“Listen, you spoke the truth. They have to make you famous now. That’s how Hollywood deals with the truth . . . They make you so famous that nobody’ll take you serious anymore.”
—Cecil Brown, Days without Weather
Not counting Jo Jo Dancer, Richard Pryor—or someone calling himself that—appeared in the following films, almost always in the starring role.
Critical Condition (1987)
Moving (1988)
See No Evil, Hear No Evil (1989)
Harlem Nights (1989)
Another You (1991)
The Three Muscatels (1991)
Mad Dog Time (1996)
Full confession: we haven’t seen any of these movies, not all the way through, anyway. But we’ve seen enough. They are unbearable. We never believed that Paul McCartney died in a 1966 car wreck or that Elvis staged his own death in 1977 to live a life of obscurity in northern Michigan, but we can say with fair certainty that the hapless actor passing himself off as Richard Pryor in these movies was an impostor.
Richard—the real Richard—well knew of this doppelganger’s existence and spoke of him often. The terrible irony is that in his prime the genuine Richard believed himself to be the impostor. (Who Me? I’m Not Him is the title of a 1977 LP of older material issued on the Laff label.) He often said that Richard Pryor the movie star and famous comedian was someone else, living and breathing and walking around out there in the world somewhere while he spent Richard Pryor’s money, slept with his women, lived in his house, and cashed his checks, fearing all the while that one day the real Richard Pryor would show up and kick his ass. He knew he could do it, too.
While in the hospital recovering from the fire, he told his friend, the producer Thom Mount, “I got real scared. I was this person that I had inherited in life. And I was a person that nobody knew. Nobody knew me. All I could keep doing was act like this person, this Richard Pryor, because I was afraid. I was afraid they’d kill me if they found out I wasn’t Richard Pryor.”
Kathy McKee saw him two or three times in the years following the fire and she confirms: “He was not the same person.”
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If this usurped Richard Pryor can be said to have a spiritual forebear, it is Shakespeare’s Sir John Falstaff—the lusty, besotted, conniving, whore-mongering, nose-tweaking, purse-snatching rapscallion and corrupter of the crown who strides the boards in Henry IV, Part 1 and Part 2, and again in Henry V. But now observe: this swaggering colossus is reduced to a kowtowing, repentant, subservient tool in The Merry Wives of Windsor, a work Shakespeare dashed off at the behest of Queen Elizabeth who wanted to see her favorite character fall in love. Harold Bloom calls his Merry Wives incarnation the “pseudo-Falstaff,” a nameless impostor masquerading as Shakespeare’s most sublime creature. Shakespearean scholar A. C. Bradley catalogs the indignities. The Falstaff of Merry Wives, he writes, “is baffled, duped, treated like dirty linen, beaten, burnt, pricked, mocked, insulted.” Worst of all, he repents and begs pardon. “It is horrible.”
As with the pseudo-Falstaff, the impostor Pryor is, in Bloom’s words, “uncomfortable with what he is doing and wishes to get it over with as rapidly as possible.” He “loathes not only the occasion but himself for having yielded to it.”
The spectacle would make us “lament a lost glory” if we did not “know him to be a rank impostor” masquerading as the great man.
Richard’s friend, bodyguard, trainer, and sometime spiritual adviser Rashon Khan confronted him point-blank and asked him why he was doing a “crazy movie” like The Toy. Why, when even his costar Jackie Gleason said it was bullshit. “Richard said, ‘The money. I get paid for this one.’ ”
Richard could no more turn down Hollywood’s millions than Shakespeare could refuse his queen.
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Like Elvis Presley before him, Richard reached heights of absolute genius when commanding a stage with a microphone in his hand, then squandered his energy and talent on a string of forgettable movies. Greil Marcus could have been speaking of Richard Pryor’s entire postfire output when he wrote this response to Bob Dylan’s Self Portrait: “I once said I’d buy an album of Dylan breathing heavily. I still would. But not an album of Dylan breathing softly.”
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Writer Andy Breckman (cohost of WFMU’s long-running comedy program Seven Second Delay) recalls a full-cast read-through of a screenplay he wrote starring Richard Pryor.
What was it called? It doesn’t matter. It wasn’t Stir Crazy, okay?* It was one of the shitty ones he made later, after he started to shrivel up, when nobody could bear watching him.
There was a scene where one of the characters—a senile old lady—takes a crap in the backyard. Shamelessly, in broad daylight. Like a dog. Mr. Pryor felt that scene didn’t work. I respectfully disagreed. We went back and forth. He wanted it out. I thought it should stay.
Finally, the director turned to Pryor and said, “Richard, is this something you feel strongly about?” And this is what Pryor did: he reached into his jacket and pulled out a gun! A real gun. A Derringer—with two short barrels. I’d never seen one before but I could tell it was definitely real. I was so scared I almost blacked out.
Pryor put the Derringer on the table—thunk—and stared at me, sort of defiantly. It was like a saloon scene in a bad western. Everyone gasped and laughed nervously. Nobody said anything for about five seconds. Then I playfully ripped the page out of the script, indicating “Heh, heh, okay Richard, you win!” Everyone tittered nervously some more. Finally, Mr. Pryor put the gun away and the read-through continued. We never saw the gun again. Although, as I recall, everyone laughed at Mr. Pryor’s lines a little louder from that point on.
There was one movie Richard made that apparently no one has seen. Called The Three Muscatels, we can only say that it was ostensibly based on the Alexander Dumas novel of the Musketeers and that it starred and was cowritten by Flynn Belaine Pryor, Richard’s fifth (and sixth) wife.
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Richard’s physical condition deteriorated considerably after he and Flynn divorced for the second time in 1991. Deboragh returned and took on the duties of a twenty-four-hour caregiver. Richard managed to make a few more TV appearances and received an Emmy nomination for his role as a cranky MS patient—with Rain playing his daughter—on the CBS drama, Chicago Hope. And he turned up in an offbeat part as a garage owner in David Lynch’s movie, Lost Highway.
Roger Ebert was gracious enough to overlook Richard’s role as “Jimmy the grave digger” in his final movie, Mad Dog Time, a film he described as being no more or less engaging than looking at a blank screen for the same amount of time. “Oh, I’ve seen bad movies before. But they usually made me care about how bad they were. Watching Mad Dog Time is like waiting for the bus in a city where you’re not sure they have a bus line . . . I don’t have any idea what this movie is about—and yet, curiously, I don’t think I missed anything.”
Directed by Larry Bishop (son of Rat Packer Joey Bishop), Mad Dog Time stars Richard Dreyfuss, Diane Lane, Jeff Goldblum, and Ellen Barkin, with Gabriel Byrne, Kyle MacLachlan, Gregory Hines, Burt Reynolds, and Billy Idol. Thus, Richard ended his film career exactly as he began it, playing a supporting role in a star-bloated gangster comedy. Only this time no one singled him out as the movie’s promising bright spot. Instead, they looked away.
* It was Moving, directed in 1988 by Alan Metter, costarring Beverly Todd, Stacey Dash, and Randy Quaid.