Becoming Richard Pryor

by Scott Saul

  Even Paramount seems to have realized that the power of Richard’s performance shifted Silver Streak’s center of gravity: the final film worked better as a “bromance” than as a standard romantic comedy. A month after its release—as the film defied lukewarm reviews by hauling in tens of millions, on its way to becoming the eighth-highest-grossing film of the year—Paramount’s full-page New York Times ad for Silver Streak eliminated Jill Clayburgh from view and promoted Richard to top billing instead: “Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor take a train ride from hilarity to mystery and back again.” So it was that, with some sleight of hand and considerable finesse, Richard achieved his first starring role in Hollywood. Silver Streak represented the culmination of a strategy he had refined with Lady Sings the Blues and Wattstax: of elaborating a cameo until it was no mere cameo but magnetized everything around it.

  Privately, Richard was surprisingly blasé about his first pairing with Wilder. During Silver Streak’s production, he shut himself up in his dressing room with a legal pad and pencil, and—as if to compensate for how he felt pigeonholed by Hollywood—wrote a screenplay in which God came down to earth as a black man. (Try turning that into a Willie Best role!) The wound inflicted by Blazing Saddles, which might have paired him in a buddy comedy with Wilder three years earlier, was still fresh. As they wrapped up filming in LA, Mel Brooks had visited his close friend Gene and hammed it up with his old cowriter Richard. He clinched Richard around the neck and joked that the comic was “wonderful and talented” despite the fact that he wasn’t Jewish. Richard smiled in Brooks and Wilder’s presence, but once they were gone, he fell on his dressing room bed with a sneer.

  He was prepared to be disappointed by whites—prepared to be embraced and then told that he didn’t belong and shown the door. After Silver Streak, he kept speaking sharply about how he’d known betrayal. “Don’t trust too many white folks,” he told a black journalist. “[S]tay black in your heart, keep your black friends around you always, ’cause white folks will make you feel that everything is always alright and then they will chop your head off.”

  Such was the complexity of Richard Pryor: on-screen he could make interracial friendship palpable and believable as never before; off-screen, he warned blacks of the perils of ever trusting whites. Silver Streak turned Richard into a bankable Hollywood star. It was the first of four buddy comedies he completed with Gene Wilder; their scene together in the men’s room became a classic, a touchstone in the comedy of racial manners, and was perhaps the most prominent vehicle through which Richard tutored a generation of would-be white hipsters to loosen up, go with the flow, and find the rhythm within them. Yet he seemed to want to forget that he’d ever starred in the film. He summed up his experience on it to the New York Times with a dismissive quip: “I was looking to hustle, and I got hustled.” In his memoir, he mentions Silver Streak only glancingly, as a film to which he didn’t give his all. Although some imagined that, given his on-screen chemistry with Wilder, the two had to be friends off-screen, in fact they never met outside the context of their working relationship.

  When, in 1979, Richard’s manager, David Franklin, pressed him to reunite with Wilder for the film that became Stir Crazy, the greatest moneymaker of Richard’s career, the comic resisted. “It didn’t seem like an interesting movie,” he said. To which Franklin responded that the studio was offering Richard a million dollars for the part. Richard still was unconvinced.

  “Isn’t a million dollars enough reason?” Franklin asked.

  “Yes, I guess so,” said Richard. He felt dragged into the buddy movies that were a crucial piece of his Hollywood legacy. They became his box office calling card, but he longed for another.

  As Silver Streak wrapped up shooting in June 1976, Richard sensed a new world of possibility opening up for him as an actor. He was wooed in quick succession by a brace of Hollywood dissidents, each of whom had taken his or her own eccentric path from the streets to the producer’s suite or director’s chair. Having maneuvered their way into the Hollywood system, they were collectively willing to wager millions of dollars that they could slip Richard through its cracks.

  First on Richard’s dance card was producer Hannah Weinstein, who was putting together a biopic about Wendell Scott, the black stock car racer who broke the NASCAR color bar in 1950s Virginia. The sixty-four-year-old Weinstein shared some of Scott’s courage: she was gumption personified—a “woman with no patience for trifles,” wrote the Los Angeles Times—and a longtime activist. In the 1930s and ’40s she had been a speechwriter and campaign organizer for liberal standard-bearers like Fiorello La Guardia and Henry Wallace. In the 1950s, upon migrating to England, she had set up a thriving production company and secretly hired screenwriters who’d been blacklisted in the United States for associating with the Communist Party. She came to Richard as an ambassador of Third World Cinema, the production company she’d launched with black actors Ossie Davis, James Earl Jones, and Diana Sands in 1971, with the mission of opening up the media industries. By 1976, Third World had ushered two hundred people of color into New York’s technical unions—quite the achievement, given that the unions had begun with a mere six blacks and two Latinos out of six thousand members. But Third World had less to show for itself as an actual production company. Its output was limited to 1973’s Claudine, a modest and affecting drama about a welfare mother who falls in love with a sanitation worker.

  In her meeting with Richard, Weinstein pitched the film that would become Greased Lightning. Melvin Van Peebles, whose Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song had so inspired Richard in Berkeley, would be his director. (It was Van Peebles, in fact, who had suggested Richard for the movie.) She started listing the actors whom she saw filling out the picture, and when she dropped the name of Cleavon Little, Richard immediately assumed, perhaps from his experience with Blazing Saddles, that Little would play the role of Wendell Scott.

  “Who do you want me to play?” he asked.

  Weinstein stared at Richard as if he were obtuse. “The lead. You’re going to play Wendell Scott.”

  Richard was stunned. “Well, that fucked me up,” he recalled. “I was blown away when a movie that seemed to have substance came along and the producers wanted me to star.” He swallowed his misgivings and committed to the film in late June, with production set to begin a mere three weeks away, in Georgia.

  While preparing for the role of Wendell Scott, Richard finalized plans to head up a still more audacious project, what became the film Which Way Is Up?. Producer Steve Krantz and director Michael Schultz came to him with the idea of translating Lina Wertmüller’s The Seduction of Mimi, an Italian sex-and-politics satire that had been an art house favorite, into the context of black life in the United States. Schultz, the up-and-coming black director of the moment, was a familiar face to Richard, and made for a compelling pitchman. Richard had thought of Schultz as his director of choice for The Black Stranger, his “voodoo western,” and had even put up Schultz and his wife, upon their arrival in Los Angeles, in a small Malibu condo he was renting on the side.

  Schultz had a calm demeanor, working-class roots, and, most important, a vision for black filmmaking that harmonized with Richard’s own. Having cut his teeth as a director on plays, by the likes of Sam Shepard and Derek Walcott, that experimented with odd tonalities, Schultz wanted to depart from the models offered either by blaxploitation films (too lurid) or Sidney Poitier’s ghetto comedies (too tame). “My theory is that you can make just as exciting films by dealing with reality, not fantasy,” he told the Hollywood Reporter in 1975. Cooley High, an alternately joyful and sober treatment of black high school life in Chicago, was his breakthrough film. His next, Car Wash, likewise marbled together feelings of joy and entrapment. On the one hand, it was a funky pick-me-up, synchronizing a single day at a Los Angeles car wash to a pumping Norman Whitfield soundtrack. On the other—with its pageant of car wash workers moving in and out of the foreground, seeking, with some desperation, their piece of action�
�it was an inner-city version of Robert Altman’s Nashville. In its closing scene the militant Abdullah says, with tears on his face, “I know I’m not crazy, but every day I have to come here and watch this clown show. Sometimes I just can’t take it.”

  For Car Wash, Schultz had recruited Richard for a day player cameo, one that both lightened the film’s mood and gave texture to its politics. As Daddy Rich, an evangelist who arrives in a gleaming limousine bearing the license plate TITHE, Richard turns the car wash workers into an instant congregation by preaching the gospel of Mammon with utter conviction. He is the clown prince of its clown show—and, consequently, is resisted by Abdullah, who calls him out as a pimp in preacher’s clothing.

  After Car Wash, Richard was game for another collaboration with Schultz, and he signed on for the Wertmüller adaptation. To seal their friendship, he presented Schultz with a provocative gift: a rifle with Schultz’s name engraved on it, accompanied by a note that read, “I hope you can shoot this better than you can shoot movies.” Universal picked up the film; production was set for October, just two months after Greased Lightning wrapped. Richard swung the job of adapting Wertmüller’s scenario to his Berkeley comrade Cecil Brown, even though Brown had little track record as a screenwriter. As he had done with Saturday Night, Richard was using his influence to open up the industry, to help those who had helped him.

  Richard’s successes with Weinstein and Schultz were preludes to the most consequential business meeting of his summer, with Universal’s Thom Mount. By the time he took the meeting, around the beginning of July, Richard was relaxed enough to lounge on a long white sofa while Mount and Richard’s manager, David Franklin, hashed out the terms of his future in Hollywood. Mount was all of twenty-eight years old, and a veteran of the sixties. As a college student in North Carolina, he had devoted himself to the Southern Students Organizing Committee, a New Left group whose emblem showed black and white hands clasped together against the background of a Confederate flag. He had been an artist in SoHo, a writer for the Liberation News Service, and an editor for the Indochina Peace Campaign, an antiwar group that saw the Vietnam conflict as “the focal point of a worldwide struggle against imperialism.” Now Mount was empowered to represent Universal, a Hollywood studio with a particular reputation for stuffiness; his job was, in part, to unstuff its shirt. Since coming to Universal, he had sponsored two films with largely black casts, Bingo Long and Car Wash, and a number of movies with absolutely no aspirations to social significance. When he met Richard, he had in his pipeline the Burt Reynolds vehicle Smokey and the Bandit, of which he later said, “It is pure junk food, but I like Big Macs and Coca-Cola. They mean something to me.”

  Mount, then, was some combination of activist, populist, and—an essential requirement for his job—opportunist. Richard was an opportunity he felt compelled to seize. Under the unprecedented terms of the deal he struck with Richard, Pryor was guaranteed an eye-popping three million dollars over the next four years. In return, the actor-comedian was obligated to give Universal “first right of refusal” for his creative ideas on six movies. He had the choice of starring in these movies or not; if he did star, he would earn a share of the movie’s profits. Should he need help fleshing out his story ideas into a script, Universal would pay a handsome salary to both Richard and the screenwriter collaborating with him. And if Richard chose to act in films for other studios while fulfilling the terms of his Universal contract, that was fine.

  The contract was a watershed in Richard’s career: an incredible act of faith in his abilities as a writer and performer, not to mention his power as a crossover draw. “We believe it is possible to make money on class A pictures that not only star black people, but are made by black people,” Mount told a reporter, explaining the deal as a breakthrough in industry thinking. To which Richard rejoined, “Well, I guess that means if these movies don’t make money a whole lot of niggers gonna be in trouble.”

  A hazy sense of experimentation was in the air in Hollywood. Soon after Mount negotiated the multipicture deal, New West magazine profiled him as one of Hollywood’s “baby moguls,” its “new power elite.” Mount was, the article reported, a fresh sort of studio executive, the kind who might wear blue jeans with his tux and sport an old SDS button at the opening of a film festival. Still, it was unclear what sort of changes, outside the wardrobe choices of its executive class, the baby moguls would bring to Hollywood. According to some, the baby moguls would ventilate Hollywood with the spirit of the sixties. “That whole period taught me not to be frightened,” said Lisa Weinstein, a young vice president at Twentieth Century–Fox (and Hannah Weinstein’s daughter). “It was great training. After a bayonet’s stared you up your nose, what’s to be scared of taking risks?” Other observers were more skeptical. “I often wondered where all the student radicals would go when they grew up,” said one. “Now I know. They came to a place where they never have to grow up.”

  For Richard, the question of Hollywood’s openness to risk took a more personal form: how much, as he started carrying films, would he be made to adapt to Hollywood? And how much would Hollywood be made to adapt to him?

  With so much at stake in his career, Richard tried to turn over a new leaf. “I’m through actively messing with my body,” he said. He embraced a regimen of “holistic living,” hoping to become more fit and trim. Health foods and vitamins were in; cocaine was out. When his Berkeley buddy Claude Brown visited him in his dressing room at a concert, he proudly opened his refrigerator to display what seemed like thirty-some quarts of orange juice.

  While he flushed his system clean with OJ, Richard faced a tight deadline. Given his start date on Greased Lightning and the terms of his contract with Warner Bros., he had less than two weeks to conceive and produce a new album for the label. Bicentennial Nigger, the album that he rushed into existence, is his most uneven, padded with undeveloped riffs on his teenage gang in Peoria and lengthy shout-outs to black celebrities in his audience. “It’s not my best work,” he complained to a reporter upon its release. “I’m never going to sign a multirecord contract like that again.” But it is also his most hard-edged and conceptual album, with several tracks skewering from different angles the patriotic hoopla of America’s bicentennial. The album’s cover brilliantly captured the slant of Richard’s alternative history. It depicted Richard in ten incarnations—as policeman, convict, hustler, boxer, reverend, slave, and so on—with all the incarnations bound together in leg irons fastened by Uncle Sam himself. Richard might contain a multitude in himself, the image suggested, but no matter how much he multiplied himself onstage, Uncle Sam always held the power to yank his chain.

  The title track was a stick of dynamite with a slow fuse. “You all know how black humor started,” Richard said. “It started in the slave ships. A cat was on his way over here, rowing. And a dude said, ‘What are you laughing at?’ ‘Yesterday I was a king.’” He connected the dots between that slave ship and the state of black America in 1976:

  They’re having a bicentennial. Two hundred years! Gonna have a bicentennial nigger. They will—they’ll have some nigger two hundred years old in blackface, with stars and stripes on his forehead.

  In the wheezy voice of his bicentennial minstrel, Richard said, “I used to live to be one hundred and fifty. Now I dies of the high blood pressure by the time I’m fifty-two, yuk yuk yuk. And that thrills me to death.” He recounted the horrors visited upon black Americans—the Middle Passage, the separation of families under slavery—as if they were all a hilarious joke, with yuk-yuks punctuating every sentence. “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” (an unusual in-studio touch) surged in the background, the dissonant soundtrack to black suffering. “Y’all probably done forgot about it,” he said, still in that minstrel chuckle, before speaking normally, truthfully, as if for the first time: “But I ain’t never gonna forget.”

  Silence. The end—of the track and the album. It’s hard to think of any other “comedy” record that closes with such a
head-snapping reckoning.

  While Richard saw the last two hundred years of American history as a blackface horror show, he also wondered if the prospects for the next two hundred were equally bleak. “Hey, Jack, saw Logan’s Run the other day,” Richard riffed in one of the Bicentennial Nigger shows. “Twenty-third century, but there weren’t no niggers in it. Guess they’re not planning for us to be around.” Then a kicker: “That’s why we got to make movies.” Summoning himself to that task, he planned, after Bicentennial Nigger, to stick to a three-year moratorium on stand-up so that he could make his mark on Hollywood. “I don’t really want to go around the country playing clubs, seeing cities. I did that already. I have this new house. I want to stay put and do films,” he told a reporter.

  A few weeks later, he was flying to Madison, Georgia, to step into his first role as leading man. Perhaps Third World Cinema could break the old American pattern.

  The production of Greased Lightning was soon full of drama, but in a change of pace, Richard was not its main instigator. Nervous about carrying a film—and especially worried about how he could absorb a part with so many lines—he aimed to stay on the straight and narrow. He brought his grandmother Marie out to Madison to “take care of things” and, implicitly, keep him in line. He settled with her in a farmhouse on the city’s rural outskirts and in his downtime lived a rusticated life, wiling away the hours fishing, or setting off firecrackers, or hunting. He savored where his career had taken him. “When I was a kid,” he told an interviewer while making the film, “I always said I would be in the movies one day, and damned if I didn’t make it. Sometimes I just sit home and look out the window and say, ‘Daaaammmmmm!’ ” On the set, he was often in the same reflective mood: when waiting for his scenes, he would pull over a chair and sit under a tree.

  Given Richard’s relative mellowness, Greased Lightning’s disturbances at first came from other sources. When the film’s largely black cast and crew arrived in Madison, local whites rebelled. They “were creating all kinds of havoc,” recalled Michael Schultz, who visited Richard in the early days of shooting to confab about Which Way Is Up?. According to Schultz, it took the intervention of the town’s white sheriff to calm the waters. “‘Be cool,’” Schultz remembered him saying, “‘these niggers are gonna be out of here in a couple of weeks. Y’all just be cool, it’s a lot of money.’”