Becoming Richard Pryor (57 page)

In Barbados, Richard was the picture of physical and mental discipline. He woke up, dressed himself in tennis whites all the way down to his knee socks and sneakers, and played some games at a nearby court; he took a light lunch (salad, melon) on the terrace of the villa they’d rented; he brainstormed with Carl Gottlieb about
Which Way Is Up?
in the afternoon; he went out for a nice dinner with Pam, Carl, and Carl’s wife. Then he retired for the evening and began the cycle anew the next morning. He was relaxed and in fine fettle. Once, he broke into a high singsong voice, “As mayor of the Munchkin City”—and entertained Carl with a flawless rendition of the entire Munchkin sequence from
The Wizard of Oz
.

More than costars: Richard Pryor and Pam Grier, circa 1977. (Courtesy of Getty Images)

In their afternoons together, Richard and Carl had a creative project into which they could sink their teeth. Wertmüller’s
The Seduction of Mimi
was a ripe Italian parable about the idiocy of machismo: its title character was a bumbler in politics and love, confused enough to become, in turn, a Communist and a tool of the Mafia, and foolish enough to think that he can enter the bedrooms of three different women without paying a price for his conniving. But
Mimi
was also inimitably Italian in its plotting and style, and very far from the Hollywood mode of filmmaking, even the “New Hollywood” mode
of filmmaking. The main character’s buffoonery was rooted in the tradition of the
commedia dell’arte
, with its hopelessly dumb schemers. And Wertmüller, who apprenticed under Fellini, loved to populate her casts with oversize characters who spilled into the realm of the grotesque: at one point in
Mimi
, she aimed a fish-eye lens at the naked and flabby posterior of an overweight actress, so as to fill the screen with it. From Gottlieb’s point of view,
Mimi
had “enormous story gaps, covered by music and montage. I mean
real
flaws.”

Adapting
Mimi
, then, was no simple affair. It meant translating
commedia dell’arte
into the funky idiom of black American comedy, and Italian art house cinema into Hollywood entertainment. Michael Schultz had already established, with Cecil Brown’s help, some of the coordinates of the translation. Mimi’s job as a laborer in the quarries of Sicily would become Leroy Jones’s job as a fruit picker in the fields of Central California; the Communist struggle would become the migrant farmworkers’ struggle; and the Mafia-run world of Italy would become the corporate-run world of America. Now Richard and Carl worked to fill in the other blanks: they needed to Pryor-ize the film’s characters—to rewrite Mimi as a black Everyman, to turn Mimi’s father into a version of Mudbone, and to turn Mimi’s rival into a version of Richard’s loquacious reverend.

Carl ran a tape recorder while he and Richard let their imaginations unspool. Carl had a background in improv—he had been involved for half a decade with the political comedy troupe the Committee—and the two played through the script as if it were an extended improv game. “It was a very healthy collaboration because [Richard] was very intent on making the movie work,” Gottlieb remembered. Unlike many actors, Richard submerged his ego and was unconcerned with the number of lines allotted to his character.

Their creative idyll was interrupted by a medical emergency. Pam’s temperature spiked; her lips became swollen, part of a severe allergic reaction to some shellfish she’d eaten. Richard, who often had much in common with the triple-timing Mimi, stayed by her side. He applied cold compresses to her forehead and reassured her, “It’s going to be
alright, baby” (and it was: an American doctor arrived the next day to give her an injection, which stabilized her). Nervously but fully, Richard inhabited the role of caretaker—another new leaf turning over. Upon Pam’s recovery, the two couples returned to LA, Carl having everything he needed—hours of taped improvisations—for the rewrite.

W
hen Carl Gottlieb delivered his revised script for
Which Way Is Up?
, the cynicism of Wertmüller’s original had melted away, and Richard was working on the most explicitly political movie of his career. The farmworkers’ union now gave the movie its moral thrust; it was the larger solution to a world where blacks and Latinos worked for poverty wages in the fields while company bosses snaked around in limos, surrounded themselves with goons, and ordered hits on union leaders. The union’s adversary in the film is Agrico Industries, a hydra-headed conglomerate whose motto is “We Grow on You” and whose top executive has the all-white suit and decadent manners of a southern plantation owner.

Schultz, meanwhile, was trying to make his film
engagé
in other ways. Averse to having his farmworkers played by “Hollywood extras with their sunglasses,” he invited El Teatro Campesino, a radical theater group affiliated with the United Farm Workers, to play Latino characters and rewrite any farmworker dialogue that sounded false. Universal resisted the idea; Schultz won the argument by warning the studio, “I don’t want to do a phony representation of [the farmworkers’ movement] and neither do you. Because if you do, then theaters are going to get burned.” Meanwhile, he assembled a crew that breathed in the spirit of
la causa
. It was high on youthful energy and low on studio veterans—the technicians who, as Gottlieb summed them up, were “the old farts in the baseball caps, named Red and Curly and Mack and Shorty.” The crew’s average age was thirty-two; many were black, Chicano, or female, the sort of people who wouldn’t have been hired on a production ten years earlier. Presiding over the camera operators was cinematographer John Alonzo (
Harold and Maude
,
Chinatown
), himself the child of Mexican migrant workers.

As
Which Way Is Up?
approached its first day of filming in late 1976, Schultz took another creative risk: he asked Richard to play all three characters inspired by his stand-up—father, son, and holy roller—in the sort of virtuosic turn associated with British actors Alec Guinness (
Kind Hearts and Coronets
) and Peter Sellers (
Dr. Strangelove
). If Richard accepted the challenge, it would mean not just that he’d be working harder—filming scenes multiple times, with stand-ins—but also that he’d be carrying a heavier emotional load.

In the scenes between the diffident Leroy and his cocksure father Rufus, he would be replaying a dynamic from his own past, the Peoria of the early 1960s, when as a young man he shared a roof with his father Buck. Rufus might have been originally conceived as a takeoff on Mudbone, but he ended up an amalgam of Mudbone and Buck, with the mannerisms of the former and the harsh swagger of the latter. In the final film, he’s a nonstop editorialist whose favorite subject is his son’s shortcomings. “Pop, I’m in the paper!” Leroy enthuses as if starstruck with himself, the day after he falls into the arms of a Cesar Chavez–like activist. “You done tore your ass now, boy!” Rufus responds, deflating his son like a toy balloon. When Leroy mutters to Annie Mae, “I hope my kids ain’t gonna be like him,” Rufus slips in the dagger: “Nigger, you got to get some pussy before you can have some kids!” Leroy flinches; Rufus chuckles. “Shit, I’m knockin’ the bottom out of mine.” As a father, he’s accustomed to getting the last word and the last laugh.

Richard accepted all the challenges of
Which Way Is Up?
—of carrying the movie in triplicate; of revisiting the sore spots of his past and transforming them into comedy. In December 1976, just before filming began, he made another professional gamble: he committed to produce for NBC a special and twelve half hours of other unspecified programming, despite his reservations about TV work. Given how NBC was, for the first time in its history, ranked last among the major networks, he believed that he could defeat the network censors in any skirmishes. “I’m just going to say, ‘Here’s the shit, take it or leave it.’ NBC will go for anything right now because they’re in trouble,” he predicted.

His future seemed so bright that even the prospect of his own
crack-up caused him no anxiety. “I’m going to be big. What I’m happy about is I don’t owe nobody, and I got enough money to go crazy with. If I have a nervous breakdown, I can be in a private hospital.”

T
he set of
Which Way Is Up?
was kept closed, the usual forbidding sign (“No Admittance—Cast and Crew Only”) embellished with a red skull and crossbones.
Time
,
Newsweek
, and the
Washington Post
pestered Universal to interview the film’s players, to no avail. The growers put in calls to the studio, anxious how the film would represent their interests, and also were put off. Schultz played his cards close to his vest; he was just making “a harmless little comedy,” he said. He didn’t want to rile anyone until he’d pulled off the film’s tight shooting schedule: “minor miracles in 33 days,” he called it.

In his element: on the set of
Which Way Is Up?
with director Michael Schultz and costar Lonette McKee. (Courtesy of Marcia Reed)

For Richard,
Which Way Is Up?
was both grueling and delightful as an acting experience. He looked at the young, multiracial crew, so similar to his usual stand-up crowd, and every moment he was on
camera—a great proportion of the shoot—he took upon himself the near-impossible task of keeping them in stitches. As Carl Gottlieb observed, “In the master [take], when we finished a scene and the director yelled, ‘Cut!,’ everybody who was holding in their laughter would let it out. The whole set would laugh—the grips, the cameramen, everybody.” Then it was time to reshoot the scene, with close-ups and cutaway shots, for coverage. “He’d do the scene,” Gottlieb continued, “and the laugh that he was used to getting wasn’t there. No fault of Richard, but everybody had heard the joke ten times. They were professionals. So in an effort to win the crew back, Richard would start ad-libbing. And he would always win them back.” A reporter for
Mother Jones
saw the crew “us[ing] sweaters to stifle their laughter at [Richard’s] elaborations and taradiddles”; given Richard’s refusal to repeat himself, she thought, the “script supervisor’s pencil must be down to a nubbin.” Schultz later said, “My hardest job on [
Which Way Is Up?
] was keeping the crew from laughing and spoiling the sound, or keeping the actors from cracking up.” Richard, he judged, was an actor who “can do the same scene ten different ways—all of them right.”

When Richard was done with it,
Which Way Is Up?
was more anarchic and unpredictable than
The Seduction of Mimi
. It still had the bones of a political film, as its creators had intended, but in its guts it was a sex comedy, about the spectacles unleashed by human appetites. Richard’s Leroy Jones is a man at the mercy of his impulses, a chameleon whose foolishness takes on the color of each world he passes through. With his wife, Annie Mae, at the beginning of the film, he’s a fool for sex. When she lies in bed with her back to him, he wheedles her to uncross her ankles and serenades her with “Just a little lovin’, early in the mornin’”; rebuffed, he tortures himself by eavesdropping on the lovemaking between his father and stepmother in the next room. With his lover Vanetta, the liberated woman who supports the farm workers and subsists on a diet of carrot juice and organic food, Leroy is a fool for romance. He tries to jog alongside her until he plotzes headfirst into the ground; he dresses in flowing
caftans that match hers; he promises his undying fidelity to her. And with “Sister Sarah,” the wife of the preacher who has given Annie Mae a child, he’s a fool for revenge—the fool of fools. He breaks his promise to Vanetta by courting Sister Sarah extravagantly, and the full weight of his confused life crashes down upon him. In trying to have it all, he loses everything.

With
Which Way Is Up?
, Richard finally had license to be as sharp, vulgar, and as outré on-screen as he wished. He was free, as
Newsweek
later put it, to “gobble[] up his triple parts like a happy hog let loose in the garden.” There’s no Hollywood film that better testifies to his gifts as a comedian. In hilarious moments of physical comedy, he showed how he’d begun, in the 1950s, by studying the examples of Sid Caesar and Jerry Lewis. As Leroy, he scrunches up his face to make himself unrecognizable to a goon; as the Reverend Lennox Thomas, he sways with gleeful self-love while performing a guitar solo next to his pulpit; as Rufus, he tumbles like a bowling pin in the back of a pickup truck, his eyes wide with surprise yet flashing with anger. At the same time, the film revealed Richard as a disciple of Redd Foxx and other older black comedians of the Chitlin Circuit. In the roles of Rufus and the Reverend especially, he exhibits their ability to play with a cartoon of a character, to give an exaggerated performance but keep the language razor-edged and nimble.