Al Bell couldn’t believe his ears when this skinny guy started his set at the Comedy Store. As the head of Memphis-based Stax Records, Bell commanded one of the largest African American–owned businesses in the United States, second only to Berry Gordy’s Motown.
Richard did this one bit—a routine he’d continue to refine over the next few years—where he imitated a guy on an acid trip. “I couldn’t believe what I saw,” says Bell. “The story he was telling as he played out the character was really penetrating as far as black people are concerned.” At the end of the routine, as the guy was coming down, his last line was, “Nigger, come out of that black skin and be black, nigger.”
“It left the audience stunned,” Bell recalls. In that one line “he had exposed so much about black people.”
The line was not some bumper-sticker slogan. It was mind blowing, like some kind of Zen koan. No matter how you turned it over in your mind, or it turned your mind over in you, you could never plumb its depths. The line kept turning in on itself, refusing to be translated into anything other.
“This man is a genius,” said Bell. “When you listen to the intelligence behind what he is talking about you really realize you’re talking about a literal genius.”
Bell had gone to catch Richard’s act at the behest of Forest Hamilton, son of jazz drummer Chico Hamilton and the head of Stax West, the record company’s new division based in Los Angeles. The twenty-six-year-old Hamilton’s job was to scout West Coast talent and establish Stax within the motion picture and television industries. Bell was in town to organize a daylong concert commemorating the seventh anniversary of the 1965 Watts rebellion.
Wattstax, as the concert came to be known, took place on Sunday, August 20, 1972, at the L.A. Memorial Coliseum featuring Stax recording artists Rufus Thomas, the Staple Singers, Kim Weston, Albert King, Little Milton, William Bell, Carla Thomas, The Bar-Kays, Luther Ingram, and Isaac Hayes among others. The Reverend Jesse Jackson flew in from Chicago, landing with less than an hour to spare, to deliver the invocation and to lead the crowd in his “I am somebody” call and response.
With more than one hundred thousand mostly African Americans sitting out in the hot sun all day in celebration of Watts, local media were just waiting for the whole thing to blow up. Security was minimal. Stax had requested that the LAPD assign only African American officers to work the event. It all wentbeautifully. The Stax organizers were pleased and relieved that not so much as a scuffle had been reported, but it didn’t necessarily make for engaging cinema.
Stax had hired director Mel Stuart (Four Days in November; If It’s Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium; Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory) to helm a documentary of the event. The music was superb, of course, but even when interspersed with documentary footage and interviews filmed in area restaurants, barbershops, and on front stoops, the movie still felt incomplete. What the movie needed, Stuart decided, was “someone who would sum up what the picture was about, would lead us on to the next step, would really be the voice of the community.” A chorus, like the one in Shakespeare’s Henry V—“O for a muse of fire, that would ascend / The brightest heaven of invention.”
Al Bell knew just the guy. “Hey, man,” he told Forest Hamilton, “go find Richard Pryor.”
Hamilton tracked him down at a small club in Watts. When they first walked in the place, Stuart recalls, “this rather big gentleman walked over to me and grabbed me and said, ‘What is this honky doing in my club?’ I thought my life was over. . . . Forest Hamilton, who weighed about three hundred pounds, grabbed this man, threw him against the wall, and the guy went down. Forest went over to him and said, ‘He’s got expertise, motherfucker!’ The guy looks up at me and says, ‘Shit, man, I didn’t know you had expertise. Come on in, man, come on in.’ ”
Less than five minutes into Richard’s set, Stuart knew that he was in the presence of a comedic genius. “I knew this was the chorus. Everything you see in this film is improvised by Richard. There’s no script. And he is the soul of the film.”
The decision to cast Richard as the film’s “wickedly funny commentator” was a superb stroke, according to Newsweek magazine’s reviewer. “Perhaps not even Dick Gregory can shape accumulated black experience into such biting bits of humor. [Pryor] is reason enough to see Wattstax.”
Richard’s role in the film was to spin documentary straw into comic gold. In one of the documentary segments shot in a Watts restaurant, a man tells how his “high yellow” brother made him first realize he was a nigger. The two had been playing with a group of white kids who excluded him, yet bonded with his lighter-skinned brother. When they got home, his brother called him a nigger and declared himself white. “I didn’t know what a nigger was,” the man says. “But my mother’s bad. Check this out. She said, ‘Cool. All right, then, I ain’t your mother because all my kids are niggers.’ ”
Richard wraps up the segment with this:
I think, like, niggers are the best of the people who were slaves, you know what I mean? That’s how we got to be niggers. Cause they stole the cream of the crop from Africa and brought them over here. And God, as they say works in mysterious ways and so he made everybody “nigger.” Cause we were arguing over in Africa about the Watusi and (riffing on African-sounding tribal names) the Ojuomboo, and Zamunga . . . in different languages. So he brought us all here. The best. The kings and queens. Princes and Princesses. Put us all together and called us one tribe: Niggers!
Watergate notwithstanding, the single greatest stroke of luck to ever befall the new wave of stand-up comedians came in December 1973 when Sammy Shore, called back to Las Vegas for a months-long engagement at the Hilton, left his wife Mitzi in charge of the Store.
In her husband’s absence, Mitzi Shore found her life’s calling. She put young comics to work painting the entire interior black—black walls, ceiling, tables and chairs—so when the single spotlight hit the comic on stage, there was nothing else to look at. She had them move the bar back by the kitchen. From now on, customers would order drinks from cocktail waitresses.
Mitzi Shore made the Store a place where comics could be seen, get exposure, commune and confer with their comic brethren, and workshop their material in front of an audience. She did it all for the comics. Which is why she thought she didn’t need to pay them.
By the end of the year, Mitzi took full ownership in a divorce settlement from Sammy. He must’ve known he was losing both his club and his wife when he made a visit to L.A. after only a month in Vegas. He barely recognized the place. Everything had been painted black. The floor was packed. And where was the bar? Sammy told his wife he wanted to do a few shows while he was in town. She said she would try to fit him in the next night’s lineup but couldn’t make any promises.
Back when Sammy Shore had been in charge of the Store, he gave his old-school pals full run of the place. There was no lineup or schedule. They went behind the bar to pour their own drinks and commanded the stage for as long as they pleased. The younger, less-known comics had to hang back and hope for a chance to go on. Mitzi turned that system upside down, giving preference to young up-and-coming comics and scheduling them in strict fifteen-minute time blocks.
The stream of young comics flowing into L.A. behind Johnny Carson’s move of The Tonight Show to Burbank swelled to a tidal wave after nineteen-year-old Freddie Prinze made his television debut on Thursday, December 6, 1973. So impressed was Carson with Prinze’s five-minute performance that, as Prinze started to leave the stage, Carson waved him over to the couch. Never before had a first-time comic been granted a sit-down chat with Johnny.
Over at the Comedy Store, jaws dropped. The comics crowded around the TV “recognized that they were seeing history,” writes William Knoedelseder in I’m Dying up Here: Heartbreak and High Times in Stand-Up Comedy’s Golden Era. Their reactions “ranged from ‘Holy shit,’ to ‘I can’t fucking believe this,’ to ‘Right on, Freddie!’ ”
Few comics failed to notice one more thing about Prinze’s Tonight Show debut: Johnny introduced him as “a young comedian who’s appearing here in town at the Comedy Store.” That statement put the Comedy Store on every comic’s map and created a new equation in their heads: One set at the Comedy Store plus one appearance on Carson equals the whole world. If it happened to Freddie, then it could happen to any of them. You could almost hear the suitcases being packed.
A young Jay Leno, sitting on his sofa in Boston, watched the same equation play out for his pal Jimmie Walker who was immediately signed to the new Norman Lear–Bud Yorkin series, Good Times. Leno had worked the same clubs with Walker. He was a better comic than Walker. He got bigger laughs. Yet there was Walker on TV, and there sat Leno watching him. He got up off his couch, booked a flight to L.A., packed a single suitcase, took his entire savings (fifteen hundred dollars) out of the bank, left his apartment unlocked, and, on his way out the door, told the neighbors in his building to help themselves to anything inside.
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Lily Tomlin remembers improvising a scene for her upcoming TV special at Richard’s house when Berry Gordy called to praise his performance in Lady Sings the Blues, guaranteeing him he would be nominated for an Oscar. After he hung up the phone, Tomlin remembers, Richard suddenly became the six-year-old boy from his “The Primpce and the Primpcess” fairy tale he’d performed the first time she saw him on The Ed Sullivan Show—“shy, hopeful, and suddenly terrified, as if he had pulled off something he’d never expected.”
Although the Oscar nomination Gordy predicted never came to pass, Richard received universally outstanding reviews for his revelatory portrayal of Billie Holiday’s heroin-addicted piano player, a characterization inspired in part by his old friend Jimmy Binkley, the house pianist at Collins Corner back in Peoria. The movie brought him much attention but few acting offers. Perhaps he’d played the heroin-addicted piano man too convincingly. Along with the accolades, Richard earned a reputation for his erratic behavior, violent temper, and heavy drug use.
That reputation was not wholly undeserved. During filming of The Mack, now regarded as a blaxploitation classic (perhaps the most sampled movie in hip-hop and one of Quentin Tarantino’s acknowledged touchstones), Richard as “Slim” played sidekick to Max Julien’s pimp “Goldie.” Following one of many altercations with producer Harvey Bernhard, a coked-up Richard told Julien that he was going to kill the man. Julien declined Richard’s invitation to take part but stood back and watched from down the hallway as Richard, carrying a lead ball in a sock, knocked on the producer’s hotel room door. Because the production, filmed on location on the streets of Oakland, California, had been plagued with threats, interference, and outright assault from local gangs, Bernhard kept an around-the-clock bodyguard in his room and a .45 in his belt. As Bernhard recounted the scene to Julien the next day, he pulled his gun on Richard and challenged him to make his move, at which point, Richard wisely collapsed in laughter and assured Bernhard it had all been a joke. Richard and Julien, who contributed heavily to the script, both pushed back against Bernhard and director Michael Campus (who likewise shot The Education of Sonny Carson on the streets of Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant) for their depiction of pimps and urban street life. In one instance, Richard went off script to create what turned out to be the film’s most riveting scene. Rather than play the scene as written, which called for him to turn his back on a pair of corrupt white cops (Don Gordon and William Watson)—an act that anyone with a lick of sense would recognize as suicidal, they protested to Campus—Richard’s Slim stands his ground, breaking down in real tears as he bitterly curses the two cops while allowing Goldie time to slowly walk away unscathed. After viewing the dailies, Campus had no choice but to use the scene as Richard had improvised it. It was too good not to.
The movie’s second-most-memorable scene comes when Slim and Goldie take prisoner a rival pimp (Dick Anthony Williams) who’d had Goldie’s mother killed, and order him, at gunpoint, to stick himself with the long stiletto he carried concealed in a walking stick. Richard’s smiling, near-hysterical command that the pimp stick himself—“Stick yourself, nigger. One more for me, now. Stick yourself! I’m tryin’ to help you. Don’t get angry. Be cool. Again!”—is still harrowing to watch. And it was all Richard’s idea. Williams’s character had previously pulled the stiletto during a confrontational pool-hall scene. In his commentary on the DVD release, Williams laughed, marveling, nearly thirty years later, at the workings of Richard’s mind. “I knew the dude was gonna come up with something from the pool table scene. He’s got a mind . . .”
Richard similarly threw himself into every role that came his way during this time and, in 1973, turned in some of the finest performances of his career, mostly in films that had poor showings at the box office. Not one of them was a comedy. As would most always be the case, Richard did his funniest and most incisive work when he embodied broken or conflicted characters from within and played them in earnest instead of for obvious laughs. There’s no better example of this than the “Juke and Opal” sketch written by Jane Wagner for Lily, Tomlin’s comedy-variety special that aired November 2, 1973, on CBS.
Tomlin, without benefit of complexion-enhancing makeup, plays Opal, the black owner of a cafe frequented by Juke, a scruffy young drug addict played by Richard in a green fatigue jacket. Opal serves him potato soup (“something nourishing”) and talks with him about getting on methadone.
Their teasing, flirtatious banter—“You irritate the lining of my mind,” Opal tells him—is interrupted by the entrance of a couple of social workers doing community research. “We’d like to ask you a few questions,” the young woman announces as they come through the door.
Juke openly admits, when asked by the survey takers, that he’s addicted to drugs but objects when the young woman makes note of his answer. “Don’t write it down, man. Be cool. That’s not for the public. I mean what I go through is private.” Before he answers any more, Juke has a few questions of his own: “Who’s Pigmeat Markham’s mama? You ever been mugged in the same neighborhood more than once? Do you know who ‘Boo’ Diddley is?”
When Opal gives Juke ten dollars from the register, the young man tries to intervene. “You really shouldn’t give him the money. You know what he’s going to do with it.” Opal covers for Juke by saying he’s going to buy her more potatoes.
After the couple leaves, Juke gives the ten back, saying he’s not buying any more potatoes. He’s going to try. “You know, I think I’m kinda crazy about you,” he says. “You a sweet woman.” As he leaves, he hesitates at the door and says, “I’ll think about you. Be glad when it’s spring.” Then one last word: “Flower!”
Writing for the New Yorker in September 1999, Hilton Als said the nine-and-a-half-minute sketch “remains, a little over a quarter of a century later, the most profound meditation on race and class that I have ever seen on a major network.”
Perhaps the greatest testament to how convincingly Tomlin embodied the black cafe owner Opal can be found in the lack of viewer outcry when she and Richard’s Juke exchanged a brief kiss on the lips as he put up his hood to head back out into the cold. It was rare—and risky—for a black man to kiss a white woman on primetime television in 1973. In this instance, no one seemed to notice.
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The troubles—and triumphs—that would mark the entire of Richard’s sketchy TV career were fully on display when an improvised skit pairing Richard’s little-boy character Billy with Tomlin’s rocking-chair preschooler Edith Ann wandered afoul of program practices. Director Rick Wallace called, “Cut!” when Richard’s character remarked that he had “bigger titties” than Tomlin’s Edith Ann.
Lily followed Richard to his dressing room and tried to talk him back, but he said he just couldn’t do anymore. It was as though the ordeal of fully embodying and then abandoning or being less than true to a character caused Richard psychic distress, if not physical pain.
“You can’t stop a guy like Richard Pryor when he’s on a roll,” says Richard’s friend David Brenner. “If you interrupt him, he’s done. It’d be like if you went down on the track when someone’s running and said, ‘Listen, I want to change your sneakers. I think you’ll do better with these.’ You can stop a guy like me and I can be back in an instant. I’m being the real me—the funny me—but I don’t get into these great characters, these dimensions.”
“I felt ridiculous,” Richard told David Felton of Rolling Stone. “My kid couldn’t get into it. So I can’t go onstage and it be in my mind that this kid can’t say something, ’cause the kid is wrecked, as a kid. I mean, I was ready to cry as a kid, ’cause I was the kid, you dig?
“That’s the way I see kids. I just get fascinated talking to ’em, ’cause it’ll be honestly sweet and whatever they say is innocent. And if they say ‘tittie,’ you can’t tell a kid they can’t say ‘tittie.’ They deal with real shit.”
Lily scored big in the ratings, got great reviews, and won its writing team (including Richard) an Emmy for Best Writing in Comedy-Variety, Variety or Music category. CBS never aired the show again.
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Richard, Billy Dee Williams, and director Sidney J. Furie were all riding high on the success of Lady Sings the Blues when they regrouped for the action-thriller Hit! about a federal agent (Williams) who seeks revenge after his teenage daughter dies of a drug overdose. Knowing that his superiors would never allow such an operation to proceed through official channels, Williams takes it upon himself to recruit, finance, train, and transport to France a small band of private American citizens who have each suffered personal tragedies as a result of illegal drugs. They seek vengeance not against street-level junkies and pushers but by going up against the nine leaders of a Marseilles drug syndicate who control product and distribution.
Mismarketed as a blaxploitation film, Hit! confounded the genre with its ensemble cast of multiracial and cross-generational heroes. Even the wealthy French villains are portrayed in identifiably human terms. One French kingpin, for example, disappointed by his sumptuous lunch, rails against big oil polluters, the “pigs who use the sea for a sewer,” doing such harm to aquatic life that “it will soon be impossible to eat a decent bouillabaisse.”
With its tagline “To pull off a job no one would ever dare you need a team no one would ever believe,” the movie’s lineage can be traced to Dirty Harry and The French Connection by way of The Seven Samurai.
The cautiously mistrustful camaraderie between the characters played by Richard and Billy Dee Williams is palpable throughout the movie, drawing method inspiration from their off-screen friendship. Williams enjoyed hanging out with Richard and Mooney but was so uptight about his career he avoided being seen with them in public. He wanted to be a leading man. Richard had a reputation for the kind of trouble that could screw that up.
There’s a scene—one of several—in which Richard clearly goes off script while flirting with fellow vigilante Gwen Welles in the backseat of the van driven by Williams. As they approach the Seattle Ferry dock, Richard chuckles, reading aloud from a sign at the entranceway: “Seattle Ferries from eight to six.” Then, affecting an effeminate lisp: “My, my . . . business must be brisk.” Williams shoots Richard a scathing look. Richard doesn’t let up. “Why don’t they name a ferry boat the Lesbian? (lisping again) ‘I’m taking the Lesbian to the island.’ ”
Williams mutters something incomprehensible as he climbs out of the van. Whatever he says seems intended for Richard’s ears, not ours. Richard, for his part, reacts with a bewildered, what-the-fuck’s-bugging-him expression. Then, playing to Welles, he foppishly slaps a glove across the back of the driver’s seat and, lisping again, delivers this: “He’s gone to ask the Marquis de Sade who we should recruit.”
Later, while piloting a boat across French waters, Richard half mutters half sings, “I gotta get laid, I gotta get laid . . .” then breaks into a blues-inflected sea shanty, sounding a bit like the later-day Tom Waits:
I bet they have some weird bitches here
I bet they have some weird bitches here
I bet they got some Eskimos
and all they do is suck your toes
I bet they have some weird bitches here
He doesn’t play it for laughs. It’s all completely in character, a man laboring to cheer himself against a sense of impeding doom. No one else is even listening. His somber cohorts down on deck are staring out across the water, grimly contemplating the illegal and potentially suicidal nature of the mission they are about to undertake.
As he docks the boat, Richard calls down to the man shagging their line, “Tie it off there, me lad. Where’s the pussy?” When he gets no reply, Richard looks at his hand and says, “Well, Rosie, looks like it’s you and me again tonight.” Then, planting a kiss on his gloved palm, says, “I love ya, baby.”
As the climax approaches and the bodies of French kingpins begin piling up, Richard even coaxes a teary laugh from the heroin-addicted character played by Gwen Welles as she begins to fall apart, crying to him that she can’t go through with the other hits. She’s scared and she doesn’t like killing people. Richard, whose scuba-diving character had surfaced alongside a drug lord’s yacht with a speargun and harpooned him in the chest, barks back at her in the voice of a shit-talking hustler, “You think you got troubles, nigga? I lost a motherfuckin’ spear. Cost me forty-seven boxtops. I saved for six months. Shit! Had a gold tip on it and everything.”
The few critics who bothered to give Hit! any notice complained that the film provided a scant twenty minutes of thrills, and only after the audience had endured an hour and fifty minutes of setup and character development. All true. For audiences expecting a blaxploitation thrill ride, Furie’s art-house pacing, often disorienting camera work, and generous attention to character and detail made for slow going. It would not be released on DVD until April of 2012 and has yet to find the audience it deserves.
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In Some Call It Loving, an oddly sad and atmospheric film inspired by John Collier’s much livelier satiric short story, “Sleeping Beauty,” jazz musician Zalman King becomes obsessed with a spellbound woman (played by Mia Farrow’s younger sister, Tisa) on exhibit in a carnival sideshow. Richard, for the most part, is wasted as King’s drug-addled friend who is insistent in explaining the deeper meaning of a lopsided heart he has painted in glow-in-the-dark red on the wall above a urinal in the men’s room of a jazz club where King is performing. Midway through the film, Richard’s character dies of an overdose for no apparent reason (story-wise) other than perhaps writer-director James B. Harris’s concern that he might bring more oxygen and light than his otherwise claustrophobic fantasy could bear. This was, after all, the same James B. Harris who, nine years earlier, walked away from his production partnership with Stanley Kubrick over what he believed was Kubrick’s misguided decision to adapt Peter George’s cold war novel Red Alert as a comedy and call it Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.
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Although Richard is onscreen for less than five minutes of Sidney Poitier’s Uptown Saturday Night, he manages to steal the scene—if not the entire movie—out from under Bill Cosby and Poitier both. (Screenwriter Richard Wesley had originally envisioned Redd Foxx and Richard in the Cosby and Poitier roles.) Penelope Gilliatt, reviewing the 1974 comedy for the New Yorker, calls Richard’s performance as private detective Sharp-Eye Washington masterly: “He takes not the faintest notice of his clients’ shy attempt to hire him.” While they regard his quick-wittedness as the mark of a good detective, his “mind is obviously more on making a quick exit, which he does by way of window and a fire escape—or possibly a water pipe—waving goodbye professionally as if he had everything under control.”
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What’s so striking about these movies—however uneven or ill-conceived—is that directors and producers cast Richard Pryor because of his brilliance as an actor, because of what he could actually do. They allowed him to bring his rage, his mischief—his badass self—and they gave him room to occupy his characters with pathos and human foible. That’s why they hired him. As Pauline Kael wrote, “Pryor shouldn’t be cast at all—he should be realized. He has desperate, mad characters coming out of his pores, and we want to see how far he can go with them.”
This was the artistic capital he would trade on a few years later when his name had become a box-office draw and studios began throwing millions at him. At those rates, the stakes were too high. He had to tone it down. Instead of going inside and embodying his characters, he had to stand outside where he could keep an eye on them.
“The movies that they had him ultimately do were very forgettable,” says Franklyn Ajaye. “Hollywood always takes the bite out of any comedian. If you’re a comedian they just bring you on to do something silly. Woody Allen did the best because he did his own thing. Richard was a phenomenal comedian, but they softened the edges when they brought him the money for the movies. But, look, I don’t know how anyone can turn down three, four million dollars.”
If the studios and networks weren’t willing to risk his mayhem, it was only because they didn’t need to. His name—the Richard Pryor brand—was by that time worth more than any performance, worth more than they were paying him. All he had to do was show up and hit his mark. By then, there was no going back.