Becoming Richard Pryor

by Scott Saul

  The writing process was spectacularly fitful. Sometime in the late morning, the writers would assemble, and the dialogue would start to fly. Both Richard and Mel Brooks were performer-writers: they thrived on acting out their riffs instead of dictating them. (During his gig on Our Show of Shows, Brooks said to himself, “My God, I’m not a writer, I’m a talker”—a self-assessment that could have applied equally to Richard.) Meanwhile a secretary would take notes, scrambling “like a one-armed paper hanger trying to keep some kind of order,” Bergman recalled. “After an hour of working, we’d start perusing these [takeout] menus. Then we’d order lunch for about forty minutes, trying to figure out what we’re going to get.” After lunch, the script riffing would resume, and then, “at three o’clock, Mel would say, ‘My brains are exploding, I can’t do this anymore,’ which was about right, and that would be it.”

  The screenplay that emerged from this month of spasmodic creativity was darker and more pointedly political than the original treatment, spiked as it was by the contributions of Richard, whom Brooks called “very brave and very far-out and very catalytic.” In Bergman’s original treatment, the black sheriff was a Bunyonesque figure who romanced the daughter of a railroad owner; Bergman’s inspiration was the swaggering Panther spokesman H. Rap Brown, and the part originally fell to the grandiloquent actor James Earl Jones. By the time Richard and his fellow writers had finished with him, “Black Bart” was a trickster who fit more closely Richard’s self-conception, a hero so deviously outrageous that his deputy Jim calls him “one crazy nigger.”

  This Black Bart “sports some violet shades” and “moves like a moist dream across the prairie.” One of his first moves as sheriff is to crumple up and throw away a Wanted poster with a black man on it, reasoning, “He’s got enough trouble without a bunch of honkies chasing his ass all over Mexico.” He whiles away the time in his office by taking a black jockey ashtray and painting it white. After he and Jim clobber some Klansmen off camera, Jim asks him, “Did you have to stick the cactus up his ass?”—to which Bart replies, dreamily, “I had to.” And Bart has sexual as well as political bluster. When Jim asks him what happened during his night with Lily von Shtupp, he quips, “I don’t know, but I think I invented pornography.”

  In this first-draft screenplay, Richard’s most personal contribution was a piece of street poetry that Bart performs on a scaffold in order to delay his hanging. Winking at the camera, he says, “The more I talk the less I die.” Then he launches into a seventy-three-line recitation that might be titled “The Pimp’s Lament.” It begins:

  My family was poor

  My mama was a whore

  And society held my father in contempt

  And before I had bloomed

  I knew I was doomed

  To live the life of a pimp

  Then it segues into Bart’s success with a particular “sidewalk jezebel”:

  The girl turned out nice

  She was doubling up twice

  On the meeting and greeting scene

  Why this whore would take on

  Frenchmen, Puerto Ricans, henchmen

  To her, they was all the same

  And no son of a gun

  Did this whore shun

  Who could pay for her time and her frame

  When the girl gets ill, Bart schemes to work her into a threesome with another girl and a white hillbilly, and she, feeling jilted, turns him into the police. Thus his final message:

  So the moral of the story is

  Your whore’s your bread and glory

  And I say this with tears in my eyes

  Even if she’s sick

  And can’t turn a trick

  Don’t leave your whore till she dies

  Cut to: a tear rolling down from under the hood of Boris the executioner.

  Richard’s “pimp’s lament” came out fully formed in the writers’ room and surprised everyone. He told Norman Steinberg that he’d learned it in prison, and the poem is a textbook example of the kind of profane “toasts” that circulated among black men in barber shops, taverns, and jails—toasts that were first collected between covers, two years later, in Bruce Jackson’s classic anthology Get Your Ass in the Water and Swim Like Me. For Steinberg, the poem was like nothing he’d ever heard. For Richard, it was the poetry of North Washington Street, the soundtrack of his childhood. And given what he witnessed growing up—his father and uncle playing the role of the pimp; his ill stepmother Ann pulling tricks in his father’s home—its playful styling had deeper associations.

  This poem at the scaffold, like many of the most explicit gestures in the original script, didn’t survive the months of editing that whittled the 120-page script down to a more manageable size. But the final film carried Richard’s imprint, not least through the uses it found for the word that punctuated his nightclub act: nigger. In the film, it’s a word that comes as easily to an elderly white woman (“Up yours, nigger”) as to a slave-driving yahoo foreman (who asks for a “good old nigger work song” from a group of exhausted railroad workers). It’s also a word to be leveraged, jujitsu-like, against one’s opponents. When the townsfolk pull out their guns to shoot Bart, he becomes a performer onstage much like Richard himself, able to encase the roles of perpetrator and victim in the same body. He is, suddenly, both a white bigot who holds Bart at gunpoint and a “cringing, whining plantation darkie” (in the words of the script). When the white gunman threatens, “Next man makes a move, the nigger gets it,” the townsfolk lower their guns, touched by Bart’s one-man melodrama. “We would never have done [that bit],” said Andrew Bergman, reflecting on how the other writers benefited from Richard’s nerve. “It might’ve occurred to us, but we would have said, ‘Uhhh . . .”

  As much as Richard contributed to Blazing Saddles a scalding treatment of race in American life, the film gave him something in return. It allowed him to move outside his usual preoccupations, to shed his skin. Mel Brooks remembered that, instead of throwing himself completely into the part of Black Bart, Richard “concentrated on Mongo. He wrote most of the Mongo stuff; he loved Mongo. He came up with crazy stuff like ‘Mongo only pawn in game of life.’” Like the rest of the writers on the film, Richard was free to ransack the clichés of the Western and twist them until he had wrung out their inner absurdities. He could, through the pressure of his imagination, reveal Mongo to be not just a dumb brute, but a sweet child and inadvertent poet—even someone who flirts with being gay (given his “deep feelings” for Sheriff Bart and, in the original script, his preference for dancing with men).

  Still another gift of Blazing Saddles was that it gave Richard a taste of a creatively fruitful interracial collaboration—something he arguably hadn’t experienced since his mid-1960s New York days as a comic at the Improv. “We all adored [Richard],” said Bergman. Steinberg remembered Richard happily goofing off for an appreciative audience: at one point, Richard dressed up in a housekeeper’s outfit and feather-dusted the room. Some of that mutual affection found its way into the friendship of Bart and Jim, the relationship that grounds the film and balances out its wild, centrifugal energy. For Bergman, that on-screen friendship was essential to the film’s success. “You really believed that these two guys love each other. You really felt, with all the insanity, that there was a real relationship between them, which was amazing when you consider the things that are going on on-screen.”

  Within the writers’ room, of course, there were limits to the friendship between Richard and the others, invisible boundary lines that went uncrossed. Norman Steinberg remembered that a woman once popped into the room and asked Richard for some money; her hand was in a cast.

  “What happened?” Steinberg asked.

  “I punched her,” Richard said.

  “You punched her in her hand?”

  “She put it in front of her face.”

  In Steinberg’s recollection, “We all thought, ‘Okay, moving on . . . We weren’t going to touch that.” Likewise with Richard’
s indulgence of cocaine and Courvoisier: the friendship between him and the other writers, while based in mutual admiration and acceptance, was also a delicate thing, and sometimes strategically left untested.

  In the film’s original script, the delicate balance of Bart and Jim’s friendship comes through in the shape of its happy ending. Bart rides off from Rockridge, leaving behind the townfolk and saluting them with a fresh honorific: “Keep the faith, niggers.” Then he bumps into Jim, and the two negotiate the terms of their future:

  JIM [casually]: Where ya’ headin’?

  BART: Nowhere special.

  JIM: Always wanted to go there.

  BART: Promise y’ll stay sober?

  JIM: Nope.

  BART [smiling]: Come on.

  [They ride off together.]

  As with Piano Man and Billie, the love survives the addiction, even possibly deepens with it. This was wishful thinking, Hollywood-style, where wishes do come true.

  With his fellow writers on Blazing Saddles, Richard started getting antsy. He caught a train back west after about a month of writing. “That was about as much sitzfleisch as he had,” Bergman said. “Sitzfleisch means literally ‘sitting meat’—that’s someone who’s going to sit and write for three months. He wasn’t wired that way. We’d done pretty much most of the first draft, and he wasn’t going to come back for another draft—that we knew.” So Richard left others to tighten the script. He anticipated that, since Brooks had enthused whenever he performed as Black Bart in the writers’ room, he’d be coming back later on the project—as an actor in its starring role. He felt, with some justification, that the film carried his sensibility as much as anyone’s. When the first draft was completed and typed up in his absence, the names of the screenwriters were not listed alphabetically. “Richard Pryor” was placed second, just under “Mel Brooks.”

  According to the legend, the original script for The Mack was written, by former pimp Robert Poole, on toilet paper from within his San Quentin jail cell. A typed version, called Black and Beautiful, eventually traveled into the hands of tough-guy independent producer Harvey Bernhard, who was intrigued by the idea—a pimp using mind control to bind women to him—and had the chutzpah to think he could finance the project on Diner’s Club cards if necessary. Bernhard estimated his budget at the Hollywood pittance of $120,000. The success of early blaxploitation films like Shaft and The Legend of Nigger Charley suggested that he could make a quick return on his overextended credit.

  Though Bernhard bought Poole’s script for its seductive premise, the script itself was a piece of agitprop that begged to be rewritten. Drafted in 1969, it was a flat transmission of the revolutionary politics of Black Power’s zenith, much of its action centering on the protagonist’s Black Nationalist brother. “Snipers, baby! The war has begun!”: so exults the brother in the movie’s final line, his revolutionary brigade having just riddled a pair of dirty cops with bullets.

  Bernhard first pulled in a young director named Michael Campus to rewrite the script top to bottom. Campus was still smarting from the flop of his sci-fi ZPG, about the dangers of population explosion. (“To say I was cold after ‘ZPG’ is an understatement,” Campus said. “I was like a slab of ice.”) He had an abiding interest in black working-class life and an enabling overconfidence in his ability to negotiate perilous situations. Raised by a Communist mother and father on the border of Harlem, he had grown up in a family knitted together by the idea of social justice. The young Michael sang the Internationale at summer camp; he cried with his parents over news of lynchings in the South; he saw his father, formerly chief radiologist at Harlem Hospital, blacklisted in the anti-Communist purges of the 1950s. He picked up a hunger for unsettling truths: when Campus went behind the camera in the 1960s, he was happy to take assignments that put him in a riot on the streets of Calcutta or in the back of a police car in New York City. When Bernhard pitched The Mack his way, Campus agreed to the project under one condition: that he be allowed to move to Oakland and see the culture of “players” for himself. He wanted to ground his film in the reality of pimping, not some ersatz fantasy dreamed up by Hollywood.

  Campus considered several actors (Ron O’Neal, John Amos, Paul Mooney) for the central role of Goldie, but fatefully chose Max Julien, an actor-writer who could rewrite the role around his own sensibility. Julien’s mother, a part-time minister, had just been killed in a robbery in the streets of Washington, DC, and Julien felt both devastated and free to take on a role he would have declined while she was living. He brought to The Mack a brash and long-standing self-confidence. By the time he crossed paths with Campus, Julien had traveled a complicated itinerary, embracing a series of roles: premed student at Howard; middling stand-up comic in New York City (where he met Richard, who informed him, “I don’t know what you do, but it ain’t comedy”); expatriate actor-filmmaker in Italy; and writer-producer of Cleopatra Jones, a hit black action film with a shapely karate-chopping narcotics agent at its center. At the end of that journey of self-discovery, he was a committed radical, a close friend of Huey Newton and an artist dedicated to upending the stereotypes that Hollywood preferred. “There could be [a black cinema],” he argued in a 1971 interview, “if films start to deal with the psychological problems of the black man instead of repeating the one dimensional militant or Uncle Tom.” His rewrite of Poole’s one-dimensional Goldie would put his ambition to the test. “I can’t play Goldie as a fop,” he told Campus. “He has to be a real person.”

  Julien insisted that his friend Richard Pryor play Goldie’s partner, Slim, and Richard in turn demanded that he be able to write all the dialogue for his character. Soon Richard was hosting all-night rewrite sessions at his cottage on the grounds of Yamashiro. More than Julien and Campus (who had yet to go to Oakland), he knew the world of pimps from the inside. The Mack gave him a chance to become on intimate terms, again, with the demons of his past. It remained to be seen whether, in revisiting the hard-edged world of his father, he would exorcise those demons or become their servant.

  The three writers came together as a team—“the three musketeers,” in Campus’s optimistic view, each lending his individual talents to the project. Campus brought a sense of storytelling structure and, after he spent several weeks immersed in the world of Frank Ward, one of Oakland’s leading gangsters, a familiarity with the rough characters who prospered in that city’s underground. Julien inflected Goldie with his verbal bravado and the sensitivity that peeked out from underneath it. Richard gave the film his ear and his feeling for black street life. In his handwritten notes from the time, Campus described how Richard’s creativity erupted in the rewrite sessions:

  Richie says nothing. He just doesn’t talk, then suddenly, he says everything. The words tumble out, a river. Overlapping, caustic, furious, tough, sloppy, myopic, visionary, crude and always, always real. His life is chaos. But in the core, constant discovery. Realization.

  As with his work on Blazing Saddles, Richard considered his cocaine a necessary stimulant on the job. At their first meetup, he visited the bathroom to take a hit; in later sessions, he made multiple trips. Always, when he came back into the room, he avoided the eyes of Campus, whom he called “White Boy.”

  Gradually, over several weeks of intensive writing, the film took shape. The characters retained their names from Poole’s script, but otherwise bore little resemblance to their original form. Richard’s character Slim, formerly a tough-minded mentor to Goldie, became his wobbly sidekick, macho in theory if not in practice. Goldie was reborn as a player of some complexity: preening in a maxi-length white fur coat, but devoted to his mother; quick with an insult (“Let me tell you something, you vicious-ass piece of jelly”), but liable to drift into a church to gather his thoughts; openhearted when the cash was coming in, but coldhearted when it was not. Through Richard’s suggestions, he also became a more stylish sadist, injecting battery acid into the veins of a drug kingpin, forcing a rival to stick himself with his own dagger-tipped cane
, or locking a “rat” into the trunk of a car that was teeming with the real thing.

  All told, the arc of the film became more melancholy, less triumphant, its radical politics tempered by the disenchantment of 1972. The dirty cops were still righteously dispatched, but Goldie was left with nothing. At the beginning of the film, he came empty-handed to Oakland on a bus, and now he departed the film seemingly on the same bus, again empty-handed. Still, for a film about disenchantment, its dialogue crackled with the vitality of people teetering on the edge of disaster. “You shade-tree nigger. You ain’t no pimp, you’re a rest haven for ho’s. You’re a car thief, a car thief!”—so cries Pretty Tony, a pimp getting squeezed by Goldie’s operation. Here, with his pitch-perfect sense of street talk, Richard’s contribution was essential.

  Richard couldn’t have asked for a writing gig with more personal relevance, but the experience of rewriting The Mack was hardly idyllic. He had committed to it in a moment of faith—like Julien and Campus, he wanted to see the film come to fruition—but they had never formally discussed credit or compensation, and the default position was for all of them to get none at all. Of the “three musketeers,” he was the one most ill served by this arrangement: since Campus and Julien were the film’s director and star, their fortunes would obviously rise with the film’s. And then there was the irony that wasn’t lost on Richard: wasn’t he writing a movie about getting paid? Who was the mack but an expert in squeezing the last nickel from anyone who owed him?