Some time in 1979, shortly after I had done The Big Fix for Universal, the studio called to ask if I would like to write a movie for Richard Pryor. I thought I had died and gone to heaven. Pryor was at the top of his game then, acknowledged by many to be possibly the greatest standup comic of all time. Not only that, he was a cultural icon of extraordinary proportions, the very voice of black America, “Daddy Rich.” What more could a Jewish white boy who grew up on Miles Davis want than to work with this man?
When I first went out to Pryor’s spread in Northridge with Thom Mount and Sean Daniel, the “baby moguls” then running Universal, Richard was dead drunk. It was a harbinger of things to come, but I never blamed Richard for his legendary substance abuse problems. He was, as the cliché goes, his own worst enemy. His famously turning himself into a human torch while freebasing cocaine is proof enough of that.
When I actually started to work with Richard, I would drive afternoons out to that Northridge place – a sprawling Spanish estate with its own boxing ring and Shetland pony that wandered wild around the grounds – where I would be greeted by his housekeeper. “Would you like some quiche?” she would say, ushering me into the kitchen. “Mr. Pryor’s asleep.” It didn’t take me long to figure out that was a euphemism for “wired to the ceiling” on coke. After a while, sometimes hours, I would be ushered up to his office and we would talk about the script.
The project we were working on was then called “Family Dream” – a story idea by Pryor about an ex-con who is forced by his parole officer to drive a dozen orphans from Boston to Washington State on an old bus so they could attend a new school. With them on the trip was the children’s strict teacher (always to be played by Cicely Tyson, in Pryor’s view). Naturally the teacher and the ex-con are at loggerheads at the beginning, but ultimately brought together by their adventures with the kids – “African Queen on a bus,” as Universal exec Verna Fields described it. (The studio marketing department subsequently changed the title to Bustin’ Loose, probably to take the “family” onus off a Richard Pryor movie.)
After a few weeks of these meetings, Richard, perhaps because I wasn’t judgmental, began to trust me. Despite intermittent bravura, part of him was embarrassed by his drug habits, by the daily visits of his dealer, known as “The Rev,” in a brand new Rolls I assumed had essentially been paid for by Pryor. In actuality, Richard was one of the sweetest people I have ever met, always empathic and extremely generous. I once sat in his office as he gave hundreds of thousands to a hospital in South Central Los Angeles on the strength of a phone call, as long as they promised not to mention his name. And while the drug problem undoubtedly made it difficult, he was quite loving toward his kids, several of whom I came to know, especially his daughter Rain, who years later launched a standup career of her own.
On a couple of occasions, I drove up with Richard to an orphanage in the San Gabriel Mountains for research for “Family Dream.” This was an odd event for several reasons. The idea that Pryor would have to do research about children from disadvantaged backgrounds was ludicrous. His father had been a pimp and his mother a prostitute. But he wanted to go to be with the kids himself – and maybe to humor his middle class white boy screenwriter. It was on those jaunts I came to experience up close what Richard meant to the African-American community. When black people saw us pulling up at a stoplight in his red Mercedes convertible, it was as if Jesus Christ himself had just come up beside them. “Daddy Rich! Daddy Rich!” they would shout through tears of excitement. It was unlike anything I have seen before or since with any movie star or even rock singer. I would feel awkward, but I knew that it was Richard’s remarkable humanity they were reacting to, his ability to express a people’s pain without rancor or anger, with a forgiving grace that finally defused all rage in laughter and put everything on a different, even strangely color-blind, level.
I also spent time with Richard on the road when he did his incredible standup. At a certain point, we were getting along so well Pryor got the idea I should direct “Family Dream” as well as write it. This irritated the studio that wanted to pick the director and not long thereafter I was fired from the project with nary a word from Richard. (He had a tendency toward washing his hands of the power struggles around movies, which may account, in part, for why his standup is so much better than his films.) But a couple of months later I was hired as writer once again. Then I was fired a second time when Cicely Tyson complained I gave all the funny lines to Richard. (Who wouldn’t have?) The movie was then rewritten again and made with a first-time director named Oz Scott who had directed For Colored Girls on Broadway. I heard second-hand that Richard chewed him up on the set. The film was a botch. Scott was fired and Michael Schulz, who directed Richard in Car Wash, brought on. Schulz read my first draft and hired me a third time on the film. I worked with Michael on a new draft and two-thirds of the movie was shot all over again. By this time Richard, too embarrassed or too worn out from his freebase-burning episode, which occurred in the midst of all this, wasn’t speaking to me.
Still, the film got completed. When it came out, it was, with Alan Alda’s Four Seasons, one of Universal’s two biggest box office hits of 1981. It also won the first Image Award of the NAACP and the organization’s screenwriting prize. (I never liked the finished version of Bustin’ Loose much. Like most screenwriters, I preferred my early drafts.)
After that, I only ran into Richard a couple of times at parties, before he fell ill and essentially became a recluse. One of my regrets is that I never got to discuss with him the ins and outs of our experience. But he had other things on his mind, like multiple sclerosis.
Rest in peace.
(Cross-posted at Pajamas Media)
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19 Comments
1. Jamie Irons:Roger,
That’s a wonderful and, it seems to me, fair and utterly humane account of your work with a supremely gifted but tragic figure.
Someone (not you, of course) should have come down hard on Mr. Pryor for what he was doing to himself and his gift. Perhaps someone tried. Maybe it wouldn’t have done any good (it usually doesn’t). I think looking at this sort of drug abuse as “an illness” does a disservice to the abuser.
It would be wonderful to see what you’ve begun here as a long article in, say, The New Yorker.
Jamie Irons
Dec 11, 2005 - 8:09 am 2. David Thomson:I recommend Richard Pryorís semi-autobiographical, ìJo Jo Dancer, Your Life Is Calling.î You may want your teen age children to also see it. The movieís drug scenes should scare the hell out of anyone. He has long reminded me of the danger of combining a serious drug habit with a virtually unlimited bank account. Many of us may have avoided a similar fate merely because we could not afford it. Pryor earned his living by working intensely for awhile and then doing next to nothing for days at a time. It is far more difficult to indulge in excessive drug abuse being employed at a 9-5 job.
Dec 11, 2005 - 8:14 am 3. Buddy Larsen:jeez, Roger–what a blindingly honest saga. Painful and so humane.
Jamie–as you of all people–as a shrink, not as an addict
–would know, the only remotely statistically-significant cure for hard drug addiction–short of death–is to run out of money.
Somebody like Richard Pryor could conceivably quit it (with religion perhaps) but–he might well have felt that what people needed from him, what they depended on him for, was his raw outcast defiant edge–and that the dope was tendriled into that so deeply that he couldn’t quit it and still be “Richard Pryor”. It’s so sad. But the act was so funny.
I’m with you on the long think-piece Roger oughtta do for one of the top slicks.
Dec 11, 2005 - 8:30 am 4. Buddy Larsen:jeez, Roger–what a blindingly honest saga. Painful and so humane.
Jamie–as you of all people–as a shrink, not as an addict
–would know, the only remotely statistically-significant cure for hard drug addiction–short of death–is to run out of money.
Somebody like Richard Pryor could conceivably quit it (with religion perhaps) but–he might well have felt that what people needed from him, what they depended on him for, was his raw outcast defiant edge–and that the dope was tendriled into that so deeply that he couldn’t quit it and still be “Richard Pryor”. It’s so sad. But the act was so funny.
I’m with you on the long think-piece Roger oughtta do for one of the top slicks.
Dec 11, 2005 - 8:30 am 5. Buddy Larsen:why, typekey, why?
Dec 11, 2005 - 8:34 am 6. ShrinkWrapped:Roger,
Thank you for your touching recollections of a very brilliant, very troubled soul. As a Psychoanalyst who has also been extensively involved in treating various forms of drug addiction, I would like to add my two cents into the mix. My experience has been that once an addict begins to use Cocaine on a habitual basis, they are essentially lost. Some people can dabble or experiment with Cocaine but one who is predisposed to value the “high” will be forever changed by the experience. Sadly, those most at risk are those who are most unfortunate. The lack of stable, loving parents leaves people who have backgrounds similar to Richard Pryor’s with a deep-seated, and unconscious, hunger for feelings most of us who were more fortunate in our choice of parents take for granted. Cocaine produces feelings of well-being that are foreign to people who never had stable, loving, and consistent parenting; once they taste it, they often spend the rest of their lives trying to recapture it.
May he finally be at peace.
Dec 11, 2005 - 9:43 am 7. Peter G.:Beautiful.
Dec 11, 2005 - 10:03 am 8. Buddy Larsen:How could 70s big-time show-biz success be anything but deadly for a person so concentrating so many extremes–the talent, the times, the childhood, the money, the unique career that had to be lived, that could not be 9-to-5v’d within the Age of Aquarius’s real “gotta make it real” fetish?
Dec 11, 2005 - 10:44 am 9. markus:Wow, the foreign policy experts are also addictions experts. Please remember, Pryor died as a result of MS, which to the best of ANYONE’s knowledge, was completely unconnected to his previous addiction to drugs. I wouldn’t know for sure that Pryor was clean the last twenty years of his life, but that is what he and his associates claimed. And in fact, many coke and speed addicts have been able to stop. They are not “lost” after that first high.
Dec 11, 2005 - 7:22 pm 10. Steven55:I too was acquainted with Richard Pryor. In the late 70s I worked at a club in Denver called Ebbetts Field. Richard did maybe three 4- or 5-day stints at the club, two shows per night. I was a bartender/bouncer/doorman. All of us who worked there found Richard, when he was offstage, to be a real sweet guy–polite, soft-spoken, self-effacing, shy, friendly. He clearly enjoyed hanging out with the staff–waitresses and bartenders. Then he’d go onstage and he became very dangerous…and funny. Our audiences were all black; the staff was all white. This made for some–how shall I say–”interesting” experiences whilst serving in my capacity as a bouncer/doorman. Richard could be downright incendiary on stage, much more so than he was in his concert movies, since white people were a primary target of his his humor and wrath (which were one and the same). He was also be fairly merciless and hilarious when talking about himself and blacks; but it was the honky jokes that really got the audience riled–and the staff, er, nervous. Then, when he’d finished his performance, he’d come offstage and hang out with us and he was just the nicest guy. And at the end of every stint he tipped the staff a couple hundred dollars–a lot of money in the 70s. I can’t remember any other muscian or comedian who appeared at the club doing that.
Go with God, Richard.
Dec 11, 2005 - 7:41 pm 11. Buddy Larsen:Thank goodness no ignorant tone-deaf clods have sullied this elegiac thread, as well as Richard’s memory, with any smart-ass sarcastic miss-the-point know-nothing attempts at sarcasm. “Lost”, to anyone with an iota of sensitivity, means more than, “Hey, where’s my house at?”
Dec 11, 2005 - 8:40 pm 12. Sandy P:I remember seeing him on TV, maybe Flip Wilson, when I was a kid.
He was dressed as a preacher w/a white afro, IIRC.
“I want you to dig down deep and come up w/the bread.”
Dec 11, 2005 - 9:17 pm 13. neo-neocon:I think this is one of the best reminiscences about Pryor, the one that captures my impressions, as well–although I certainly only knew him from his performances.
To me, the guy was incredibly funny and gifted, but it was his intense vulnerability that combined with all that–and a sort of bravado–that made him uniquely moving, as well as funny. Here’s my take on him.
And marcus, you may want to revise your comments (although I won’t sit on a hot stove until you do). Pryor died not from MS, but from a heart attack.
He had early heart disease–and in fact, a heart attack he had when quite young was subject matter for one of his old comedy routines. It is well known that cocaine use can and often does damage the heart. So one can conclude that it’s at least a good possibility in Pryor’s case that his cocaine use was related to his death.
Dec 12, 2005 - 10:43 am 14. markus:neoneo — thanks for the correction. I am curious if he was able to get clean and stay clean for the last twenty plus years…I wouldn’t be surprised either way.
My point was that coke users can get clean and move on to illustrious futures. Classic examples of course are POTUS 42 and POTUS 43.
Dec 12, 2005 - 11:27 am 15. Charlie (Colorado):Markus, it happens that I was listening to Fresh Air this morning doing reminiscences of Richard Pryor; one of them was talking to him about the MS. Terry Gross asked him what he did for amusement at a time when he said he couldn’t move his arms and legs well, and he answered “Basing.”
In any case, anyone with substance problems knows that being sober for twenty years isn’t as important as being sober for the rest of the day.
(I’d also suggest that ShrinkWrapped and Neo have rather better credentials in substance abuse than you’re giving them credit for.)
Dec 12, 2005 - 11:27 am 16. larry:Wonderful, Roger. Thanks so much for confirming what I always suspected: With all his warts, Richard was still one of the good ones. R. I. P., Richard.
It takes some doing to break out of a heritage like his. Most of us can’t do it without medical, 12-step, G-d’s or all of the above’s help. If he was clean and sober the last 20 years, I’m sure he knew some peace and was an inspiration to many around him.
Dec 12, 2005 - 11:35 am 17. triticale:ShrinkWrapped has succinctly explained why there are three or four rails left in the gram of coca blanca I bought back in July. It’s nice, real nice, but it isn’t special.
Dec 12, 2005 - 2:12 pm 18. Buddy Larsen:I went round and round, too, in the day. Took a late 70s first-born to shame me clean–and it wasn’t easy. Had to move, and sever the old crowd utterly. A psychiatrist friend–much later–who treats incarcerateds for the state/county, thinks it’s genetic as well as behavioral–that the genetic may hide behind the behavioral result–through the generations, that anyone will get hooked on the hard stuff with enough useage, but most can come clean and go on, with any incentive to do so. However, some percentage, one in five maybe, can’t take one single hit ofthe hard stuff, coke, speed, junk, without lodging a permanent 24/7 hunger for a return experience–for life. This, I think, is part of what Shrinkwrapped is talking about.
Dec 12, 2005 - 3:06 pm 19. Buddy Larsen:Echo boomers may never understand, there was no boomer onus on hard dope in the decade across the end of the 60s and the front of the 70s. In fact, if you were–like Richard–a zeitgeist antenna, you HAD to dig into it–there was no other way to understand what the smartest and most lively people you knew were into. It took some years of watching friends screw up real, real, badly, to get the message that the shit was bad news. And then of course if you were one of those predisposed to it, none of the bad news mattered in the slightest–nothing mattered but the Jones. If it started to cost your job, your spouse, or all your money, you could drag yourself clean. But if you were not restricted by things that you just could not let yourself lose–somebody like Richard, say, whose whole thing was to be unrestricted, well–he’d've had to go to the moon to get free.
Dec 12, 2005 - 5:41 pm