Becoming Richard Pryor (41 page)

[
They ride off together
.]

As with Piano Man and Billie, the love survives the addiction, even possibly deepens with it. This was wishful thinking, Hollywood-style, where wishes do come true.

With his fellow writers on
Blazing Saddles
, Richard started getting antsy. He caught a train back west after about a month of writing. “That was about as much
sitzfleisch
as he had,” Bergman said. “
Sitzfleisch
means literally ‘sitting meat’—that’s someone who’s going to sit and write for three months. He wasn’t wired that way. We’d done pretty much most of the first draft, and he wasn’t going to come back for another draft—that we knew.” So Richard left others to tighten the script. He anticipated that, since Brooks had enthused whenever he performed as Black Bart in the writers’ room, he’d be coming back later on the project—as an actor in its starring role. He felt, with some justification, that the film carried his sensibility as much as anyone’s. When the first draft was completed and typed up in his absence, the names of the screenwriters were not listed alphabetically. “Richard Pryor” was placed second, just under “Mel Brooks.”

A
ccording to the legend, the original script for
The Mack
was written, by former pimp Robert Poole, on toilet paper from within his San Quentin jail cell. A typed version, called
Black and Beautiful
, eventually traveled into the hands of tough-guy independent producer Harvey Bernhard, who was intrigued by the idea—a pimp using mind control to bind women to him—and had the chutzpah to think he could finance the project on Diner’s Club cards if necessary. Bernhard estimated his budget at the Hollywood pittance of $120,000. The success of early blaxploitation films like
Shaft
and
The Legend of Nigger Charley
suggested that he could make a quick return on his overextended credit.

Though Bernhard bought Poole’s script for its seductive premise, the script itself was a piece of agitprop that begged to be rewritten. Drafted in 1969, it was a flat transmission of the revolutionary politics of Black Power’s zenith, much of its action centering on the protagonist’s Black Nationalist brother. “Snipers, baby! The war has begun!”:
so exults the brother in the movie’s final line, his revolutionary brigade having just riddled a pair of dirty cops with bullets.

Bernhard first pulled in a young director named Michael Campus to rewrite the script top to bottom. Campus was still smarting from the flop of his sci-fi
ZPG
, about the dangers of population explosion. (“To say I was cold after ‘ZPG’ is an understatement,” Campus said. “I was like a slab of ice.”) He had an abiding interest in black working-class life and an enabling overconfidence in his ability to negotiate perilous situations. Raised by a Communist mother and father on the border of Harlem, he had grown up in a family knitted together by the idea of social justice. The young Michael sang the Internationale at summer camp; he cried with his parents over news of lynchings in the South; he saw his father, formerly chief radiologist at Harlem Hospital, blacklisted in the anti-Communist purges of the 1950s. He picked up a hunger for unsettling truths: when Campus went behind the camera in the 1960s, he was happy to take assignments that put him in a riot on the streets of Calcutta or in the back of a police car in New York City. When Bernhard pitched
The Mack
his way, Campus agreed to the project under one condition: that he be allowed to move to Oakland and see the culture of “players” for himself. He wanted to ground his film in the reality of pimping, not some ersatz fantasy dreamed up by Hollywood.

Campus considered several actors (Ron O’Neal, John Amos, Paul Mooney) for the central role of Goldie, but fatefully chose Max Julien, an actor-writer who could rewrite the role around his own sensibility. Julien’s mother, a part-time minister, had just been killed in a robbery in the streets of Washington, DC, and Julien felt both devastated and free to take on a role he would have declined while she was living. He brought to
The Mack
a brash and long-standing self-confidence. By the time he crossed paths with Campus, Julien had traveled a complicated itinerary, embracing a series of roles: premed student at Howard; middling stand-up comic in New York City (where he met Richard, who informed him, “I don’t know what you do, but it ain’t comedy”); expatriate actor-filmmaker in Italy; and writer-producer of
Cleopatra
Jones
, a hit black action film with a shapely karate-chopping narcotics agent at its center. At the end of that journey of self-discovery, he was a committed radical, a close friend of Huey Newton and an artist dedicated to upending the stereotypes that Hollywood preferred. “There could be [a black cinema],” he argued in a 1971 interview, “if films start to deal with the psychological problems of the black man instead of repeating the one dimensional militant or Uncle Tom.” His rewrite of Poole’s one-dimensional Goldie would put his ambition to the test. “I can’t play Goldie as a fop,” he told Campus. “He has to be a real person.”

Julien insisted that his friend Richard Pryor play Goldie’s partner, Slim, and Richard in turn demanded that he be able to write all the dialogue for his character. Soon Richard was hosting all-night rewrite sessions at his cottage on the grounds of Yamashiro. More than Julien and Campus (who had yet to go to Oakland), he knew the world of pimps from the inside.
The Mack
gave him a chance to become on intimate terms, again, with the demons of his past. It remained to be seen whether, in revisiting the hard-edged world of his father, he would exorcise those demons or become their servant.

The three writers came together as a team—“the three musketeers,” in Campus’s optimistic view, each lending his individual talents to the project. Campus brought a sense of storytelling structure and, after he spent several weeks immersed in the world of Frank Ward, one of Oakland’s leading gangsters, a familiarity with the rough characters who prospered in that city’s underground. Julien inflected Goldie with his verbal bravado and the sensitivity that peeked out from underneath it. Richard gave the film his ear and his feeling for black street life. In his handwritten notes from the time, Campus described how Richard’s creativity erupted in the rewrite sessions:

As with his work on
Blazing Saddles
, Richard considered his cocaine a necessary stimulant on the job. At their first meetup, he visited the bathroom to take a hit; in later sessions, he made multiple trips. Always, when he came back into the room, he avoided the eyes of Campus, whom he called “White Boy.”

Gradually, over several weeks of intensive writing, the film took shape. The characters retained their names from Poole’s script, but otherwise bore little resemblance to their original form. Richard’s character Slim, formerly a tough-minded mentor to Goldie, became his wobbly sidekick, macho in theory if not in practice. Goldie was reborn as a player of some complexity: preening in a maxi-length white fur coat, but devoted to his mother; quick with an insult (“Let me tell you something, you vicious-ass piece of jelly”), but liable to drift into a church to gather his thoughts; openhearted when the cash was coming in, but coldhearted when it was not. Through Richard’s suggestions, he also became a more stylish sadist, injecting battery acid into the veins of a drug kingpin, forcing a rival to stick himself with his own dagger-tipped cane, or locking a “rat” into the trunk of a car that was teeming with the real thing.

All told, the arc of the film became more melancholy, less triumphant, its radical politics tempered by the disenchantment of 1972. The dirty cops were still righteously dispatched, but Goldie was left with nothing. At the beginning of the film, he came empty-handed to Oakland on a bus, and now he departed the film seemingly on the same bus, again empty-handed. Still, for a film about disenchantment, its dialogue crackled with the vitality of people teetering on the edge of disaster. “You shade-tree nigger. You ain’t no pimp, you’re a rest haven for ho’s. You’re a car thief, a car thief!”—so cries Pretty Tony, a pimp getting squeezed by Goldie’s operation. Here, with his pitch-perfect sense of street talk, Richard’s contribution was essential.

Richard couldn’t have asked for a writing gig with more personal relevance, but the experience of rewriting
The Mack
was hardly idyllic. He had committed to it in a moment of faith—like Julien and
Campus, he wanted to see the film come to fruition—but they had never formally discussed credit or compensation, and the default position was for all of them to get none at all. Of the “three musketeers,” he was the one most ill served by this arrangement: since Campus and Julien were the film’s director and star, their fortunes would obviously rise with the film’s. And then there was the irony that wasn’t lost on Richard: wasn’t he writing a movie
about
getting paid? Who was the mack but an expert in squeezing the last nickel from anyone who owed him?

“You’re gonna pay me for doin’ all this shit,” he told Campus during one writing session, then started repeating it like a refrain. Campus shrugged: “I’m the director, not the producer, not the money guy.”

At their last session, Richard stared at the pages of the script, taking in what they’d accomplished. Then, as Campus and Julien said their good-byes, Richard stepped back from the pleasantries. He lifted a key line from the script—what Goldie the pimp says to Lulu, the first woman in his stable, when she runs to him breathless and penniless, raving that a trick has just tried to kill her—and he made it his own: “Get me my money.” Having written
The Mack
, Richard was trying to operate as one. Campus agreed to plead Richard’s case, to “get him his money,” but in his mind he already could hear Harvey Bernhard’s response: “Screw Pryor.”

“Richie is the human submarine,” Campus jotted down in his notes at the time. “Everything below the surface but the rage periscope.” Now
The Mack
had to move into production up north in Oakland and Berkeley, on a tight shooting schedule and with a fuming Richard as its costar.

O
ne of the reasons
The Mack
lives on as a cult classic—a movie that has inspired filmmakers such as Quentin Tarantino and the Hughes brothers, and hip-hop performers from Ice Cube and Dr. Dre to Outkast and Jay-Z—is its texture, the way it evokes the feel of desperate nights in Oakland in 1972: Snoop Dogg has called it “one of the coldest movies in American cinema.” That sense of hard-bitten reality was
achieved at considerable risk. Campus was committed to filming on location—in Oakland’s bars, nightclubs, barbershops, churches, and funeral parlors—at a moment when the larger location was dicey in the extreme, and not just on account of the expected complications that might arise when a film crew enters the inner city (for which
The Mack
’s bodyguards carried firearms). One day, when Campus set up his camera and maneuvered his actors into place for an outside shoot, bottles started raining down from the nearby rooftops. The crew scattered, shocked at the organized ambush.

Bernhard and Campus had entered, blindly, into an ongoing territorial battle between the Ward Brothers, who controlled the underground economy of the area, and the Black Panthers, whose organization was at a tender transitional moment. Just two months before
The Mack
started filming, the Panthers had narrowed their ambitions, declaring Oakland their sole “base of operations” and asking all party members to close down other local chapters. The party aimed to concentrate on “liberating the territory of Oakland”—from the police and from kingpins like Frank Ward. In public, the Panthers started putting on a fresh face and mobilizing to elect Black Panther chairman Bobby Seale as mayor of Oakland; much less publicly, they tried to muscle in on the Ward Brothers and get a slice of their action. When Campus had toured Oakland’s demimonde with Frank Ward and then secured the Ward Brothers’ protection for the filming of
The Mack
, he unwittingly took sides in this war for possession of Oakland. The fusillade of bottles was the Panthers’ way of announcing, as Seale told Harvey Bernhard, “You’re in Panther territory now, boy.”

Bernhard reluctantly agreed to meet “the Man,” Huey Newton, at his penthouse apartment overlooking Lake Merritt, and the next day at noon, he, Max Julien, and Frank Ward were sitting on lacquered seats in front of a Chinese table, waiting for Newton. Bobby Seale walked out in white pants and a black watch navy cap, and recited his poetry for twenty minutes. His recitation complete, Seale announced “I’m not going to rip you off for much”—just five grand. Bernhard pulled out his checkbook and wrote a check for the full
amount, unaware that his own financing agent hadn’t yet put up the money. After the check bounced, the war between the Panthers and the filmmakers escalated. The Panthers set up pickets at the Showcase Lounge, where
The Mack
’s crew hoped to film the essential “Players Ball” sequence. “The Black Community Will Not Be Exploited Anymore!” charged eight-foot-high banners. Seale demanded that all extras on the film receive fifty dollars, not the ten dollars for which they’d been contracted, and called films like
The Mack
a “silver coated form of oppression.” This time, Bernhard wrote a check that didn’t bounce—and that was funneled into a fund for extras.

At the same time that the filmmakers were fending off the Panthers, they hit an equally persistent spot of trouble with Richard, who appeared to have pushed a Self-Destruct button en route to the East Bay. His character, Slim, was written as an insecure player with a taste for the finer things, and sometimes it seemed there was little daylight between Richard and the role he had scripted for himself. He partied with three or four women through the night, getting high on coke and champagne, then treated the set like his private playground during the day. Once, he came out of his trailer with three ladies of the evening at his side, and staggered up to Campus.