by Scott Saul
“You’re gonna pay me for doin’ all this shit,” he told Campus during one writing session, then started repeating it like a refrain. Campus shrugged: “I’m the director, not the producer, not the money guy.”
At their last session, Richard stared at the pages of the script, taking in what they’d accomplished. Then, as Campus and Julien said their good-byes, Richard stepped back from the pleasantries. He lifted a key line from the script—what Goldie the pimp says to Lulu, the first woman in his stable, when she runs to him breathless and penniless, raving that a trick has just tried to kill her—and he made it his own: “Get me my money.” Having written The Mack, Richard was trying to operate as one. Campus agreed to plead Richard’s case, to “get him his money,” but in his mind he already could hear Harvey Bernhard’s response: “Screw Pryor.”
“Richie is the human submarine,” Campus jotted down in his notes at the time. “Everything below the surface but the rage periscope.” Now The Mack had to move into production up north in Oakland and Berkeley, on a tight shooting schedule and with a fuming Richard as its costar.
One of the reasons The Mack lives on as a cult classic—a movie that has inspired filmmakers such as Quentin Tarantino and the Hughes brothers, and hip-hop performers from Ice Cube and Dr. Dre to Outkast and Jay-Z—is its texture, the way it evokes the feel of desperate nights in Oakland in 1972: Snoop Dogg has called it “one of the coldest movies in American cinema.” That sense of hard-bitten reality was achieved at considerable risk. Campus was committed to filming on location—in Oakland’s bars, nightclubs, barbershops, churches, and funeral parlors—at a moment when the larger location was dicey in the extreme, and not just on account of the expected complications that might arise when a film crew enters the inner city (for which The Mack’s bodyguards carried firearms). One day, when Campus set up his camera and maneuvered his actors into place for an outside shoot, bottles started raining down from the nearby rooftops. The crew scattered, shocked at the organized ambush.
Bernhard and Campus had entered, blindly, into an ongoing territorial battle between the Ward Brothers, who controlled the underground economy of the area, and the Black Panthers, whose organization was at a tender transitional moment. Just two months before The Mack started filming, the Panthers had narrowed their ambitions, declaring Oakland their sole “base of operations” and asking all party members to close down other local chapters. The party aimed to concentrate on “liberating the territory of Oakland”—from the police and from kingpins like Frank Ward. In public, the Panthers started putting on a fresh face and mobilizing to elect Black Panther chairman Bobby Seale as mayor of Oakland; much less publicly, they tried to muscle in on the Ward Brothers and get a slice of their action. When Campus had toured Oakland’s demimonde with Frank Ward and then secured the Ward Brothers’ protection for the filming of The Mack, he unwittingly took sides in this war for possession of Oakland. The fusillade of bottles was the Panthers’ way of announcing, as Seale told Harvey Bernhard, “You’re in Panther territory now, boy.”
Bernhard reluctantly agreed to meet “the Man,” Huey Newton, at his penthouse apartment overlooking Lake Merritt, and the next day at noon, he, Max Julien, and Frank Ward were sitting on lacquered seats in front of a Chinese table, waiting for Newton. Bobby Seale walked out in white pants and a black watch navy cap, and recited his poetry for twenty minutes. His recitation complete, Seale announced “I’m not going to rip you off for much”—just five grand. Bernhard pulled out his checkbook and wrote a check for the full amount, unaware that his own financing agent hadn’t yet put up the money. After the check bounced, the war between the Panthers and the filmmakers escalated. The Panthers set up pickets at the Showcase Lounge, where The Mack’s crew hoped to film the essential “Players Ball” sequence. “The Black Community Will Not Be Exploited Anymore!” charged eight-foot-high banners. Seale demanded that all extras on the film receive fifty dollars, not the ten dollars for which they’d been contracted, and called films like The Mack a “silver coated form of oppression.” This time, Bernhard wrote a check that didn’t bounce—and that was funneled into a fund for extras.
At the same time that the filmmakers were fending off the Panthers, they hit an equally persistent spot of trouble with Richard, who appeared to have pushed a Self-Destruct button en route to the East Bay. His character, Slim, was written as an insecure player with a taste for the finer things, and sometimes it seemed there was little daylight between Richard and the role he had scripted for himself. He partied with three or four women through the night, getting high on coke and champagne, then treated the set like his private playground during the day. Once, he came out of his trailer with three ladies of the evening at his side, and staggered up to Campus.
Campus asked, “What are you doing? Who are you?”
Richard deflected the brunt of the question. “This is family. It’s okay—these are my cousins.”
The substance abuse, combined with Richard’s insomniac sleep schedule, took its inevitable toll on his body. When acting out a scene of drunken camaraderie between Slim and Goldie at a bar, Richard was so wasted on booze and coke that Michael Campus needed to prop him up during filming. If Campus lost his grip for a moment, Richard hit the floor.
Meanwhile, Richard continued to simmer over his unpaid work on the film’s script, his anger spilling out on set and off. In the early hours of September 27, at the tail end of a punishing day of filming, he told Campus, “I want my fucking scene now.”
Campus snapped at Richard: the reason for the delay, he said, was that his two stars were talking too much. He turned away.
Richard snagged Campus’s attention by insulting his mother—a cruel touch, as Richard knew she had died early and tragically, when Campus was a child. Then, without another word, Richard charged at the director and clocked him so hard on the jaw that Campus reeled and fell to the ground, unconscious.
“How’d you like that blow?” Richard asked the limp body on the ground. Then, to everyone: “Did I get him? Did I really get him?”
The security crew trained their guns on Richard, and Max Julien rushed to grab and protect him. “You can’t shoot him. No, you got to shoot me,” Julien said, making himself a human shield. The security crew stood down, and Richard was escorted back to the Marriott.
Yet he was not done with the day’s mayhem. At 3:00 a.m., he knocked on the door of Julien’s room, carrying a homemade weapon—a sock with some metal in it, some coins or some iron balls—and appealed to Julien to join him on a late-night visit to Harvey Bern-hard. Julien demurred, and the two embraced. Richard said, “You know, sometimes even if you love people, you’ve got to cut them loose,” and he wandered off on his lonely journey down the hall toward Bernhard’s room, sock in hand.
“Harvey, you know I really love you and am sorry,” he began with Bernhard. “I wanted to come in here and apologize for beating up Michael.” Then, as if disgusted by his act of ingratiation: “I came in here to kill you.” He swung the sock.
Bernhard was sitting, groggily at first but increasingly awake, next to a coffee table on which he’d left an extremely sharp knife, one he used to peel almonds. “I was going to throw the coffee table on top and cut his throat,” Bernhard recalled. But before he could execute the maneuver, his wife walked into the room and started talking about the good heart of her husband, Harvey. The temperature in the room shifted; Richard’s bravado collapsed. “I can’t take this shit,” he said, and left.
The next day, he borrowed fifty dollars from Bernhard’s sister and went back down to LA. The manager of the Marriott pulled Bernhard aside so that he could see the state of Richard’s room at checkout. It looked as if a hurricane had torn through it: broken lamps, broken chairs; a total shambles. As for the film, Richard’s character, Slim, would have to be written out of his remaining scenes.
Perhaps the whole production cut too close to the bone, too close to the pain of Richard’s past. Just as he had played second fiddle to his
father, Buck, for two decades in Peoria, so here he was playing the mack’s sidekick, the wannabe who voices the vulnerability that his emotionally armored friend cannot. In some of the film’s most famous scenes—some of Richard’s best acting work, too—Slim steals the spotlight with his cracked-up pain. In one, he refuses to walk away from two dirty cops who ask him and Goldie to beat it. Slim is perceptive enough to know that as soon as he and Goldie turn their backs, they might be shot for “resisting arrest,” and bold enough to defy a shotgun pointed at him by a cop. But Slim isn’t as collected as he is perceptive. He sucks in his mouth; his eyes widen with fear. “I ain’t runnin’ no fucking place,” he says. “I ain’t no track star.”
The scene then sputters unforgettably, as if some actor in it were going off script (which Richard in fact was doing, improvising around Slim’s pain). The cops leave abruptly when a group of onlookers—potential witnesses—appears. Goldie walks away somberly, bearing the weight of the world on his shoulders in the form of a hip brown suede cape. Alone now on the street, his friend receding into the distance, Richard’s Slim can’t stop talking, even though he’s talking only to himself. He spits out the words with a teary-eyed fury:
We’re gonna get the motherfucker, ’cause he’s a punk! You ain’t shit! I’m gonna get him! Goldie, we gonna get ’em ’cause they pulled down on us! They didn’t use that shit, baby! The motherfucker pulled a gun on me, man! I ain’t bullshittin’, brother! We gonna get him, punk-ass motherfucker!
As Slim raves on alone, talking about a “we” that doesn’t exist, the camera gradually pulls back to reveal a new detail of his outfit: along with a pink floral shirt and gray satin vest, he’s wearing a pair of crimson knee pants that seem designed for a child. Neither the pimping game nor these brave words have made a man of Slim; neither has restored him to himself.
In all, Slim’s monologue furnishes one of the strangest half minutes in 1970s film. To fantasize about revenge is, for Slim, to fall apart—to become too intimate with his pain. But his defiance is, in its weakness, also exquisitely human. It connects him to those who’ve felt that they were living, literally or figuratively, with someone who pointed a gun in their direction; links him to those who have wanted to stand up for themselves but doubted their power to do so. Max Julien observed, “I know ladies who’ve been abused, and they saw that scene and they realized they didn’t want to be abused anymore. It said, ‘Don’t touch me again.’”
The Mack could never escape being a fly-by-night production—its acting was uneven, its plotting forced—but with Richard’s help, it fingered something raw and profound. Upon its release in the spring of 1973, it rose to become the fourth-highest-grossing movie in the United States, despite the fact that it was largely limited to inner-city theaters.
Richard seemed to live The Mack in his mind, to be possessed by the spirit of its script. In Los Angeles around the time of the film’s production, he relayed to his girlfriend, Patricia, a version of what he had told Michael Campus. “Bitch,” he said, “you’ve got to go out and bring back some money.”
Shell-shocked, the former Pan Am stewardess drove to the Beverly Wilshire hotel and sat at its bar. She waited for something to happen, and when nothing did, she repaired to her car, on a side street off Wilshire Boulevard, and started sobbing. A group of men heard her crying and asked what was wrong. When she told them, one of the men, an actor, offered her a hundred dollars. She felt she couldn’t take it under the circumstances.
When she came home empty-handed to their cottage in the hills, Richard flew into a rage. He had an empty bottle of Courvoisier in one hand and a mostly empty bottle of Courvoisier in the other, and started beating Patricia’s head with them.
Patricia threw up her hands to shield herself. Richard yelled, “Be a woman! Put your hands down!”
Patricia pivoted, ran into one of the cottage’s small bedrooms, and locked the door. A little while later, she heard a terrifying chopping sound. Richard had taken the small hatchet that she used to chop wood for their wood-burning fireplace and was attacking the door that stood between them.
The hatchet made short work of the door. “Please, Richard, I love you, I love you,” Patricia said, in a naked bid to calm him.
Richard stood over her, addled by the drugs and agitated by his anger, and began choking her. When Patricia looked into his eyes, he seemed off in some faraway place.
Then, all of a sudden, he felt sick and doubled over, vomiting. He had shrunk into a helpless child making a mess on himself. “Mama, mama, help, help,” he said, before passing out.
Patricia looked at herself. She was on her hands and knees; her white dress was smeared with blood, her lip swollen. She decided that she was through with Richard.
She saw a light outside, and left the cottage for it. She met a woman, who offered her some clean clothes—the woman’s mother, a heavyset woman, had just died and left a closet full of them—and then the two drove to a hospital. There Patricia was treated for a broken nose and three cracked ribs. She contacted a writing friend of Richard’s, who lent her enough money to return to Sausalito.
About a year after arriving with Richard in Hollywood, Patricia came back to Sausalito in a dead woman’s oversize clothes, and crashed with an old friend.
CHAPTER 16
* * *
Black Goes First
Los Angeles, Marseilles, Cannes, 1972–1973
There’s probably a cobra crawling around in there,” Richard said, pointing to a bale of hay. He was on the outskirts of the Chino men’s prison, talking to a Paramount publicist and waiting for his scene. Flies buzzed about; cows lowed in the distance, their smell traveling over the wind. Inmates were gathering on the edge of the shoot, curious. Their rural prison worksite was being used as a location for Hit!, director Sidney Furie’s follow-up to Lady Sings the Blues, and the inmates had stopped pitching hay for a moment to catch a glimpse of Hollywood in action.
The publicist was asking Richard about the arc of his career, and Richard had turned unusually reflective, musing on the traps into which he’d fallen. “I want to do something to show that I have depth,” he said. “It’s time to branch out, time to stretch my talents as far as they will go.” He dangled a piece of hay between his fingers. “The happy-go-lucky comic—that’s an act. I like to do parts. But I don’t want to be one-dimensional, to lock myself in.”
A crew member called Richard for his scene. His character, Mike Willmer, was supposed to spot the man (now a convict) who had raped and killed his wife, then attack him in a sort of fugue state. It was a scene in which Richard was expected to move, in a matter of seconds, from a state of guarded congeniality to one of throttling, homicidal rage.
Richard brushed the hay off his pants. “Being a character, man, that makes me come alive,” he said. He spread his hands as if taking in a larger piece of the world. “You’ve got to separate who you are and who the character is. There’s such excitement in that real moment when you achieve that character—it’s like being in your conscious and your subconscious at the same time.”
He then took off to prepare for his scene. The publicist watched him pace the length of the parking lot and noted his intensity: “Shoulders stooped, eyebrows furled, his movements suggest a rock that is about to precipitate a landslide.”
Nineteen seventy-three seemed as if it might be Richard’s landslide year, but it was instead a half-and-half year—of artistic breakthroughs and professional struggles. It was the year when he started being courted as a film actor, did some of the best TV work of his career, and, through his contribution to the landmark documentary film Wattstax, established himself as black America’s most nimble color commentator. Perhaps most important, it was the year his self-understanding shifted, the year when he recognized—partly as a result of his brief and enchanted collaboration with Lily Tomlin—how much he loved falling into character. Sometimes that character was a wino or a junkie, a preacher or a cop, a pimp or an average Joe like Hit’s Mike W
illmer. Sometimes it was a more vivid version of his ordinary self, raised through the magic of the stand-up stage into some combination of Everyman and avatar: the man who, by turning his life story into an act, gave it shape and resonance.
For this artist in love with character, the one thing he abhorred was losing the flow of character, the flow of dialogue between his “conscious” and “subconscious.” From this point forward especially, Richard responded poorly—with frustration, rage, sabotage—when asked to hew closely to a script or, worse, to censor himself. Presented with a bale of hay, he couldn’t help but imagine the cobra crawling around inside it.
For many in Hollywood, of course, Richard’s irreverence was his great selling point. On a Saturday night in October 1972, director Mel Stuart caught a rare Pryor performance—in “a half-empty room” of a “dull-ass club” in a part of LA that Stuart had never visited—and was convinced within three minutes that he was in the presence of “the comic genius of our time.” And not just a comic genius: the performer who could fix his film Wattstax—rescue it from its baggy rough cut and give it a through line.
When Stuart arrived at that club, he was wrestling with only the latest of the many challenges that had dogged his film. Wattstax had been conceived, in the manner of the concert film Woodstock, as a celebration of a community drawn together through music—in this case, the thousands of black Angelenos set to attend a concert organized by Stax Records, the powerhouse soul music label. Stuart, a documentarian whose résumé included mainstream fare like The Making of the President: 1964 and Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, agreed to make the film “on one condition: I am the only white person on the set.” Watts was a foreign world to him; he knew he needed the palpable sense of camaraderie that only black camera operators could provide. The community had exploded into riot just seven years before, and he felt it was justifiably wary of outsiders. But how to get blacks behind the camera? Hollywood’s technical unions had only a tiny number of blacks on their rolls. The film’s producers held an open call, drew on union apprenticeship programs and university workshops—and managed to recruit forty-five black technicians to film the concert, an unprecedented number on a Hollywood shoot.