Becoming Richard Pryor (55 page)

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.

A
s
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 un
clear 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?

W
ith 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.