Becoming Richard Pryor

by Scott Saul

  Director Melvin Van Peebles was the loser in the next skirmish that beset the film. He had wanted to thread an element of fantasy into the biopic, but several weeks into the shoot, Warner Bros. and Hannah Weinstein looked at the rushes and felt the film was rattling off course, with a tone too broadly satirical and stylized. Though radical in her politics, Weinstein was not drawn to formal experimentation. She was happy for Greased Lightning to deal forthrightly with the hardships of black life, or to underscore how poor blacks and poor whites could make common cause, but didn’t cotton to Van Peebles’s ironic vision, and she removed him from the film.

  The production came to a standstill; Richard was now a leading man without a director. He phoned Michael Schultz, who had since returned to LA, and asked him to save the movie. Schultz hesitated—he was deep into the preproduction work on Which Way Is Up?—then reconsidered. “Here’s my star,” he thought. “I don’t want him to be in a movie that’s going to blow. I don’t want him to look bad. I guess I’ll have to go do it.” Schultz told the press that, in his conception, Greased Lightning would now follow in the lines of Burt Reynolds’s White Lightning, but with more of a comic touch—music, no doubt, to the ears of Weinstein and Warner Bros. Schultz arrived in Madison, took stock, and decided there was little he could salvage from Van Peebles’s footage; he went on to reshoot 80 percent of it.

  Fortunately, Schultz had a star who was generally living outside his “crazy nigger” mystique—and who, when he strayed, had a costar who kept him in line. Pam Grier, cast as Wendell’s wife, Mary, arrived on the set one morning in August, eager to work with Richard for the first time. Then she waited. The sweltering Georgia heat melted her makeup; her dress became wet with sweat. At two o’clock, Richard strolled in and, instead of moving straight into a rehearsal of their scene together, took out a fork and teasingly poked at her eye. Grier snapped: she smacked the fork out of his hand and gave him a tongue-lashing.

  “This is an opportunity for you to be a leading man and show what you can do, and you’re going to mess with this,” she said. “Do you know your lines?”

  “No, not . . .” Richard fumbled.

  “If not, I’ll come back when you’re ready,” Grier said, and peeled off for her dressing room. As she reflected later, she could not have chosen a better way to impress, or seduce, Richard: “I walked off and respected myself, and that’s when he fell in love with me.” During the shoot, they were affectionate, curious to get to know one another outside their respective mystiques. “Pam Grier, you’re just a farmer. A hick,” Richard told her, surprised to glimpse the person behind the persona; she was far from the badass vigilante character he knew from screen roles like Foxy Brown and Coffy. In their screen time together, too, they flirted with finding their less sensational selves.

  Aware of all he had to learn, Richard was everywhere looking to add more nuance to his part. He studied the moves of his costar Beau Bridges, who played Hutch, a poor white race car driver who begins as Scott’s competitor and ends as his boon companion. “He was beautiful,” Richard said of Bridges. “I’d watch him in a close-up and want to kill him, he was so good. He taught me a lot about acting in front of the camera.” Richard received another sort of acting tutorial from the race car drivers he met on set—among them Wendell Scott, who served as the film’s technical adviser. Richard befriended the man whom he was playing on-screen, and absorbed Scott’s geniality. Scott’s attitude “was different from how I would do it as a black man today,” Richard offered, “because I would have taken a shotgun with me. And he don’t have none of that feeling.”

  All this—Richard’s affection for Grier and Bridges, his sense of Scott and the racing world he inhabited—filtered into his performance, which was understated and surprisingly modulated. His Wendell Scott is a dreamer who comes fully alive only when he’s hurtling down a road or a track, a sweet soul who lives for an adrenaline rush but not for revenge. Off the track and in the company of family and friends, he’s kind and straight-ahead. With his white pal Hutch, for instance, he has a casual, unforced intimacy—nothing like the electric agitation between Silver Streak’s Grover Muldoon and George Caldwell. Wendell and Hutch have a bottom-dog connection: they love the sound of humming engines while sensing, at the same time, that their lives are as busted up as the stock cars they’re endlessly rebuilding.

  Behind the wheel, Richard’s Wendell is more animated, bringing a dash of style and good-natured rebelliousness to the task at hand. At his first racing scene, he is a dandy among the grease monkeys, with a newsboy’s cap and a long white scarf draped around his neck. When the good ol’ boy owner of the racetrack instructs him, as if talking to a small child, about the basics of racing (“One time around is a lap”), Scott calls him “captain” and “sir” with a gamesome spirit: he’s involved in a delicate bit of acting, mocking the owner to himself but not so overtly that he trips off any suspicions. White men in positions of authority are pitiable giants to him, so powerful and yet so dumb. He wants to get on with the race. And when white race car drivers push him off the track and nearly kill him, he still wants to get on with it—to coax his smoking and sputtering mess of a car back on the track and across the finish line. Richard’s Wendell flickers with a shrewd intelligence, but at his core, he’s driven by a simple, uncomplicated love for his sport.

  When Greased Lightning’s production wrapped in September, Richard had reason to be proud of how he’d handled his first starring role. There was nothing Willie Best–like to his part; and he had defied the rumors of his unreliability and held himself together. Still, a curious irony trailed his debut as a leading man. He had ascended with a role that was as remote from the jagged power of his stand-up comedy as any in his career. His Wendell Scott is free of raunch, free of neuroses, free of cutting edges—as soft and lovable as Richard’s “bicentennial nigger” was sharp and disturbing. And that was how Hannah Weinstein liked it: when, in the coming months, Michael Schultz tried to make the film more dynamic in its editing, he suffered a similar fate to that of Melvin Van Peebles. Weinstein fired Schultz’s editor and took over the film, reshaping it according to what Schultz called “the soap opera style of moviemaking,” with “a lot of emphasis on the family and on the boring parts of the picture.” All this might have made the character of Wendell Scott closer to the real-life Wendell Scott, who by all reports was a good-natured family man, but it did not draw him closer to the real-life Richard, or to the wellsprings of his comedy.

  While directing Greased Lightning in Georgia, Schultz looked ahead to Which Way Is Up?, already in preproduction, and announced to the trade press, with some bite, that “I want to make certain that Richard Pryor . . . has an opportunity to give full play to his comedic talents, and those talents can be very political, and very raunchy. I plan to see his humor is not castrated.” For several years, Schultz had conceived of his sex farce as Richard’s Hollywood breakthrough: “the whole idea of this picture is to give Richard’s talent a vehicle to express itself.” By late summer, though, Schultz had a problem on his hands. Richard’s friend Cecil Brown had delivered a screenplay that was too prolix—a novelist’s idea of a screenplay—and, worst of all from Schultz’s perspective, simply not funny. The director brought in Carl Gottlieb, a comedy writer who had just taken an unwieldy script about a shark and, by tightening it and giving its dialogue an improvisational flavor, had helped turn it into Jaws. Perhaps if he worked closely with Richard, Gottlieb could cast a similar spell on Which Way.

  So, in the fall of 1976, Richard set off with Gottlieb for a ten-day vacation at a villa in Barbados. The assignment: to project the characters in Richard’s head onto the page, with their profane spirits fully intact.

  CHAPTER 21

  * * *

  A Man of Parts

  Barbados, Los Angeles, industrial Michigan, 1976–1977

  The Richard who arrived in Barbados could feel that the pieces of his life were finally coming together—that he’d passed through the whi
rlwind and been deposited by a gentle hand on a sun-drenched shore.

  At his side was Pam Grier, who, after the shooting of Greased Lightning, had transitioned from costar to inamorata, and brought a loving sense of structure to his life. With her support, Richard had committed to a new morning regimen. No more sleeping in until two in the afternoon; now he breakfasted on eggs, bacon, freshly made oatmeal, and freshly squeezed juice, then dashed off to the tennis court for a workout with his trainer. Self-improvement was the order of the day—and not just for his body. Having confessed to Pam that, with his eighth-grade education, it was hard for him to read fluently, he enlisted her to coach and support him. He dreamed big while staying true to his sensibility. “I heard that War and Peace is the hardest motherfuckin’ novel to read,” he told her. “I’m gonna read it. If I can’t read it, it’s so damned big, at least I can kill someone with it. Use it as a weapon.” The circle of his ambition was expanding. He signed on to star in a number of literary adaptations—Cyrano de Bergerac, Arsenic and Old Lace, even George Orwell’s Animal Farm.

  In Barbados, Richard was the picture of physical and mental discipline. He woke up, dressed himself in tennis whites all the way down to his knee socks and sneakers, and played some games at a nearby court; he took a light lunch (salad, melon) on the terrace of the villa they’d rented; he brainstormed with Carl Gottlieb about Which Way Is Up? in the afternoon; he went out for a nice dinner with Pam, Carl, and Carl’s wife. Then he retired for the evening and began the cycle anew the next morning. He was relaxed and in fine fettle. Once, he broke into a high singsong voice, “As mayor of the Munchkin City”—and entertained Carl with a flawless rendition of the entire Munchkin sequence from The Wizard of Oz.

  More than costars: Richard Pryor and Pam Grier, circa 1977. (Courtesy of Getty Images)

  In their afternoons together, Richard and Carl had a creative project into which they could sink their teeth. Wertmüller’s The Seduction of Mimi was a ripe Italian parable about the idiocy of machismo: its title character was a bumbler in politics and love, confused enough to become, in turn, a Communist and a tool of the Mafia, and foolish enough to think that he can enter the bedrooms of three different women without paying a price for his conniving. But Mimi was also inimitably Italian in its plotting and style, and very far from the Hollywood mode of filmmaking, even the “New Hollywood” mode of filmmaking. The main character’s buffoonery was rooted in the tradition of the commedia dell’arte, with its hopelessly dumb schemers. And Wertmüller, who apprenticed under Fellini, loved to populate her casts with oversize characters who spilled into the realm of the grotesque: at one point in Mimi, she aimed a fish-eye lens at the naked and flabby posterior of an overweight actress, so as to fill the screen with it. From Gottlieb’s point of view, Mimi had “enormous story gaps, covered by music and montage. I mean real flaws.”

  Adapting Mimi, then, was no simple affair. It meant translating commedia dell’arte into the funky idiom of black American comedy, and Italian art house cinema into Hollywood entertainment. Michael Schultz had already established, with Cecil Brown’s help, some of the coordinates of the translation. Mimi’s job as a laborer in the quarries of Sicily would become Leroy Jones’s job as a fruit picker in the fields of Central California; the Communist struggle would become the migrant farmworkers’ struggle; and the Mafia-run world of Italy would become the corporate-run world of America. Now Richard and Carl worked to fill in the other blanks: they needed to Pryor-ize the film’s characters—to rewrite Mimi as a black Everyman, to turn Mimi’s father into a version of Mudbone, and to turn Mimi’s rival into a version of Richard’s loquacious reverend.

  Carl ran a tape recorder while he and Richard let their imaginations unspool. Carl had a background in improv—he had been involved for half a decade with the political comedy troupe the Committee—and the two played through the script as if it were an extended improv game. “It was a very healthy collaboration because [Richard] was very intent on making the movie work,” Gottlieb remembered. Unlike many actors, Richard submerged his ego and was unconcerned with the number of lines allotted to his character.

  Their creative idyll was interrupted by a medical emergency. Pam’s temperature spiked; her lips became swollen, part of a severe allergic reaction to some shellfish she’d eaten. Richard, who often had much in common with the triple-timing Mimi, stayed by her side. He applied cold compresses to her forehead and reassured her, “It’s going to be alright, baby” (and it was: an American doctor arrived the next day to give her an injection, which stabilized her). Nervously but fully, Richard inhabited the role of caretaker—another new leaf turning over. Upon Pam’s recovery, the two couples returned to LA, Carl having everything he needed—hours of taped improvisations—for the rewrite.

  When Carl Gottlieb delivered his revised script for Which Way Is Up?, the cynicism of Wertmüller’s original had melted away, and Richard was working on the most explicitly political movie of his career. The farmworkers’ union now gave the movie its moral thrust; it was the larger solution to a world where blacks and Latinos worked for poverty wages in the fields while company bosses snaked around in limos, surrounded themselves with goons, and ordered hits on union leaders. The union’s adversary in the film is Agrico Industries, a hydra-headed conglomerate whose motto is “We Grow on You” and whose top executive has the all-white suit and decadent manners of a southern plantation owner.

  Schultz, meanwhile, was trying to make his film engagé in other ways. Averse to having his farmworkers played by “Hollywood extras with their sunglasses,” he invited El Teatro Campesino, a radical theater group affiliated with the United Farm Workers, to play Latino characters and rewrite any farmworker dialogue that sounded false. Universal resisted the idea; Schultz won the argument by warning the studio, “I don’t want to do a phony representation of [the farmworkers’ movement] and neither do you. Because if you do, then theaters are going to get burned.” Meanwhile, he assembled a crew that breathed in the spirit of la causa. It was high on youthful energy and low on studio veterans—the technicians who, as Gottlieb summed them up, were “the old farts in the baseball caps, named Red and Curly and Mack and Shorty.” The crew’s average age was thirty-two; many were black, Chicano, or female, the sort of people who wouldn’t have been hired on a production ten years earlier. Presiding over the camera operators was cinematographer John Alonzo (Harold and Maude, Chinatown), himself the child of Mexican migrant workers.

  As Which Way Is Up? approached its first day of filming in late 1976, Schultz took another creative risk: he asked Richard to play all three characters inspired by his stand-up—father, son, and holy roller—in the sort of virtuosic turn associated with British actors Alec Guinness (Kind Hearts and Coronets) and Peter Sellers (Dr. Strangelove). If Richard accepted the challenge, it would mean not just that he’d be working harder—filming scenes multiple times, with stand-ins—but also that he’d be carrying a heavier emotional load.

  In the scenes between the diffident Leroy and his cocksure father Rufus, he would be replaying a dynamic from his own past, the Peoria of the early 1960s, when as a young man he shared a roof with his father Buck. Rufus might have been originally conceived as a takeoff on Mudbone, but he ended up an amalgam of Mudbone and Buck, with the mannerisms of the former and the harsh swagger of the latter. In the final film, he’s a nonstop editorialist whose favorite subject is his son’s shortcomings. “Pop, I’m in the paper!” Leroy enthuses as if starstruck with himself, the day after he falls into the arms of a Cesar Chavez–like activist. “You done tore your ass now, boy!” Rufus responds, deflating his son like a toy balloon. When Leroy mutters to Annie Mae, “I hope my kids ain’t gonna be like him,” Rufus slips in the dagger: “Nigger, you got to get some pussy before you can have some kids!” Leroy flinches; Rufus chuckles. “Shit, I’m knockin’ the bottom out of mine.” As a father, he’s accustomed to getting the last word and the last laugh.

  Richard accepted all the challenges of Which Way
Is Up?—of carrying the movie in triplicate; of revisiting the sore spots of his past and transforming them into comedy. In December 1976, just before filming began, he made another professional gamble: he committed to produce for NBC a special and twelve half hours of other unspecified programming, despite his reservations about TV work. Given how NBC was, for the first time in its history, ranked last among the major networks, he believed that he could defeat the network censors in any skirmishes. “I’m just going to say, ‘Here’s the shit, take it or leave it.’ NBC will go for anything right now because they’re in trouble,” he predicted.

  His future seemed so bright that even the prospect of his own crack-up caused him no anxiety. “I’m going to be big. What I’m happy about is I don’t owe nobody, and I got enough money to go crazy with. If I have a nervous breakdown, I can be in a private hospital.”

  The set of Which Way Is Up? was kept closed, the usual forbidding sign (“No Admittance—Cast and Crew Only”) embellished with a red skull and crossbones. Time, Newsweek, and the Washington Post pestered Universal to interview the film’s players, to no avail. The growers put in calls to the studio, anxious how the film would represent their interests, and also were put off. Schultz played his cards close to his vest; he was just making “a harmless little comedy,” he said. He didn’t want to rile anyone until he’d pulled off the film’s tight shooting schedule: “minor miracles in 33 days,” he called it.