call from one of Richard’s lawyers saying that his client wanted four million dollars—far more, he knew, than Evans could afford. “I was advised it would be a disaster and the best thing to do would be to get out of it,” Richard later explained. “And the best way to get out of something is to ask for money, and that’s what I did.”

  Instead, the role of Sandman Williams launched the film career of Gregory Hines. Richard’s next movie was Brewster’s Millions—a “wicked waste,” Vincent Canby called it in his New York Times review: “Watching Richard Pryor as he forces himself to cavort with simulated abandon in Brewster’s Millions is like watching the extremely busy shadow of someone who has disappeared. The contours of the shadow are familiar but the substance is elsewhere. Brewster’s Millions is another in the series of earnest attempts to tame—to make genteel—one of the most original, most provocative, most unpredictably comic personalities to come onto the American scene in the last 20 years.”

  It was, Richard said, the first movie he ever did completely sober, and he could never bring himself to watch it.

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  Richard preemptively dismissed his films and his roles in them before anyone else could: “Tell the fans I’m sorry,” he would say. “I got greedy. I did it for the money.”

  In 1976, he apologized for Silver Streak, his first teaming with Gene Wilder. “It was a career move, and I’m sorry I did it. But I’ll be glad when the movie is out and over with.” After Stir Crazy broke the hundred-million-dollar mark, making it the highest-grossing comedy to date, Richard told a nightclub crowd that he and costar Gene Wilder “appreciate that y’all went to see it, we really do—but I saw the motherfucker and I don’t get it.”

  He did it to his own Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life Is Calling, a film depicting the events of his own life that he directed, starred in, and cowrote with two of his best friends. He wasn’t saying he did it for the money but that his sincere effort had failed. “I don’t know what happened,” he told Thom Mount in the March 1986 cover story for Andy Warhol’s Interview a month before Jo Jo’s release. “I like the script and I’d do it again today. To see what I did with it makes me somewhat sad. I asked myself a thousand times, ‘How could I have fucked up?’ ”

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  The project started with promise. In 1985, Rocco Urbisci was going through a difficult time. He had separated from his wife and was living apart from his two children in an apartment on
the beach near the Ventura County line, miles away from everything else. He needed time to figure things out. Then the phone rang.

  “Rocco, it’s Richie. What are you doing?”

  “You want to know the truth? I’m taking a dump.”

  Richard didn’t miss a beat. “Well, after you wipe your ass, come meet me at Columbia Studios.”

  Richard had decided to do a movie based on his own life and he wanted Rocco to help write it.

  “Why me?” Rocco still asks. Richard Pryor could’ve hired the best—David Mamet, William Goldman, Paul Schrader, Robert Towne . . . anybody. He wanted Rocco Urbisci. He needed him to be there. Rocco had earned his trust. Richard could tell him anything, and did. Horrific stuff about his life. Some of it Rocco still refuses to divulge and says he never will. It refused to be written as the comedy the studio was hoping for. It ended up being more like an inventory of events in his life. It was therapy, he said, “more like basket-weaving.”

  The studio, predictably, wanted more of Richard’s stand-up material. That was the Richard everyone loved. Richard and Rocco didn’t know how they could shoehorn that into what they had written, so they brought Paul Mooney on board. He knew where the stand-up bits would fit, but it changed the tenor of the whole thing. The sequences are jarring, like a montage copied and pasted from one of those rise-to-the-top celebrity biopics where the star is seen triumphing on a variety of stages while calendar pages flip past, and newspaper headlines spin.

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  The story is told from the disembodied vantage point of Jo Jo in the aftermath of the freebase incident that nearly kills him. While lying bandaged in a hospital bed, his spirit leaves his charred body and journeys out to retrace the steps of his life, paying ghostly visits to his younger selves at key junctures along the way.

  The scenes from Jo Jo’s early life were filmed on location in Peoria (in the movie, they say it’s Ohio), in the actual house where Richard grew up. It took real courage, Rocco says, for him to confront his demons and the pain of his childhood, reenacting actual scenes from his life in his grandmother’s house, directing his younger self to peek over the same transom into the same room where his mother turned tricks.

  Jo Jo’s father humiliates him using the same words Richard’s father had: “This boy ain’t shit and his mama ain’t shit, either.” In other ways, he cheated the story. One of his wives—representing Shelley—slaps him and he doesn’t hit back. He sulks. The worst transgression is a scene at the bus station as he is leaving town to chase his dreams. He earnestly begs his first wife to come with him.

  When the corporeal Jo Jo invites his alter ego back into his body (“I thought you’d never ask”) at the end of the film, a restored Jo Jo returns to the concert stage, using the voice of Richard’s old-time preacher to eulogize the burned-up corpse of his former self.

  The boy was a mess. He run through life like shit run through a goose. And now he rests here with a smile on his face. I guess that’s a smile. I hope that’s his face. You sure that isn’t his ass? It look like his ass! Some people lead with their chin. Life kind of forces you to do that—to lead with your chin. But this man here, he led with his nuts. If his nuts wasn’t in a vise, he wasn’t happy.

  The trouble was, Richard tried to make a heartfelt drama from the same material he had, for so many years, been spinning into wild and irreverent comedy gold. Richard knew it would be a hard sell for his fans. “They want laughs—lots of laughs, which it hasn’t got. It could be moving and good, but people may say, ‘Why are you telling us this? We don’t want to know this.’ ”

  Writes Pauline Kael:

  Pryor doesn’t have the skills to tell his story in this form. As a standup entertainer, he sees the crazy side of his sorrows; he transforms pain and chaos into comedy. As a moviemaker, he’s a novice presenting us with clumps of unformed experience. It isn’t even raw; the juice has been drained away. He was himself—demons, genius, and all—in Richard Pryor—Live in Concert and, though to a lesser extent, in Richard Pryor—Live on the Sunset Strip. Here, trying to be sincere, he’s less than himself.

  “Perhaps the worst thing about Jo Jo Dancer,” Julian Upton writes in Bright Lights Film Journal, “is Pryor himself.”

  In what should have been a primal scream of a performance, a fusion of the electrifying power of his best stand-up with the howling demons that dogged him off-screen and offstage, the actor instead gives an awkward, largely poker-faced turn, occasionally hitting the high notes but generally looking lost in his own movie . . . The disturbing truth of Jo Jo Dancer is that it confirms that Pryor’s excitable greatness had vanished. All we see is the laundered Pryor of 1986 trying to imitate the wild, wired, and reckless Pryor of a decade earlier—and as in Here and Now, it’s an act he could no longer pull off.

  Approximately two-thirds of the way through the movie, we are treated to a progressive montage of Jo Jo, sporting an increasingly voluminous natural, performing snatches of Richard’s now-classic stand-up routines under the sound-track recording of Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On.” Working with some of the greatest stand-up material ever conceived (his own), there is no spark, no volatile clash with audiences that had never before encountered comedy such as this. It’s all perfunctory, performed by rote in front of an accepting audience. Inevitably it falls flat, merely set down for the record, as it might be performed by a Richard Pryor impersonator. Jo Jo’s renditions are stillborn, like museum pieces, empty of the struggle, the chaos, the sloppiness of discovery at the moment of conception in an uncertain encounter with a live audience. Richard knew what he was talking about when he told Mooney that no one could steal his material. As this sequence makes excruciatingly clear, no one but Richard Pryor knew what to do with it. Not even Jo Jo Dancer.

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  An alarmingly frail and emaciated Richard went on The Tonight Show in October 1986 in part to squelch rumors that he had AIDS. He’d lost twenty pounds in preparation for a film role, he said, but then his weight kept dropping.

  “I was getting really scared. I was losing weight and my pants were falling down. I said there’s something wrong. I was worried about those diseases around. I thought ‘Richard, it’s finally caught up with you.’ I thought I had one of them and I was going to die. I was very calm about it. I went and got the blood checked. The doctor said I was fine, but the next day my eye went out. My right eye is blind,” he told Carson. “You could hit me on this side and I wouldn’t see it coming.”

  Richard knew what the trouble was, in name, at least. A few months earlier, Deboragh had flown with him to the Mayo Clinic.

  The diagnosis was multiple sclerosis. He didn’t know what that was. After listening to the doctor’s explanation, he was convinced no one else did, either.

  He understood what he was in for, that the incurable, degenerative disease would likely take away his motor skills, balance, and control of his bodily functions. He was determined not to give anything up before the disease took it away. The very next day after that Tonight Show appearance, he got married for the fifth time, to a twenty-three-year-old actress named Flynn Belaine. (They separated after two months of marriage and were divorced in January but would remarry following the birth of their son in 1990.)

  * Evans recalls that his eleven-year-old son overheard him discussing The Cotton Club with Barry Diller, Michael Eisner, Don Simpson, and other power brokers during a Saturday meeting at their home. His son kept pestering him to come out onto the patio, saying he had something urgent to tell him. Exasperated, Evans finally excused himself and demanded to know what was so important that it couldn’t wait. To his surprise, his son earnestly wanted to know if The Cotton Club was really as important as Evans seemed to believe. “Don’t use Richard Pryor then,” his son said. “If you do, it’ll just be another Richard Pryor movie.”

  “I’M FINDING IT HARD IMITATING RICHARD PRYOR”

  “Listen, you spoke the truth. They have to make you famous now. That’s how Hollywo
od deals with the truth . . . They make you so famous that nobody’ll take you serious anymore.”

  —Cecil Brown, Days without Weather

  Not counting Jo Jo Dancer, Richard Pryor—or someone calling himself that—appeared in the following films, almost always in the starring role.

  Critical Condition (1987)

  Moving (1988)

  See No Evil, Hear No Evil (1989)

  Harlem Nights (1989)

  Another You (1991)

  The Three Muscatels (1991)

  Mad Dog Time (1996)

  Full confession: we haven’t seen any of these movies, not all the way through, anyway. But we’ve seen enough. They are unbearable. We never believed that Paul McCartney died in a 1966 car wreck or that Elvis staged his own death in 1977 to live a life of obscurity in northern Michigan, but we can say with fair certainty that the hapless actor passing himself off as Richard Pryor in these movies was an impostor.

  Richard—the real Richard—well knew of this doppelganger’s existence and spoke of him often. The terrible irony is that in his prime the genuine Richard believed himself to be the impostor. (Who Me? I’m Not Him is the title of a 1977 LP of older material issued on the Laff label.) He often said that Richard Pryor the movie star and famous comedian was someone else, living and breathing and walking around out there in the world somewhere while he spent Richard Pryor’s money, slept with his women, lived in his house, and cashed his checks, fearing all the while that one day the real Richard Pryor would show up and kick his ass. He knew he could do it, too.

  While in the hospital recovering from the fire, he told his friend, the producer Thom Mount, “I got real scared. I was this person that I had inherited in life. And I was a person that nobody knew. Nobody knew me. All I could keep doing was act like this person, this Richard Pryor, because I was afraid. I was afraid they’d kill me if they found out I wasn’t Richard Pryor.”