Becoming Richard Pryor

by Scott Saul

  When, in the summer of 1976, Schrader pitched Richard a starring role alongside Harvey Keitel and Yaphet Kotto in a heist drama about three auto workers who rob their union local, Richard leapt at the chance. He idolized Robert De Niro and was eager to work with the screenwriter who had conjured Taxi Driver’s Travis Bickle. Schrader and his brother Leonard went to work tailoring for Richard the part of Zeke Brown, a workingman twitchy with desires for a better life. They put Richard’s comedy albums on heavy rotation and modeled Zeke’s talk and rhythms after Richard’s own. When they were done, Schrader felt it was inconceivable for anyone else to play the part. He and his brother had taken Richard’s stage persona, the trickster undone by his appetites, and moved that persona to the gritty and clanging floor of a factory in Detroit, where it took on a new weight.

  At its core, the film is a study in disintegration—the disintegration of friendship, the disintegration of idealism under the fire hose–like pressure of larger forces. The three workers at its center start with a complex and fragile bond. Richard’s Zeke is the live wire and schemer, a man who emits a pure surge of riotous energy. Feeling his debts, he pads his tax form with a few extra kids and hopes the IRS will never darken his door; frustrated with a locker door that has injured his pinky, he breaks up a listless union meeting with a fuming, hilarious monologue on his tribulations. Jerry (Harvey Keitel) is the laugher and the worrier. He loves Zeke’s jokes but would never crack a joke himself; he’s not that loose or cynical yet, and is holding down a second job to make ends meet. Smokey (Yaphet Kotto) is the smartest and strongest of the three, and also the most watchful. While Zeke blows his top at the union meeting, Smokey leans back and absorbs the show; he’s tight-lipped while others guffaw. It’s never clear how much these three like one another, but it’s clear that they need one another: who else can understand their gripes, the losing hands they’ve all been dealt? They’re motivated to rob their union by a common sense of desperation, which, unfortunately, turns out to be a weak solvent. Blue Collar played as working-class tragedy: the heist goes bad, friendships go sour, a man is killed, solidarity proves an illusion. Upon its release, the Village Voice called it “the single most overtly political movie made for a major studio in a decade.”

  As Schrader moved the film into production, he found it most useful to have Richard on board. When other studios refused to touch such a hard-hitting project, it was Richard’s risk-taking booster at Universal, Thom Mount, who agreed to cofinance and distribute it. And when Detroit’s automakers froze out Schrader from filming on location in their auto plants, it was Richard who, indirectly, saved the day. The wife of the owner of the Checker Motor Company had loved Silver Streak and convinced her husband to open his plant in Kalamazoo for what promised, in their minds, to be a fun production.

  The production was not fun. The contrast with Richard’s last two films—where he had happily collaborated with the easygoing (and black) Michael Schultz—could not have been more extreme. He told Schrader repeatedly, during the production, that it was “the most difficult, unpleasant and distasteful thing he had done in his life.”

  A director leaning on his actors: Harvey Keitel, Paul Schrader, Yaphet Kotto, and Richard Pryor on the set of Blue Collar. (Courtesy of Universal Pictures)

  Schrader himself called the experience of making Blue Collar “unrelentingly unpleasant” and likened it to trench warfare. The set was oppressively hot, the feeling there explosive. Scuffles between the three leads were a daily occurrence. “Right after you said ‘Cut,’ a fight would start,” remembered Schrader. After a few weeks, the three lead actors refused to speak with one another, and Schrader had to engage in “shuttle diplomacy, much like the Middle East, going from hotel room to hotel room, trailer to trailer, relaying each other’s feelings toward each other because they won’t speak directly.” The liberal intake of cocaine on set did little to lower its temperature. Twice Richard smashed a chair over the heads of an actor during the shoot—once over the head of Kotto, who was a little drunk and just fell down; another time, over the head of George Memmoli, who filed a one-million-dollar lawsuit against Richard for a fractured skull. Around the time his three main actors stopped speaking with one another, Schrader started crying uncontrollably on set. He was checked by Richard, who said, “You pussy—are you gonna be a man or what?”

  What had gone wrong? In some sense, the hostilities on set were part of Schrader’s grand strategy for his film:

  As a first-time director, I knew I wasn’t going to teach anybody how to act and I knew I wasn’t going to get a big star actor. So I went to three actors, each of whom was pushing for his career and each of whom was not independently bankable but who as a group were somehow bankable. Then I took all three of these bantam roosters, dropped them into the same pit and made sure that nobody got out first. After a couple of weeks, you can imagine what it got like down in that pit, because they each wanted to put their stamp on the film. In fact, it was a clash of egos which got transferred, as it always does, onto race.

  For Schrader, the actors’ cockfight was an experiment in controlled sadism, conducted for art’s sake. There was no small irony here: Blue Collar was a parable, he declared, about how “big organizations . . . get away with poorer working conditions, because everyone is sort of going at each other, everyone’s trying to outmaneuver his fellow worker.” As a director, he had adopted a similar strategy of provocation—setting actor against actor—without being in control of the consequences.

  For Richard, the tension with his fellow actors was a shock to his system. In his previous films, he had been the king of the scene stealers, often playing to a straight man or a group of actors who gave his lines extra bounce. In Blue Collar, partly because Schrader encouraged the rivalry, his costars viewed every scene as a zero-sum game, with every point to Richard debited straight from their personal accounts. Keitel and Kotto were, according to Schrader, “very trained, and very professional, and also very greedy. If they both ate and gorged themselves, and there was one piece of rice left on the table, they’d fight each other for it. So Richard had to come on the set every day absolutely prepared with improvs he’d worked out the night before, so he could fight. Because if he ever relaxed, Harvey or Yaphet would slip into the vacuum, and take the scene from him. And they would have no qualms about leaving him on the floor; they’d love that, as he would love to do it to them.”

  Apart from the matter of their competing egos, Richard and Harvey Keitel came to blows over their nearly opposite approaches to the craft of acting. Richard hated repeating himself and hated overthinking a role; he liked to surprise his director, his fellow actors, and even himself with a new twist on a scene. He exploded with energy and kept it up for four or five takes, then started waning. Keitel was more deliberate, and much slower to warm up. As a consequence, for his scenes with Richard, he needed to run through his scenes eight or nine times with a stand-in. Once Keitel was ready, the red-hot Richard would be brought in for his first take—and his ad libs would make a mess of Keitel’s thoughtful preparation. At one point, after a particularly inspired ad lib on Richard’s part, Keitel looked into the camera, went out of character, and deliberately spoiled the take. A split second later, Richard jumped on Keitel; fists flew; Richard’s bodyguard and Schrader dove into the scrum to pull the actors off each other. It was just another muggy, hot-tempered day on the set of Blue Collar.

  On top of Richard’s struggles with his costars and director was his struggle with the very character he was playing, the once-rebellious but ultimately accommodating Zeke Brown. He thought that his character flipped too easily from trickster to sellout—that Zeke risked being seen as a mere weasel rather than as a black man in a bind. He worried that if black audiences were to reject Zeke, they would be rejecting him, too. Schrader wasn’t sympathetic; he thought Richard worried too much about being likable, that he confused being an actor with being a public figure.

  Ultimately, though, Richard reshaped the last act of
the film in thoughtful and consequential ways. “If you’re going to imply that I’ve done something,” he suggested pointedly, “then the audience should see me do it so they aren’t left to imagine it for themselves.” A light went off in Schrader’s head, and he instantly wrote an extra scene in which Zeke confronts the union boss, then is pushed back into a corner. (Richard played it beautifully; he captured the poetry of a defeated soul without saying a word, just in the way he shut his eyes, then folded his hands over his face.) And Richard did much to deepen his next scene, a slow-burning tour de force in which Zeke explains his choice to Keitel’s character, Jerry. The scene was a mere three pages in the screenplay. It became five minutes long after the two actors elaborated it with their improvs. “If I gotta kiss ass,” Zeke explains to Jerry, “I’m gonna pick the ass I’m gonna kiss, and it ain’t gonna be the motherfuckin’ police because they ain’t gonna do nothing but shit in my face.” The words spill out quickly, but there’s a hush to his tone that suggests a new quality to his character: circumspection.

  Schrader, one might say, was both a horrible director and a marvelous director—horrible in how he made his actors suffer, marvelous in how he used and framed what his actors gave him. He had the good judgment to let his actors treat his script, when it served them, as if it were merely guideline writing. With Richard, Schrader allowed him to “set sail from the script, just take a good jump,” even though Richard’s spontaneity meant that Schrader had less “coverage” and less latitude in the editing room: “better to cut for the performance,” he concluded, “than have a smoothly cut film of blandness.” These improvisations meant that Blue Collar had a different texture from Schrader’s earlier films, a crackle to it. New York’s Molly Haskell observed that the film had “30 very funny lines,” which was “30 more than in any previous Schrader screenplay.”

  All told, Schrader created a dark-tinted working-class world in which the contradictions of Richard’s stage persona—his vulnerability and his aggression, his likability and his rascality, his seriousness and his refusal to take anything seriously—made perfect sense. In so many of his earlier movies, Richard played a cameo figure because there was no way to register the range of his stage act within the central premises of the film; he was an outlier. In Blue Collar, Richard had a setting that was close in spirit to the working-class Peoria in which he had grown up, the low-ceilinged world whose ethic he summed up as “work, pension, die.” As an actor, he could tap into—and flash across—his many moods.

  Take the shape-shifting scene in which destiny arrives at Zeke’s household in the form of a nebbishy IRS agent. Zeke begins by playing the affable host: “Always glad to help the government,” he says gamely. Then the agent sticks him with a $2,460 bill in penalties and late payments, and the fizz goes out of the conversation. Zeke looks queasy; he asks searchingly, “Man, where am I gonna get that kind of money? You’re talking about my life.” His wife brings in three of their neighbor’s kids, thus upping their total to the six he’s claimed as deductions, and he brightens for the performance: “start checking off them names,” he instructs the agent. When the agent refuses to play along, Zeke’s back to his vulnerable self: “I’m left with about thirty bucks after all the fucking bills are paid. Give me a break, will you, mister?” When the agent rebuffs him again (“I work for Uncle Sam”), the energy trapped within Zeke explodes: “Fuck Uncle Sam! They give the fuckin’ politicians a break! Agnew and them don’t pay shit! The workingman’s gotta pay every goddamn thing!” He pushes the agent out the door, but before the agent has left the premises, Zeke seems exhausted by the explosion and flooded by worry. His voice breaks on his last line: “If I had the navy and the marines behind me, I’d be a motherfucker too!” With another actor playing Zeke, this scene might have merely reinforced the ugly stereotype of the black man as tax cheat. But Richard’s Zeke was many things at once: a schemer, an open book, a powder keg, a wreck. It was fascinating to watch the play of his emotions.

  Perhaps the greatest surprise in Richard’s performance in Blue Collar was that, in tune with Schrader’s own temperament, Richard exposed the depressive within himself. It was a strong facet of his self that, for all his candor onstage, he’d kept hidden from his audiences. In the film’s most claustrophobic scene, the three friends sit on a couch after a night of bingeing on cocaine, booze, and women. For three long minutes, the camera remains fixed on them in their stillness. None of them looks the others in the eye; they’re close enough to be touching but pointedly alone. When Richard’s Zeke speaks, it’s to confess, under his breath, his sense of inadequacy: “Sometimes I get so depressed. I start thinking about the shit I promised Carolyn and shit I ain’t never going to be able to do, and I know a man’s supposed to take care of his family. I never was good with money, man. I’m just always broke. I can’t fuckin’ get the knack of that shit. God knows I tried.” Church bells toll in the distance; Keitel’s Jerry puffs on a final cigar; Kotto’s Smokey broods with heavy-lidded eyes. Zeke has named the desperation that is their common baseline. On that couch, they’ll start plotting to rob their union and, by reaching for a dream of release, throw their old lives away.

  On the couch: Smokey (Yaphet Kotto), Jerry (Harvey Keitel), and Zeke (Richard Pryor) in Blue Collar’s morning-after scene. (Courtesy of the author)

  The “couch scene” was the last scene filmed for Blue Collar. By that point, in mid-July, the movie’s leads disliked one another so much they couldn’t stand to make eye contact, and they disliked Schrader so much that they couldn’t bear to film standard cutaway shots. The scene was shot, by necessity, in one seemingly endless take: Schrader’s actors wouldn’t give him anything else. After Schrader said, “Cut,” Richard made for his car and drove off. The movie was over. In the can was an indelible film that took one of Richard’s great themes onstage, self-sabotage, and projected it onto a broader canvas, until it seemed like self-sabotage was the worrisome fate of the American working class.

  “It changed my life,” Richard said of his work on Blue Collar. “I had a whole struggle going on—getting that deep, revealing that pain.” According to Schrader, Richard later accused the director of putting him back on cocaine, a charge that Schrader dismissed as “a stretch.” Still, it was true that working on Blue Collar was a shattering experience for him, one that left him uncertain as to who he was or what he would become. Reflecting on his career and the way forward, he told one interviewer that no line of work was safe. His own bruised feelings were part of a bigger picture: “the world around us is crumbling to make way for new life.”

  CHAPTER 22

  * * *

  Giving Up Absolutely Nothing

  Los Angeles, 1977

  In early July, after another exhausting day on the set of Blue Collar, Richard returned home for a meeting with the creative team behind his TV series. The Richard Pryor Show was set to premiere in two months, and the meeting was framed as your average brainstorming session; a reporter for Newsweek sat in. After batting around ideas for the first of ten shows, Richard cut everyone off. “I don’t feel this in my heart. It just stops here,” he said, pointing to his head. “Two years ago there was great shit on TV. Now people walk around being outraged, numb from the shock.” He confessed to having an epiphany while watching comic Flip Wilson in a small role on The Six Million Dollar Man as a special guest star. Flip had recently been a giant, with his own TV show. Now he was chewed up and used up, a nonentity. “I don’t want that to happen to me,” Richard said.

  He started thinking aloud. “You know something? I don’t want to be on TV. I’m in a trap. I can’t do this—there ain’t no art.” He broke into tears. “I bit off more than I can chew. I was turning into a greedy person. They give you so much money you can’t refuse.” The creative dynamic in the room, he felt, was all wrong: “I need a straight, square person like Bob Ellison”—the esteemed script doctor, an alum of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, who had punched up Richard’s special and then been removed from the team
for the series. “I hated Bob Ellison’s motherfucking guts, but he made me work. Y’all love me, sit around nodding and smiling.”

  When a writer begged him to think about what the show might accomplish, Richard said, unforgettably, “You want to see me with my brains blown out? I’m gonna have to be ruthless here because of what it does to my life. I’m not stable enough. I don’t want to drink and I don’t want to snort and I can’t do it no other way.” He was pulling out of the show. That decision made, Richard announced it was time to relax. His housekeeper fetched a sock, filled with cocaine, that he kept hanging in his closet. Richard emptied it on the table and encouraged everyone to help themselves.

  Over the next several days, Richard discovered that it wasn’t so easy to walk away from NBC. His manager, David Franklin, had already invested a great deal of the network’s first payment in a parcel of Atlanta real estate. NBC, reeling from an especially poor season, didn’t cotton to having a hole in its new programming schedule. The show’s writers, with their own hopes for the series, hired a plane to buzz over Richard’s house with a banner that read “Surrender Richard.” After several weeks of negotiations with the network, Richard agreed to continue with the show; NBC agreed to whittle his commitment down from ten episodes to four, with the possibility of more if Richard wanted. Somewhere in the shuffle of summer, too, NBC seems to have decided to hedge its bets with Richard’s show: the network shifted it from 9:00 p.m. on Thursday to the more daunting time slot of 8:00 p.m. on Tuesday, where The Richard Pryor Show would now compete against ABC’s two nostalgia-fueled hits, Happy Days and Laverne and Shirley. It was an unlikely matchup that one columnist called “electronic hari kiri” for NBC: Richard facing the Fonz in America’s family hour. The series moved forward, with the first episode to be taped in late August.