Mel Brooks initially turned down the chance to do Blazing Saddles when his agent David Begelman showed him the screen treatment—then titled “Tex X”—written by fellow Begelman client Andrew Bergman. Brooks was only interested in developing projects of his own. But he was at a career low. No acting jobs were coming his way, he couldn’t get his own projects off the ground, and Warner Bros. would pay him well to shape the treatment into a script that he would then direct. “I figured my career was finished anyway,” he said.
To help him with the script, he hired Bergman and the team of Norman Steinberg and Alan Uger, writers he had worked with before. The script would also need the contributions of an authentic black voice. After Dick Gregory turned him down, he went to Richard Pryor.
Richard, by all accounts, threw himself into the project with abandon, spinning out gags and situations like an inspired Rumplestiltskin—even offering up bits from Black Stranger, a cowboy screenplay he’d written while in Berkeley. What’s most impressive, he showed up every day and on time.
“I decided this would be a surrealist epic,” Brooks told Kenneth Tynan in a New Yorker profile. “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. For nine months we worked together like maniacs. We went all the way—especially Richard Pryor, who was very brave and very far out and very catalytic. . . . They wrote berserk, heartfelt stuff about white corruption and racism and Bible-thumping bigotry. We used dirty language on the screen for the first time, and to me the whole thing was like a big psychoanalytic session.”
Impressed by what he’d seen from Richard during their months of writing the screenplay together—the way Richard would jump up and act scenes out—Brooks became convinced that he would be outrageous in the title role of “Black Bart,” as the script was then called. Brooks had been delightfully surprised when the studio accepted their profane, illogical, irreverent, madcap script, requesting only a few minimal changes to rein in the running time. So he was perhaps more stunned than he might have been when Warner Bros. flatly refused to consider Richard for the part. He lacked acting experience, they said. What they didn’t expressly say was that he had a reputation for being erratic and uncontrollable and was known to have drug problems. There was no telling what he might do.
Richard was dumbstruck when he got the news from his friend Cleavon Little that he’d signed on for the role. That Richard would later share a Writers Guild of America award for Best Comedy Written Directly for the Screen did little to ease the pain. His name was inadvertently left off the early prints of the film.
“Richard wrote it and Mel Brooks chased him out,” director Michael Shultz said at the time. “Mel Brooks was trying to get total credit for the picture. . . . To be outmaneuvered and ripped off at that early stage in his career is something that’s a little hard for him to get over. I’d feel the same way.”
Knowing that Richard had been slated for the role makes watching the movie a bit of a disappointment, says film scholar James Monaco. “You keep thinking what Pryor could have done. He is exactly what’s missing from Blazing Saddles. He might have injected the necessary evil gleam. Little was too rational and simply too attractive to energize the film.” Had he played the role, Pauline Kael wrote, Richard would have made the sheriff “crazy—threatening and funny both.”
Besides all that, it would have teamed Richard with Gene Wilder two years before Silver Streak.
Cleavon Little did a fine job, Mooney allows. “He’s okay, but he’s not a genius. On the other hand, can you picture Blazing Saddles with Richard Pryor in the lead? Ridiculous, right?”
Take a look at the televised performance of Richard playing both a man and a woman going through a breakup in his routine “When Your Woman Leaves You” or embodying all participants in a bar fight in “Nigger with a Seizure,” and then imagine what he could’ve done with the scene in Blazing Saddles where Bart holds off a mob of angry townspeople by putting a gun to his own head and taking himself hostage, barking them back with, “Hold it! Next man makes a move, the nigger gets it.” The crowd recoils with a collective gasp. The town doctor says, “Listen to him men, he’s just crazy enough to do it.” Bart then embodies both hostage and hostage-taker simultaneously.
AS HOSTAGE-TAKER: Drop it or I swear I’ll blow this nigger’s head all over this town!
AS HOSTAGE: (terrified “darkie” voice) Oh, lordy, lord! He’s desperate! Do what he say, do what he say!
It broke Richard’s heart that he never got to play it. It was his scene.
Richard was further devastated to learn that the studio wanted to cut his cowboys-farting-around-the-campfire scene and that Brooks had agreed to it.
Yes, Brooks agreed to cut the fart scene—and the scene where the horse gets punched in the face and all derogatory references to black people—but he never had the slightest intention of following through. “It’s what I always tell young filmmakers,” he said. “Say yes, yes, yes to every damn fool thing the producers ask, then ignore it all. No one ever notices.”
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After the heartbreak of Blazing Saddles, Richard fell into a dark and bitter depression. Mooney urged, pestered, and cajoled him to get back up on his feet. Stand-up was the only forum in Hollywood where a black man could speak his mind without the town “going all Frankenstein on his ass.” Frankenstein’s monster was their in-joke metaphor for Hollywood:
Just like Dr. Frankenstein, producers want to stitch together body parts and build their own stars, their own monsters. . . . I always thought of Frankenstein’s monster as a black man. All the white people are always chasing him. “Get him! Get him!” . . . The villagers are terrified of him, just like crackers are terrified of the black man. And when they catch him, he whups villager ass, just like a black man. He throws motherfuckers all over the place.
But Richard had to be a movie star. Anything less would be failure in his eyes.
Contemplating the spectacle of Richard Pryor—a solo performer without peer—setting his true gifts aside to perform in such arid fare as Adiós Amigo, incomprehensible camp like The Phynx,* and nearly everything he did after 1979 is even more mind numbing than that of Elvis Presley abandoning his country-stewed brew of roots, blues, and gospel rhythms to star in insipid teen movies with barely functioning story lines held together with bubble-gum pop confections and rear-projection backdrops. (On the flip side, consider that Shakespeare, according to a theory put forth by professor Felix Schelling, wanted most of all to be a poet, only resigning himself to writing crowd-pleasing plays because he couldn’t make a living from his verses.)
And then in February, while Richard grieved through the theatrical release of Blazing Saddles and the attendant reviews praising Cleavon Little, he got a call from Forest Hamilton at Stax West. Buoyed by the success of Wattstax, and perhaps egged on by Motown’s Lady Sings the Blues—if Berry Gordy could make Oscar-caliber movies, then Stax owner Al Bell figured he could, too—Stax produced Darktown Strutter’s Ball, directed by William Witney and starring Trina Parks, under the Stax-Netter Films banner (a partnership with former MGM vice president Doug Netter, despite Netter’s having threatened Stax with a lawsuit over the inclusion in Wattstax of Isaac Hayes’s performance of the MGM-controlled “Theme from Shaft”). Darktown Strutters (as it was eventually released, then reissued in the 1980s as Get Down and Boogie!) turned out to be not at all what Stax’s vice president of advertising and publicity Larry Shaw had envisioned when he read the script.
As the head of Stax West in Los Angeles, Forest Hamilton was tasked with monitoring the progress of the film. He called Shaw up and said, “This film is crazy. It ain’t going nowhere we thought it was going.”
“It was going into very white folks comedy,” Shaw concurs. “Slapstick, pies in the face, weird Batman sounds—horrible. We couldn’t stand it.”
Everyone agreed that Richard had elevated Wattstax, taking it from being a mere document of a historic event and turning it into a genuine movie. Shaw wondered if maybe Richard could work the same magic on Darktown Strutter’s Ball. Hamilton arranged a special screening for him. Shaw was there, watching from the back of the projection room and, at some point, noticed that he didn’t see Richard’s head anymore. He found him on the floor, crouched down below seat-level, crawling toward the door. He said, “Please, Shaw. I know I owe you a few favors, but don’t ask me to do this.”
Fair enough, Shaw said. How about doing a record instead?
Stax’s new comedy label Partee Records had released only a handful of LPs, mostly minor efforts by major comics such as Timmie Rogers, Moms Mabley (I Like ’Em Young), and the now highly collectable At Last . . . Bill Cosby Really Sings.
Richard gave them That Nigger’s Crazy, recorded live at Don Cornelius’s Soul Train studio in San Francisco with all new material he’d been developing at the Store.
My uncle said, “Boy, don’t you ever kiss no pussy. I mean that. Whatever you do in life, don’t kiss no pussy.”
I couldn’t wait to kiss a pussy. He’d been wrong about everything else. Woman had to beat me off. “That’s enough, that’s enough! Please. Two days . . .”
“You crazy!” some guy in the audience yells.
“Huh?”
“YOU CRAZY!”
“Yeah!” Richard agrees. Absolute glee in his voice.
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That Nigger’s Crazy was a phenomenon, marking the emergence of Richard in full possession of his genius, the Richard Pryor we know today. Greg Tate, looking back on the LP in an obituary piece for the Village Voice, wrote:
You have to go to Chekhov or Edward P. Jones to find small lives rendered with as much epic detail and epiphanal force as Pryor unveils on “Wino & Junkie,” a hellacious and ruthlessly hilarious vision of life beneath the underdog that erects a totem to Black male oblivion out of the parsed lines his Boswell wino relates about his junkie Johnson.
James Alan McPherson wrote that Richard “enters into his people and allows whatever is comic in them, whatever is human, to evolve out of what they say and how they look into a total scene. It is part of Richard Pryor’s genius that, through the selective use of facial gestures, emphases in speech and movements, he can create a scene that is comic and at the same time recognizable as profoundly human.”
Richard renders his downtrodden characters in purely human terms, unsullied by any trace of sentimentality. “These portraits were wonderfully specific,” writes Richard Zoglin, “yet evocative of a whole community—unmistakably black yet too recognizable to be mere instruments of a racial agenda. . . . stand-up comedy had never seen anything like it.”
JUNKIE: Pops . . . nigger, listen to me!
WINO: Don’t you hit me no more, boy. I’ll dust your junkie ass off. You know I will, nigger. You rile me, boy. I’m ashamed to see you like this.
JUNKIE: Ashamed to see me? What about this shit out here? Niggers just fuckin’ with me, man . . .
(trails off, long silence)
Was I finished?
The self-validating logic of Richard’s junkie at times recalls Shakespeare’s Sir John Falstaff.
JUNKIE: I went to the unemployment bureau, baby. Bitch sittin’ behind the desk—ugly motherfucker come tellin’ me talkin’ ’bout, “You have a criminal record.” I say, “I know that, bitch! I’m a criminal!”
(In Henry IV, Part 1, when Prince Hal chides Falstaff as a rogue and a stealer of purses, the corpulent and debaucherous knight reasonably answers, “Why, Hal, ’tis my vocation, Hal; ’tis no sin for a man to labor in his vocation.”)
His junkie goes from comedy to pathos with whiplash-inducing abruptness.
JUNKIE: My father say he don’t want to see me in the vicinity. Just ’cause I stole his television. That’s the politics, baby. I’m sick, pops. Wonder can you help me? My mind’s thinking about shit I don’t want to think about. I can’t stop the motherfucker, baby. Movin’ too fast for the kid. Tell me some of that ol’ lies of yours, make me stop thinkin’ about the truth.
Richard Lewis remembers Richard workshopping these routines at the Comedy Store. “He was absolutely fearless. He would say anything.” And reveal anything.
You ever be with a woman you wanted to be with for a long time, man, and you finally get with her and you come in about four seconds? And you be panicked, jack, trying to be cool. “Oh, God! Lord don’t let her know . . . just let it stay heavy if not hard.” (as woman) “You’re not moving as much as you were . . .”
“Uh, I’m just resting a little. I want you to enjoy this.”
Richard’s characters were no less “real” when confronting vampires or space aliens. As metaphors, they really were not that much of a stretch.
Nothing can scare a nigger, not after four hundred years of this shit. A Martian wouldn’t have a chance. A nigger would warn a Martian. (as old man, foreshadowing Mudbone) “You better get your ass away from around here. You done landed on Mr. Gilmore’s property.”
If he land in New York, a nigger would take his shit from him. “You got to give up the flyin’ saucer, baby. Cause I’m a macaroni.” Nigger’d be cruising, “Oh, yeah, this sweet! How much is petrol? Eighty-two million a gallon? Fuck this machine!”
Al Bell and Forest Hamilton knew that with Richard’s new recording they had a crossover hit on their hands, but Stax’s distributor CBS recoiled at the very idea of taking That Nigger’s Crazy, based on nothing more than the title. And once they listened to it, John Smith says, “They were absolutely certain. They didn’t want anything to do with it.”
Partee released the LP through independent distributors in April 1974. Richard, at that time, was out on the road. He got his first inkling of how huge the record was when people in the audience started calling out requests, speaking lines along with him, or even beating him to the punch.
Girls weren’t givin’ up no pussy in the fifties. It was very seldom you got any parts of pussy. You’d be tongue-kissing and shit, your dick get harder than times in ’29. Nuts get all up in your stomach . . . You ever have that? You’d be like, “Ooooh, you gotta give me some now.”
(as girl): “I’m not giving anything, I’m on my period.”
“You on your period again?”
(now everybody, in unison . . .)
“You gonna bleed to death, bitch.”
“It was quite a surprise,” Richard said. “Niggers was in the audience doing my shit. And you better not change nothing, cause they be like, ‘Wait, motherfucker, you didn’t say that on the album. Don’t bring us no original shit. Bring the shit on the record, motherfucker!’ ”
White folks do things a lot different than niggers do. They eat quiet and shit. You be over there they be, “Pass the potatoes. Thank you, darling. Can I have a bit of that sauce? How are the kids coming along with their studies? Think we’ll be having sexual intercourse this evening? We’re not? Well what the heck.”
The album quickly went gold and took that year’s Grammy Award for Best Comedy Album, despite the then-common record store practice of keeping X-rated or potentially inflammatory titles under the counter. This presented an additional hurdle to Bell’s hoped-for hip young white record buyers faced with the prickly—and quite possibly dangerous—dilemma of having to ask for the record by name. The break-through sales came too late for Stax. Within just a few months of its release, the album had sold out, and there were no more copies to be had. Facing foreclosure from Union Planters National Bank, trouble with the IRS, and an injunction from CBS, Stax simply couldn’t find a pressing plant willing to fill its orders. Reluctantly, on September 23, 1974, the company returned the master tapes to Richard in lieu of two hundred thousand dollars in royalties it had no hope of paying him. Richard turned around and licensed it to Warner Bros.—but not before he had, in frustration, shot up his framed gold record with his .357 Magnum. It was, for Richard, the first of at least a half-dozen inanimate objects he would take down with that gun.
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Back in 1970, finding himself in dire financial straits, Richard had signed an unvetted deal with Louis Drozen’s Laff Records for “a substantial four-figure advance.” From that time on, Laff seemingly recorded every club date Richard played, and they kept the tape rolling. In crafting its contract with Richard in 1974, Warner Bros. allowed Drozen to retain the rights to the trove of tapes he had stored away in Laff’s vaults. It turned out to be massive.
Over the next decade and a half, every time a Richard Pryor movie came out or Warner Bros. issued a new Richard Pryor LP, Laff rode the coattails of free publicity and released a Pryor album of its own, culled from their apparently bottomless trove of archived recordings, sometimes repackaging the same material for a second go-round. Three of those Laff records were nominated for Grammys—perhaps a reflexive action on the part of nominating members in response to seeing the name Richard Pryor on the list of considerations, despite the junior-high-school-newspaper-quality cover illustrations (that’s assuming they actually saw the LPs in question). The first time that happened, with Are You Serious?, released in 1976, Richard bought full-page ads in the trades thanking the Recording Academy for the honor of being nominated but asking members not to mark their ballots for something he believed did not represent his best work. Eventually, one Laff title—happily, the most deserving one, Rev. Du Rite—won Richard his fourth gold award in 1982. (Live on the Sunset Strip would be his fifth and final Grammy winner the following year.)
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The cover of Rolling Stone dated October 10, 1974, pictured Richard and Lily Tomlin as personifications of theatrical comedy and tragedy masks—Richard cackling, Lily sobbing—under the headline “Jive Times: The Comedy, Theater and Routine Lives of Richard Pryor and Lily Tomlin,” the first of a two-part feature by David Felton. For this issue, Felton wrote three separate pieces on Richard: the most in-depth biographical profile yet published, a fanciful musing on the inner workings of Richard’s imagination, and the most candid, unguarded—and, one might guess, manipulative—interview Richard would ever give. (Felton’s piece on Tomlin appeared in the following issue.)
Felton certainly fared better than the National Observer interviewer who found Richard in an especially pissy and combative mood when Richard claimed, with a straight face, that J. Edgar Hoover had been his most important influence. He feigned not to know who Charlie Chaplin was. Insisted he’d never even heard his name before. When the exasperated reporter started packing up his things, Richard told him, “Say hi to your boss, Buckley, for me.” So that was it. The reporter patiently explained that he was with the National Observer, not William F. Buckley’s National Review. Oh. In that case, Richard told him, sit back down and he’d submit to a proper interview.
By contrast, Richard gave Felton eight separate interviews over the course of several months, allowing Felton to witness him sobbing in a restaurant as he tried to describe the guilt he felt for having let people down and letting him observe as he workshopped the material that would become That Nigger’s Crazy.
Richard even allowed Felton to quote extensive passages from his autobiographical screenplay “This Can’t Be Happening to Me” that he’d begun writing in Berkeley, including a remarkable scene in a cathedral in which Christ begs Richard to help him down from the cross. “I’ve been hanging around here two thousand years,” Jesus says to him, “and they ain’t buried me yet, and I’m tired.” Richard pulls the spikes from his hands and feet, and helps him, limping, out of the cathedral. As soon as they reach the street, sirens go off. Richard and Jesus are set upon by a group of monks who beat them up, haul Jesus back inside, and nail him back on the cross. As Jesus wails in agony, Richard vows to tell the world what just happened, to which one of the monks replies, “Who’s going to believe you, nigger?”
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While on a late-summer cross-country tour, Richard stopped in Peoria to attend a ribbon-cutting ceremony dedicating the new sliding board—apparently a very elaborate sliding board—that he had donated to Miss Whittaker’s new day-care center. The mayor proclaimed it “Richard Pryor Day.” A band played on the back of a flatbed truck, and the YMCA put on a show in his honor at the Shrine mosque. Following the ribbon cutting, Richard presented the Emmy he had won as a writer for the second Lily Tomlin special to the woman who had inspired and believed in him when he needed it most. As he ceremoniously unveiled the trophy, which he had hastily wrapped in newspaper, he told Miss Whittaker, “If it hadn’t been for you, I would not have learned anything about the theater. And I certainly wouldn’t have learned how to write.”
(On his next visit to Peoria, he shyly asked Miss Whittaker if he could have the statuette back. But it was adorable the way he did it, she insisted. “Miss Whittaker,” he said, “when I say I won an Emmy, people don’t believe me.”)
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Richard cohosted The Mike Douglas Show for the entire week of November 25–29, 1974. Introduced as “the Pride of Peoria,” his stint featured guest appearances by Sammy Davis Jr., Freddie Prinze, Harry Belafonte, Joe Frazier, and a memorable performance by Sly Stone. (Memorable to everyone except Sly, that is. When an interviewer complimented him on his appearance, he didn’t know who Mike Douglas was.) At the end of the week, in what Richard would often say had been the proudest moment of his life, his grandmother Marie came out to join him, giving him a massive hug on national TV.
On that week’s Monday show, Richard found himself sobbing uncontrollably when Douglas, in one of the “this is your life” moments he enjoyed springing on his guest hosts, brought out surprise guest Miss Juliette Whittaker. Richard wept as she recalled the shy young teenager who looked to be no older than nine, showing up at Peroria’s Carver Community Center asking if he could be in a play.
Later in that same broadcast, Richard, perhaps giddy from his emotional reunion with Miss Whittaker, began to snicker as guest Milton Berle attempted to tell a maudlin, heart-wrenching story from his just-published memoir about how he’d agonized over taking his girlfriend—an actress who, he hinted, later married a powerful producer—to Tijuana for an abortion in 1931. Not only did Pryor crack up over the story, he apparently blurted out a pretty good guess as to the woman’s identity, judging from the look on Berle’s face. “I’m sorry, man,” Richard stammered, still laughing, “but I just—I just did it.”
“I wish, Richard,” Berle lectured him, “that I could have laughed at that time when I was your age the way you just laughed now, but I just couldn’t.” Richard, trying to make amends, offered to relight Milton’s cigar. “No, thank you, I don’t smoke that stuff,” Berle huffed. He attempted to resume his story with a little background on how his domineering mother, who invariably attempted to thwart any romance that lasted more than two or three dates, instructed him to marry the girl just long enough to give the child a name and then divorce her. This only provoked more ill-suppressed laugher from Richard. “I’m sorry, man, it’s just the story . . . it’s funny.” Berle refused to continue, saying he’d come back and tell the story some other time. “I told you this nine years ago and I’m going to tell you on the air in front of millions of people: Pick your spots, baby.” Richard came back with a faux Humphrey Bogart, “All right, schweetheart.” Berle gazed up into the studio lights, as though following the up-wafting smoke from his cigar and repeated the warning. “Pick your spots.”
As the show’s credits rolled, Berle howled as Richard, for the second time in his career, went down in defeat against the show’s final guest, a wrestling bear.
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That same autumn of 1974, Penelope Spheeris had a visit from her friend Lorne Michaels. He sat on the sofa in her Topanga Beach home and made his pitch, hoping to persuade her to come to New York and work on a new project of his. She never seriously considered the offer. Her longtime boyfriend, Bobby Schoeller, the father of their five-year-old daughter, had only a few months before died of a heroin overdose. The idea of uprooting her daughter and moving across the country was just too much. Besides, Lorne’s idea sounded a bit flighty. He wanted to bring live skit comedy back to TV, the way Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca had done it back in the 1950s, except hip and edgy and bold, for the 1970s.
These, she recalls, were his exact words: “I want to do a live show, from New York, on Saturday nights.”
When its time came, Richard would do for that show what he had done for Mitzi Shore and the Comedy Store, only nationwide.
* If you must know, the evil ruler of communist Albania has kidnapped a multitude of America’s bygone stars—among them George Jessel, Butterfly McQueen, Guy Lombardo, Andy Devine, Ruby Keeler, Edgar Bergen, Colonel Harland Sanders (believe it), Jay Silverheels, Johnny Weissmuller and Maureen O’Sullivan (aka Tarzan and Jane)—who all make cameos. The leader of the SSA (Super Secret Agency) wears a cardboard box over his head but sounds like Richard Nixon (courtesy of Rich Little). He responds to the crisis by assembling his legions of undercover agents—whole divisions of them—who pose as bikers, hookers, Black Panthers, Klansmen, Boy Scouts, and so on. He consults a supercomputer called MOTHA (Mechanical Oracle That Helps Americans), a female-shaped contraption with blinking lights and cone-shaped breasts. SSA hatches a plan to recruit four young men selected by MOTHA to form a rock group (the Phynx), make them into international stars, and then wait until they are invited to play a gig in Albania. As part of the group’s training, Richard (who introduces himself as “Richard Pryor”), dressed as a chef, is onscreen for all of eight seconds, just long enough to say that his job will be to teach them “soul.” Unbelievably, the Phynx’s songs were penned by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, composers of “Jailhouse Rock,” “Hound Dog,” and “Yakety Yak,” among others.