Becoming Richard Pryor

by Scott Saul

  As summer passed into fall, Lorne Michaels broke NBC’s resistance by playing hardball: he said, “I can’t do a contemporary comedy show without Richard Pryor” and resigned, only to be wooed back when NBC caved. With Richard, Michaels needed a gentler strategy. He flew out to Miami and visited Richard backstage at a jai alai fronton where he was performing. Richard laid out his conditions for committing to the show: Paul Mooney would come on as a writer; Richard’s friend Thalmus Rasulala would be hired as an actor; the soul-jazz griot Gil Scott-Heron would be the musical guest; Richard’s ex-wife Shelley, who had started to take the stage again, would be allowed to deliver a monologue; and he would be given a great number of tickets—so many that he would be in control of more than half the studio audience. Michaels agreed in the moment, though not without some queasiness. “He’d better be funny,” he said on the plane back to New York.

  The negotiations stand as a parable for how, after “That Nigger’s Crazy,” Richard leveraged his growing stardom. From one angle, he was being “difficult.” But from another, he was exhibiting a greater mindfulness about the worlds he was now navigating and, even, doing his part to desegregate American culture. He knew that his success as a performer had been driven by a core audience of black fans, and so now he was forcibly integrating Saturday Night’s audience, under the reasonable assumption that it would skew white. He knew that he’d felt at home on The Mike Douglas Show because, as co-host, he had altered the complexion of the ensemble onstage until he was no longer a token presence, and he was committed to do the same with the actors on Saturday Night. Last, he knew that a writers’ room was the incubator of all sketch ideas, so he wanted Paul Mooney as an ally in it. The audience, the stage, the SNL writers’ room—all needed more than a little color if they were to swing away from the educated lunacy of National Lampoon and toward Richard’s sensibility. He would become, on December 13, 1975, the host of the show’s seventh, and unforgettable, episode.

  Richard had considerably less pull as a movie actor than as a stand-up comic. Yet he was beginning to benefit from the shift, in Hollywood, away from a particular kind of blaxploitation flick, the action movie in which a black hero exacts violent revenge on the white world. In 1974, inner-city theaters were saturated with black-themed knockoffs—of The Godfather (The Black Godfather), of Enter the Dragon (Black Belt Jones), of The Exorcist (Abby), and, especially, of earlier blaxploitation hits like Coffy (Foxy Brown). The excitement that had greeted Shaft or Superfly was yielding to a sense of déjà vu. Box office receipts tailed off, and production companies stopped financing movies in the blaxploitation vein: in the words of film historian Ed Guerrero, “Blaxploitation went brain dead and was subsequently euthanized.” Richard was arguably the premiere black actor who found his footing in this post-blaxploitation terrain, as filmmakers hunted for the elusive formula of the “crossover” picture, the black-themed movie that nonetheless drew whites to the theater.

  His change in fortunes began, modestly, when at the end of 1973, Sidney Poitier asked him if he would play a small part, the role of flimflam artist Sharp Eye Washington, in this new film Uptown Saturday Night. Richard might have landed a much meatier role: while punching out the first draft of the script, Uptown’s screenwriter imagined Richard as one of its two leads. But Bill Cosby, Poitier’s good friend, expressed interest in the part, and as with Blazing Saddles, Richard was shouldered aside for the safer casting choice.

  With Uptown Saturday Night, Poitier was betting early against the blaxploitation vogue and clashing with the executives at his production company, who begged him to abandon the project. Poitier wanted to offer a “healthier exploration of black life,” one without the “pimps, prostitutes, and dope pushers who represent only a minuscule portion of the black community.” The film’s protagonists are not superspades who plug Whitey full of holes; they’re two working men, a factory hand and a taxi driver, searching for a lost lottery ticket and bouncing their way through an inner city that is less a scene of lurid corruption than simply the setting for a wild-goose chase. Wide-eyed at first, the two average Joes get properly jostled by a private detective who’s actually a con man (Richard’s role), a double-dealing congressman who supports both Nixon and Malcolm X, and a pint-sized karate expert. When they trigger gang warfare between a black godfather and his rival, no real blood is spilled; the plot twist is played strictly for laughs.

  As a production, Uptown had the flavor of a noble cause. Poitier was the motor force behind the film—its star, director, and executive producer—and he thought Hollywood needed integrating. For Uptown, he assembled what was billed as “the largest black all-star cast in Hollywood history”—some thirteen hundred black actors, including extras—and hired black technicians to fill almost half the behind-the-camera jobs. The film was a new and rare thing: a decently budgeted, black-directed film that aimed to be, in the words of Cosby, “a picture for the general audience. You can take anybody from your seven-year-old to your 87-year-old to see it.” Like several of the film’s actors, Richard was offered expenses only, but agreed to the job.

  “I almost went into overtime because the man kept me laughing so much I couldn’t attend to any of my duties as an actor or director,” Poitier said of Richard’s performance. For the short while that Richard is in Uptown, he steals the film from Poitier and Cosby with his twitching vitality. His con man lights up with naked greed each time he mentions his private detective’s fee; he trembles with the anxiety of a hustler on the lam and the excitement of an actor testing how willing his audience is to suspend disbelief. “Look at my eye, my right eye! See how bloodshot it is,” he says, selling the wreck that he is. “Know how it got that way? From sleeping with one eye open, baby.” Sharp Eye is the blaxploitation hero deflated, a husk of black manhood rather than its strutting embodiment. As Sharp Eye explains in the movie’s most self-conscious moment, “The movies always got some super nigger killing some white boy in the Mafia. Ha ha ha! Beating up the crooked police. That’s not true, and it don’t help me either. And women—they all got women. . . . I might as well be a monk.”

  Sharp Eye Washington’s riff on the reality deficit in blaxploitation captured the spirit of Uptown Saturday Night as a whole. The movie had no black-on-white violence, no sultry sex scenes. Its heroes were congenial, lovable, fundamentally decent—and box office gold to the tune of seven million dollars, more than three times the film’s budget. Between Uptown’s conception and its release in the summer of 1974, the blaxploitation trend had begun to sputter out, and Poitier’s film seemed to offer a new formula for success in black film: family-friendly comedy. His gamble paid off, and handsomely. A sequel went into the works.

  Richard’s next project, the Western spoof Adíos Amigo, was an attempt to capitalize on the soft-edged filmmaking niche that Uptown had begun to carve out. Fred Williamson, its writer, director, and costar, had made his name as the hunky, pistol-toting star of such blaxploitation films as The Legend of Nigger Charley and Boss Nigger, and was stretching himself with this rambling comedy about a frontier settler duped repeatedly by a con man. Richard himself had a long-standing love of the Western and an equally long-standing appreciation for its comic possibilities. Here he was asked to take his con man character from Uptown and transport him back a century to the Wild West of the 1870s; and for the first time in his film career, he was a true second lead, not merely a sidekick.

  But Adíos Amigo was a sloppy film, shot in nine days in the New Mexico desert, then slapped together with a carelessness that led Variety to grumble that “there are dozens of scenes that should have been outtakes.” It was not a piece of serviceable entertainment like Uptown, much less a madcap gem like Blazing Saddles. Its poster promised “two sharp dudes taking turns with chicks and tricks,” but there was nothing sharp to the picture; the editing was so slipshod that Williamson’s character wins a gunfight while being the slowest draw in the West. As director, Williamson seemed to have hoped that, in the absence of a solidly written
script, Richard would pick up the slack by ad-libbing, but Richard needed more—a stronger character, or a better comic partner than the granite-like Williamson. Too often, Richard was left to his own devices and simply made funny faces. The low-budget film earned back its costs, but for Richard it was an embarrassment. After its release, he asked Ebony to pass along a message to his fans: “Tell them I apologize. Tell them I needed some money. Tell them I promise never to do it again.”

  Richard’s luck in Hollywood improved when, in the spring of 1975, producer Rob Cohen, a protégé of Motown’s Berry Gordy, approached him with a script for The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars & Motor-Kings, an ambitious Motown-Universal coproduction. Bingo Long was a raffish, socially conscious comedy about a group of 1930s Negro League baseball players who break free of their black bosses (“The slaves done run off,” a veteran player exults) and form their own barnstorming team. After this opening premise, the film became, in part, an explicit parable about what it means to be a black crossover performer. On the barnstorming circuit, the players need to attract white crowds to survive, and decide to alter their style of play so that they’re not too good or too serious. They bat backward, pitch in a gorilla suit, throw firecrackers instead of baseballs, and parade into town with a “kick the mule” dance. And they have to ask themselves if, in putting on a show, they have sacrificed their dignity in the bargain. “We’ll only be pretending,” offers Bingo Long, in defense of their clowning before whites. “And since we’ll know we’re pretending, we’ll be one up on them.” His teammate Leon Carter, played by James Earl Jones, is not so sure, and the tension between the two drives the movie forward.

  For Rob Cohen, Bingo Long was not just about crossing over; it was also his attempt, as the Harvard-educated white executive in charge of Motown Pictures, to change the economics of crossover, to prove that quality films with largely black casts could break through a box office ceiling that contemporary estimates put at $9 million. He wanted to demonstrate that Motown’s magical accomplishments in musical crossover—Marvin Gaye, the Supremes, the Jackson Five—could be duplicated in Hollywood. “We have a real uphill battle to make high budget black films,” he told the Los Angeles Times, “because there has never been such a thing as a high budget black film. We aren’t making ‘Superfly’ or the story of violent high school kids in Detroit strung out on dope for a budget of $500,000. We are making classy films with glamour and love that whites and blacks can identify with.” A “classy” film required top-shelf talent: for Bingo Long, Cohen lined up Hal Barwood and Matt Robbins, fresh from winning the best screenplay award at Cannes, to adapt the novel of the same name. With their script in hand, he finagled a $3.5 million financing deal from Universal—an extraordinary budget for a “black” film. He signed Billy Dee Williams and James Earl Jones in the two lead roles, and a young Steven Spielberg, then finishing Jaws, as the film’s director.

  From the start, Richard was fundamental to Cohen’s dream of cracking the code of the crossover film. Cohen had been captivated by Richard’s performance in Lady Sings the Blues and so had instructed Barwood and Robbins to have Richard in mind while filling out the character of Charlie Snow, a Negro League player who hopes to break into the majors by passing himself off as Cuban. In the novel, the character is incidental, a bit of filigree; Barwood and Robbins enlarged him into a jive artist who takes few taboos seriously. Their Charlie tries not only to slip past the major league ban on black ballplayers (“Yo soy el baseballito supremo!”) but also to slip into the beds of white women (“Buenas knockers, señorita”). Though a figure of fun, he may also be the most dangerous player on the team: the one for whom the game extends well beyond the baseball diamond, and whose ambitions are not simply noble.

  Richard was slow to commit to the part that had been written for him. Officially the difficulties were logistical: schedules needed shuffling, the money needed to grow. For the shoot, Richard was uncomfortable staying with the rest of the cast and crew at the Hilton in Macon, Georgia, and preferred to rent his own home to guard his privacy. But he had another reason to dither, one that couldn’t be smoothed over or worked out in a contract. Bingo Long would reunite him with Billy Dee Williams, with whom he had had bad blood ever since he discovered that Williams had taken up with his then-girlfriend Patricia Heitman: in Richard’s mind, Williams had stolen his woman from him. With Franklin’s encouragement, he buried his misgivings and signed on the dotted line. Publicly, he trumpeted how wonderful it was to have “quality actors” and a “quality script”: “I don’t think anybody ever did a film like this.” He lent himself to an experiment in bringing black history to life, and to market.

  When Richard arrived on location in Georgia—“James Brown country,” he called it—in August 1975, newer misgivings joined his earlier ones. He quickly became suspicious of John Badham, the rookie director who had taken over the film after Steven Spielberg was delayed by unanticipated postproduction work on Jaws. Badham, who would direct Saturday Night Fever after Bingo Long, was by temperament and pedigree Richard’s opposite. “It’s hard to meet a whiter white man than John,” Cohen said. The stepson of an American army general, Badham had grown up in England and Alabama, then studied philosophy and drama at Yale. He was highly controlled—the sort of person, according to Cohen, who organized everything in his bedroom in parallel lines or at right angles—and awkwardly reticent. In one of their first conversations, Badham confessed to Richard that he had never seen a black person before he moved to Alabama, and that when, as a child, he caught his first glimpse, he had been stirred by fear. It was not the most graceful way to open up about his past with Richard, who afterward stormed over to Cohen and asked, “What kind of fucking cracker asshole did you hire to do this movie?”

  A wary relationship: Richard Pryor eyes Bingo Long director John Badham. (Courtesy of Bonnie Leeds)

  As shooting moved forward in Macon, Richard started to perceive a racial subtext in his interactions with Badham—a subtext to which Badham, who had never worked with a black cast, was oblivious. One night during filming, Badham asked Richard to jump off a balcony and onto a padded platform that was set several feet below. Richard wavered; he had a fear of heights, and here was this director eagerly pushing him to jump over the edge.

  Cut to: Cohen, in his production office at the Macon Hilton, receiving Badham’s distressed call from a pay phone. “Richard just left the set,” Badham reported, “and I think he said he’s going back to LA. And we have to shoot with him the rest of the night.” Cohen made a beeline for Richard’s rental house, in an affluent white area near Mercer University.

  “I hate that fucking cracker!” Richard vented to Cohen. “He don’t tell no nigger to jump and the nigger jump!” He was ready to quit the film and fly home, he said.

  Cohen tried to explain that there had to be a misunderstanding here—a first-time director mishandling his actors—but then spoke honestly about his own stake in the matter. “Do it for me,” he pleaded. “Don’t ruin my career. This means so much. I’ve fought so hard to get this movie on—a movie that a year ago Hollywood thought they would never make. We’re doing it for a major studio, it’s going to get a major release.”

  Richard relented. “I’m doing this for you,” he told Cohen. “So don’t forget it.”

  Convinced that Badham put too low a premium on the well-being of his black actors, Richard remained standoffish. On one occasion, Badham tried to line him up for a shot in which a knife was thrown at Richard’s character’s foot. Richard said, sensibly, “You don’t need me to be my foot”—a point that Badham could not dispute. “He was very concerned about his safety,” the director observed later, “and you can’t criticize him for that.”

  Near the end of the shoot, as if to fulfill Richard’s prophecies, the director attempted to execute a razzle-dazzle shot of the ballplayers’ motorcade as it sped through a country crossroads—and almost killed James Earl Jones. In Badham’s plan, the camera car would pass through the crossroads
on the path opposite the one taken by the ballplayers’ motorcade, pulling the viewer into a tense trajectory and heightening the sense of motion. But the driver of the camera car didn’t understand the plan in full—didn’t understand that he was supposed to beat the players’ motorcade to the intersection. He kept slowing down, and Jones, who led the motorcade, had to swerve off to the side to avoid a head-on collision between his motorcycle and the camera car. The crew rushed to Jones, who was unhurt. Badham apologized profusely, and Jones laughed it off.

  Richard had been hundreds of feet behind the near collision and, having stood on the brakes of his character’s yellow Franklin convertible, had come to a stop; he was safe. But he had also seen enough; he left the set in a black Cadillac and did not return that day.

  The next morning, at 6:30, when Badham strolled out of the Hilton to take his car to the set, a scowling Richard approached him and demanded an apology.

  “For what?” Badham said disingenuously.

  “You almost got me killed.”

  “No, it was James Earl.”

  “Well, you don’t care about me, so I’m going home.”

  Badham mentally calculated how many scenes Richard had left, then said, “Well, I can help you with that. If you do go home, just don’t fly out of the Macon airport. Go to Atlanta because it’s a lot easier.” And, having stood his ground, Badham stepped into the town car and drove off.

  Rob Cohen managed to persuade Richard to travel to the set anyway. They were scheduled to film a slapstick scene in which Richard’s character rips his pants while sliding into second base, revealing his colorful undershorts. As Charlie Snow, Richard was supposed to shrug off the indignity and laugh with the crowd. As Richard Pryor the actor, he was in no mood for shrugging.