Becoming Richard Pryor (40 page)

“Who fuckin’ did this to you?” Richard shouted. “I’ll kill the motherfucker!”

A
fter his work on
Lady Sings the Blues
, Richard spent the next six months settling with Patricia in their modest cottage on the grounds of Yamashiro. For all the brashness of his personal style, Richard was attracted to the serenity of Japanese gardens. At night, in his more solitary moods, he would pace around the restaurant’s expansive grounds in a Japanese jacket and wooden clogs, the lights of Los Angeles spread out before him as he weaved through the gardens’ concentric paths. There was no way for guests to drive up to the cottage entrance, and
Richard appreciated the extra bit of isolation; it was quiet, private.

Then writer Norman Steinberg called with an intriguing proposal, and Richard was whisked out of his isolation and into the Judeo-comic maelstrom that surrounded a short man by the name of Mel Brooks. Brooks had a problem on his hands, for which, he thought, Richard was the solution. Brooks was putting together a send-up of the Western for Warner Bros., in which the arrival of a hip black sheriff in town would expose all the clichés and double-talk of Hollywood’s “Old West.” “I decided that this would be a surrealist epic,” Brooks said of the project that became
Blazing Saddles.
“It was time to take two eyes, the way Picasso had done it, and put them on one side of the nose, because the official movie portrait of the West was simply a lie.”

When he reached out to Richard via Steinberg, Brooks had already assembled three Jewish writers to collaborate on the screenplay, and sensed he needed a black writer to complete his team. “If you have three Jews in a room,” explained Andrew Bergman, who had written the original scenario and was the first writer to join Brooks’s team, “you’re going to be very skittish about writing jokes about a black man—what’s permissible, what isn’t permissible. . . . Richie gave us license, which was an enormous gift.” Brooks was more specific on why he needed Richard: “I said, ‘I can’t say the
N
-word. I need him—he has to bless it. I need a black guy to bless that word.’”

For his part, Richard was thrilled. As a child, he had been enamored of B-Western star Lash LaRue, with his stylish black cowboy suit and whip-snapping panache, and as a teenager, he had fallen in love with Sid Caesar through
Our Show of Shows
, whose stable of writers famously included Brooks, Carl Reiner, Neil Simon, and Woody Allen. Now these two early love affairs were reawakened: Richard had the chance to create a cockeyed Western with an actual black cowboy at its center, and to do so with one of the creative geniuses behind the TV show he’d loved. Even better, Brooks was seeking to recapture, in his writers’ room, the formula he felt had worked so well on
Our Show of Shows
: “lock a bunch of weirdos up together and come up
with a great script.” Richard eagerly accepted the job, with two small conditions. He needed train fare to New York City and a bottle of brandy waiting for him in the writers’ room.

His first day on the new job at the Warner Bros. building at 666 Fifth Avenue, Richard arrived late. He settled into his chair in the sixth-floor executive conference room. Brooks started to explain how the film was shifting from its original conception. While he listened, Richard pulled out a little locket, opened it, tipped out some coke, and snorted it without missing a beat.

He pushed the locket over to Brooks: “Brother Mel?”

“Never before lunch,” Brooks joked.

The other writers held their tongues, stunned; at least one of Richard’s cowriters had no idea what this curious white powder was. They were nice Jewish boys, even if they had wayward imaginations. That night, Brooks phoned Andrew Bergman and asked, “Did you see that?”

Richard may have been the only
Blazing Saddles
writer to snort coke and kill a bottle of Courvoisier over the course of a day’s work, but in one crucial respect he fit in perfectly: he had the fearlessness that comes from having nothing to lose. Later,
Blazing Saddles
would be seen as one of those smash hits that change the culture. It ushered in a wave of genre spoofs (
Young Frankenstein
,
Airplane
,
Top Secret
) that lent Hollywood comedy a new knowingness; it established a highbrow-lowbrow formula that has kept
The Simpsons
going for twenty years and counting; and not least and not best, it opened up the Pandora’s box of fart jokes. But at the point of its conception,
Blazing Saddles
was a small studio movie, with no stars attached or to come, and the four men who gathered around its writers’ table were either untested or on the skids. Steinberg was a fledgling writer with no film credits; Bergman, a history PhD who had just failed to land an academic job. Brooks himself felt washed up after the box office disappointments of
The Producers
and
The Twelve Chairs
; one reason he wanted to re-create the writers’ room of
Our Show of Shows
was to shuck off his recent failures. Then there was Richard, who had made a name for
himself, then decided it wasn’t the name he wanted. Their response, as writers, to their shared precariousness was to go berserk, to forget about pleasing anybody other than themselves—or, as Brooks put it, to write “for two weirdos in the balcony. For radicals, film nuts, guys who draw on the washroom wall—my kind of people.”

The writing process was spectacularly fitful. Sometime in the late morning, the writers would assemble, and the dialogue would start to fly. Both Richard and Mel Brooks were performer-writers: they thrived on acting out their riffs instead of dictating them. (During his gig on
Our Show of Shows
, Brooks said to himself, “My God, I’m not a writer, I’m a
talker
”—a self-assessment that could have applied equally to Richard.) Meanwhile a secretary would take notes, scrambling “like a one-armed paper hanger trying to keep some kind of order,” Bergman recalled. “After an hour of working, we’d start perusing these [takeout] menus. Then we’d order lunch for about forty minutes, trying to figure out what we’re going to get.” After lunch, the script riffing would resume, and then, “at three o’clock, Mel would say, ‘My brains are exploding, I can’t do this anymore,’ which was about right, and that would be it.”

The screenplay that emerged from this month of spasmodic creativity was darker and more pointedly political than the original treatment, spiked as it was by the contributions of Richard, whom Brooks called “very brave and very far-out and very catalytic.” In Bergman’s original treatment, the black sheriff was a Bunyonesque figure who romanced the daughter of a railroad owner; Bergman’s inspiration was the swaggering Panther spokesman H. Rap Brown, and the part originally fell to the grandiloquent actor James Earl Jones. By the time Richard and his fellow writers had finished with him, “Black Bart” was a trickster who fit more closely Richard’s self-conception, a hero so deviously outrageous that his deputy Jim calls him “one crazy nigger.”

This Black Bart “sports some violet shades” and “moves like a moist dream across the prairie.” One of his first moves as sheriff is to crumple up and throw away a Wanted poster with a black man on it, reasoning, “He’s got enough trouble without a bunch of honkies
chasing his ass all over Mexico.” He whiles away the time in his office by taking a black jockey ashtray and painting it white. After he and Jim clobber some Klansmen off camera, Jim asks him, “Did you
have
to stick the cactus up his ass?”—to which Bart replies, dreamily, “I had to.” And Bart has sexual as well as political bluster. When Jim asks him what happened during his night with Lily von Shtupp, he quips, “I don’t know, but I think I invented pornography.”

I
n this first-draft screenplay, Richard’s most personal contribution was a piece of street poetry that Bart performs on a scaffold in order to delay his hanging. Winking at the camera, he says, “The more I talk the less I die.” Then he launches into a seventy-three-line recitation that might be titled “The Pimp’s Lament.” It begins:

Then it segues into Bart’s success with a particular “sidewalk jezebel”:

When the girl gets ill, Bart schemes to work her into a threesome with another girl and a white hillbilly, and she, feeling jilted, turns him into the police. Thus his final message:

Cut to: a tear rolling down from under the hood of Boris the executioner.

Richard’s “pimp’s lament” came out fully formed in the writers’ room and surprised everyone. He told Norman Steinberg that he’d learned it in prison, and the poem is a textbook example of the kind of profane “toasts” that circulated among black men in barber shops, taverns, and jails—toasts that were first collected between covers, two years later, in Bruce Jackson’s classic anthology
Get Your Ass in the Water and Swim Like Me
. For Steinberg, the poem was like nothing he’d ever heard. For Richard, it was the poetry of North Washington Street, the soundtrack of his childhood. And given what he witnessed growing up—his father and uncle playing the role of the pimp; his ill stepmother Ann pulling tricks in his father’s home—its playful styling had deeper associations.

This poem at the scaffold, like many of the most explicit gestures in the original script, didn’t survive the months of editing that whittled the 120-page script down to a more manageable size. But the final film carried Richard’s imprint, not least through the uses it found for the word that punctuated his nightclub act:
nigger
. In the film, it’s a word that comes as easily to an elderly white woman (“Up yours, nigger”) as to a slave-driving yahoo foreman (who asks for a “good old nigger work song” from a group of exhausted railroad workers). It’s also a word to be leveraged, jujitsu-like, against
one’s opponents. When the townsfolk pull out their guns to shoot Bart, he becomes a performer onstage much like Richard himself, able to encase the roles of perpetrator and victim in the same body. He is, suddenly, both a white bigot who holds Bart at gunpoint and a “cringing, whining plantation darkie” (in the words of the script). When the white gunman threatens, “Next man makes a move, the nigger gets it,” the townsfolk lower their guns, touched by Bart’s one-man melodrama. “We would never have done [that bit],” said Andrew Bergman, reflecting on how the other writers benefited from Richard’s nerve. “It might’ve occurred to us, but we would have said, ‘Uhhh . . .”

As much as Richard contributed to
Blazing Saddles
a scalding treatment of race in American life, the film gave him something in return. It allowed him to move outside his usual preoccupations, to shed his skin. Mel Brooks remembered that, instead of throwing himself completely into the part of Black Bart, Richard “concentrated on Mongo. He wrote most of the Mongo stuff; he loved Mongo. He came up with crazy stuff like ‘Mongo only pawn in game of life.’” Like the rest of the writers on the film, Richard was free to ransack the clichés of the Western and twist them until he had wrung out their inner absurdities. He could, through the pressure of his imagination, reveal Mongo to be not just a dumb brute, but a sweet child and inadvertent poet—even someone who flirts with being gay (given his “deep feelings” for Sheriff Bart and, in the original script, his preference for dancing with men).

Still another gift of
Blazing Saddles
was that it gave Richard a taste of a creatively fruitful interracial collaboration—something he arguably hadn’t experienced since his mid-1960s New York days as a comic at the Improv. “We all adored [Richard],” said Bergman. Steinberg remembered Richard happily goofing off for an appreciative audience: at one point, Richard dressed up in a housekeeper’s outfit and feather-dusted the room. Some of that mutual affection found its way into the friendship of Bart and Jim, the relationship that grounds the film and balances out its wild, centrifugal energy. For
Bergman, that on-screen friendship was essential to the film’s success. “You really believed that these two guys love each other. You really felt, with all the insanity, that there was a real relationship between them, which was amazing when you consider the things that are going on on-screen.”

Within the writers’ room, of course, there were limits to the friendship between Richard and the others, invisible boundary lines that went uncrossed. Norman Steinberg remembered that a woman once popped into the room and asked Richard for some money; her hand was in a cast.

“What happened?” Steinberg asked.

“I punched her,” Richard said.

“You punched her in her hand?”

“She put it in front of her face.”

In Steinberg’s recollection, “We all thought, ‘Okay, moving on . . . We weren’t going to touch that.” Likewise with Richard’s indulgence of cocaine and Courvoisier: the friendship between him and the other writers, while based in mutual admiration and acceptance, was also a delicate thing, and sometimes strategically left untested.

In the film’s original script, the delicate balance of Bart and Jim’s friendship comes through in the shape of its happy ending. Bart rides off from Rockridge, leaving behind the townfolk and saluting them with a fresh honorific: “Keep the faith, niggers.” Then he bumps into Jim, and the two negotiate the terms of their future: