Becoming Richard Pryor (56 page)

While he flushed his system clean with OJ, Richard faced a tight deadline. Given his start date on
Greased Lightning
and the terms of his contract with Warner Bros., he had less than two weeks to conceive and produce a new album for the label.
Bicentennial Nigger
, the album that he rushed into existence, is his most uneven, padded with undeveloped riffs on his teenage gang in Peoria and lengthy shout-outs to black celebrities in his audience. “It’s not my best work,” he complained to a reporter upon its release. “I’m never going to sign a multirecord contract like that again.” But it is also his most hard-edged and conceptual album, with several tracks skewering from different angles the patriotic hoopla of America’s bicentennial. The album’s cover brilliantly captured the slant of Richard’s alternative history. It
depicted Richard in ten incarnations—as policeman, convict, hustler, boxer, reverend, slave, and so on—with all the incarnations bound together in leg irons fastened by Uncle Sam himself. Richard might contain a multitude in himself, the image suggested, but no matter how much he multiplied himself onstage, Uncle Sam always held the power to yank his chain.

The title track was a stick of dynamite with a slow fuse. “You all know how black humor started,” Richard said. “It started in the slave ships. A cat was on his way over here, rowing. And a dude said, ‘What are you laughing at?’ ‘
Yesterday I was a king
.’” He connected the dots between that slave ship and the state of black America in 1976:

In the wheezy voice of his bicentennial minstrel, Richard said, “I used to live to be one hundred and fifty. Now I dies of the high blood pressure by the time I’m fifty-two, yuk yuk yuk. And that thrills me to death.” He recounted the horrors visited upon black Americans—the Middle Passage, the separation of families under slavery—as if they were all a hilarious joke, with yuk-yuks punctuating every sentence. “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” (an unusual in-studio touch) surged in the background, the dissonant soundtrack to black suffering. “Y’all probably done forgot about it,” he said, still in that minstrel chuckle, before speaking normally, truthfully, as if for the first time: “But I ain’t never gonna forget.”

Silence. The end—of the track and the album. It’s hard to think of any other “comedy” record that closes with such a head-snapping reckoning.

While Richard saw the last two hundred years of American history as a blackface horror show, he also wondered if the prospects for the next two hundred were equally bleak. “Hey, Jack, saw
Logan’s Run
the other day,” Richard riffed in one of the
Bicentennial Nigger
shows.
“Twenty-third century, but there weren’t no niggers in it. Guess they’re not planning for us to be around.” Then a kicker: “That’s why
we
got to make movies.” Summoning himself to that task, he planned, after
Bicentennial Nigger
, to stick to a three-year moratorium on stand-up so that he could make his mark on Hollywood. “I don’t really want to go around the country playing clubs, seeing cities. I did that already. I have this new house. I want to stay put and do films,” he told a reporter.

A few weeks later, he was flying to Madison, Georgia, to step into his first role as leading man. Perhaps Third World Cinema could break the old American pattern.

T
he production of
Greased Lightning
was soon full of drama, but in a change of pace, Richard was not its main instigator. Nervous about carrying a film—and especially worried about how he could absorb a part with so many lines—he aimed to stay on the straight and narrow. He brought his grandmother Marie out to Madison to “take care of things” and, implicitly, keep him in line. He settled with her in a farmhouse on the city’s rural outskirts and in his downtime lived a rusticated life, wiling away the hours fishing, or setting off firecrackers, or hunting. He savored where his career had taken him. “When I was a kid,” he told an interviewer while making the film, “I always said I would be in the movies one day, and damned if I didn’t make it. Sometimes I just sit home and look out the window and say, ‘Daaaammmmmm!’ ” On the set, he was often in the same reflective mood: when waiting for his scenes, he would pull over a chair and sit under a tree.

Given Richard’s relative mellowness,
Greased Lightning
’s disturbances at first came from other sources. When the film’s largely black cast and crew arrived in Madison, local whites rebelled. They “were creating all kinds of havoc,” recalled Michael Schultz, who visited Richard in the early days of shooting to confab about
Which Way Is Up?
. According to Schultz, it took the intervention of the town’s white sheriff to calm the waters. “‘Be cool,’” Schultz remembered
him saying, “‘these niggers are gonna be out of here in a couple of weeks. Y’all just be cool, it’s a lot of money.’”

Director Melvin Van Peebles was the loser in the next skirmish that beset the film. He had wanted to thread an element of fantasy into the biopic, but several weeks into the shoot, Warner Bros. and Hannah Weinstein looked at the rushes and felt the film was rattling off course, with a tone too broadly satirical and stylized. Though radical in her politics, Weinstein was not drawn to formal experimentation. She was happy for
Greased Lightning
to deal forthrightly with the hardships of black life, or to underscore how poor blacks and poor whites could make common cause, but didn’t cotton to Van Peebles’s ironic vision, and she removed him from the film.

The production came to a standstill; Richard was now a leading man without a director. He phoned Michael Schultz, who had since returned to LA, and asked him to save the movie. Schultz hesitated—he was deep into the preproduction work on
Which Way Is Up?—
then reconsidered. “Here’s my star,” he thought. “I don’t want him to be in a movie that’s going to blow. I don’t want him to look bad. I guess I’ll have to go do it.” Schultz told the press that, in his conception,
Greased Lightning
would now follow in the lines of Burt Reynolds’s
White Lightning
, but with more of a comic touch—music, no doubt, to the ears of Weinstein and Warner Bros. Schultz arrived in Madison, took stock, and decided there was little he could salvage from Van Peebles’s footage; he went on to reshoot 80 percent of it.

Fortunately, Schultz had a star who was generally living outside his “crazy nigger” mystique—and who, when he strayed, had a costar who kept him in line. Pam Grier, cast as Wendell’s wife, Mary, arrived on the set one morning in August, eager to work with Richard for the first time. Then she waited. The sweltering Georgia heat melted her makeup; her dress became wet with sweat. At two o’clock, Richard strolled in and, instead of moving straight into a rehearsal of their scene together, took out a fork and teasingly poked at her eye. Grier snapped: she smacked the fork out of his hand and gave him a tongue-lashing.

“This is an opportunity for you to be a leading man and show what you can do, and you’re going to mess with this,” she said. “Do you know your lines?”

“No, not . . .” Richard fumbled.

“If not, I’ll come back when you’re ready,” Grier said, and peeled off for her dressing room. As she reflected later, she could not have chosen a better way to impress, or seduce, Richard: “I walked off and respected myself, and that’s when he fell in love with me.” During the shoot, they were affectionate, curious to get to know one another outside their respective mystiques. “Pam Grier, you’re just a farmer. A hick,” Richard told her, surprised to glimpse the person behind the persona; she was far from the badass vigilante character he knew from screen roles like Foxy Brown and Coffy. In their screen time together, too, they flirted with finding their less sensational selves.

Aware of all he had to learn, Richard was everywhere looking to add more nuance to his part. He studied the moves of his costar Beau Bridges, who played Hutch, a poor white race car driver who begins as Scott’s competitor and ends as his boon companion. “He was beautiful,” Richard said of Bridges. “I’d watch him in a close-up and want to kill him, he was so good. He taught me a lot about acting in front of the camera.” Richard received another sort of acting tutorial from the race car drivers he met on set—among them Wendell Scott, who served as the film’s technical adviser. Richard befriended the man whom he was playing on-screen, and absorbed Scott’s geniality. Scott’s attitude “was different from how I would do it as a black man today,” Richard offered, “because I would have taken a shotgun with me. And he don’t have none of that feeling.”

All this—Richard’s affection for Grier and Bridges, his sense of Scott and the racing world he inhabited—filtered into his performance, which was understated and surprisingly modulated. His Wendell Scott is a dreamer who comes fully alive only when he’s hurtling down a road or a track, a sweet soul who lives for an adrenaline rush but not for revenge. Off the track and in the company of family and friends, he’s kind and straight-ahead. With his white pal Hutch,
for instance, he has a casual, unforced intimacy—nothing like the electric agitation between
Silver Streak
’s Grover Muldoon and George Caldwell. Wendell and Hutch have a bottom-dog connection: they love the sound of humming engines while sensing, at the same time, that their lives are as busted up as the stock cars they’re endlessly rebuilding.

Behind the wheel, Richard’s Wendell is more animated, bringing a dash of style and good-natured rebelliousness to the task at hand. At his first racing scene, he is a dandy among the grease monkeys, with a newsboy’s cap and a long white scarf draped around his neck. When the good ol’ boy owner of the racetrack instructs him, as if talking to a small child, about the basics of racing (“One time around is a lap”), Scott calls him “captain” and “sir” with a gamesome spirit: he’s involved in a delicate bit of acting, mocking the owner to himself but not so overtly that he trips off any suspicions. White men in positions of authority are pitiable giants to him, so powerful and yet so dumb. He wants to get on with the race. And when white race car drivers push him off the track and nearly kill him, he still wants to get on with it—to coax his smoking and sputtering mess of a car back on the track and across the finish line. Richard’s Wendell flickers with a shrewd intelligence, but at his core, he’s driven by a simple, uncomplicated love for his sport.

When
Greased Lightning
’s production wrapped in September, Richard had reason to be proud of how he’d handled his first starring role. There was nothing Willie Best–like to his part; and he had defied the rumors of his unreliability and held himself together. Still, a curious irony trailed his debut as a leading man. He had ascended with a role that was as remote from the jagged power of his stand-up comedy as any in his career. His Wendell Scott is free of raunch, free of neuroses, free of cutting edges—as soft and lovable as Richard’s “bicentennial nigger” was sharp and disturbing. And that was how Hannah Weinstein liked it: when, in the coming months, Michael Schultz tried to make the film more dynamic in its editing, he suffered a similar fate to that of Melvin Van Peebles. Weinstein fired
Schultz’s editor and took over the film, reshaping it according to what Schultz called “the soap opera style of moviemaking,” with “a lot of emphasis on the family and on the boring parts of the picture.” All this might have made the character of Wendell Scott closer to the real-life Wendell Scott, who by all reports was a good-natured family man, but it did not draw him closer to the real-life Richard, or to the wellsprings of his comedy.

While directing
Greased Lightning
in Georgia, Schultz looked ahead to
Which Way Is Up?
, already in preproduction, and announced to the trade press, with some bite, that “I want to make certain that Richard Pryor . . . has an opportunity to give full play to his comedic talents, and those talents can be very political, and very raunchy. I plan to see his humor is not castrated.” For several years, Schultz had conceived of his sex farce as Richard’s Hollywood breakthrough: “the whole idea of this picture is to give Richard’s talent a vehicle to express itself.” By late summer, though, Schultz had a problem on his hands. Richard’s friend Cecil Brown had delivered a screenplay that was too prolix—a novelist’s idea of a screenplay—and, worst of all from Schultz’s perspective, simply not funny. The director brought in Carl Gottlieb, a comedy writer who had just taken an unwieldy script about a shark and, by tightening it and giving its dialogue an improvisational flavor, had helped turn it into
Jaws
. Perhaps if he worked closely with Richard, Gottlieb could cast a similar spell on
Which Way
.

So, in the fall of 1976, Richard set off with Gottlieb for a ten-day vacation at a villa in Barbados. The assignment: to project the characters in Richard’s head onto the page, with their profane spirits fully intact.

Barbados, Los Angeles, industrial Michigan, 1976–1977

T
he Richard who arrived in Barbados could feel that the pieces of his life were finally coming together—that he’d passed through the whirlwind and been deposited by a gentle hand on a sun-drenched shore.

At his side was Pam Grier, who, after the shooting of
Greased Lightning
, had transitioned from costar to inamorata, and brought a loving sense of structure to his life. With her support, Richard had committed to a new morning regimen. No more sleeping in until two in the afternoon; now he breakfasted on eggs, bacon, freshly made oatmeal, and freshly squeezed juice, then dashed off to the tennis court for a workout with his trainer. Self-improvement was the order of the day—and not just for his body. Having confessed to Pam that, with his eighth-grade education, it was hard for him to read fluently, he enlisted her to coach and support him. He dreamed big while staying true to his sensibility. “I heard that
War and Peace
is the hardest motherfuckin’ novel to read,” he told her. “I’m gonna read it. If I can’t read it, it’s so damned big, at least I can kill someone with it. Use it as a weapon.” The circle of his ambition was expanding. He signed on to star in a number of literary adaptations—
Cyrano de Bergerac
,
Arsenic and Old Lace
, even George Orwell’s
Animal Farm
.