CHAPTER 23
One reason why Richard is all bent and moody during this time is he is just coming off a Paul Schrader movie, a drama that he’s real proud of but that puts him through hell. Schrader is brilliant—he’s the screenwriter for Scorsese’s Taxi Driver and Raging Bull—but nobody could ever call him Mr. Sunshine.
The role Richard takes is Zeke in Blue Collar, where he’s acting alongside Yaphet Kotto and Harvey Keitel. The production films in late spring 1977. The set is a pressure cooker. Schrader does nothing to cool it out.
“Dude likes tension on the set,” Richard complains to me. “He thinks it will show up dramatically in the art of the movie.”
Richard is miserable all through the shoot. He has fist-fights with his costars, throwing punches at both Harvey and Yaphet on separate occasions. He flings scripts, props, and other stuff around the set.
Off the set, when I see him at night, he’s drinking and doping like a real addict. He runs Amy, his drug mule, ragged. One evening, during a single six-hour period between six and midnight, he sends her out three times on re-supply runs. I counted.
Not all of that shit is going up Richard’s nose, since he’s got a whole host of hangers-on to take care of, but a lot of it does. But he never bleeds, he never rots out his nostrils like a lot of coke hounds do. He’s got a cast-iron septum.
When I finally see Blue Collar, I realize it’s a great movie and that Richard is great in it. But I wonder if it is worth it. The shoot puts Richard through an emotional obstacle course. He feels as though he can never be friends with his costars again. Too much bullshit, too much bad blood. Richard comes off that movie shell-shocked. I think today we’d call it posttraumatic stress.
But the proof is in the pudding, and Blue Collar is a dramatic role that Richard’s proud of. The box office is lousy, but reviews are good. A critic for the LA Times calls it a triumph.
“Many more motherf*cking triumphs like that,” Richard says, “and I’ll be dead.”
No rest for the wicked. Right on the heels of Blue Collar comes the bullshit surrounding The Richard Pryor Show. Richard tells NBC they’re not honoring the contract that calls for the network to put the show on after family hour, so he’s walking out.
Richard’s moves are never simple. There’s never just one reason behind his decisions. Part of the face-off over the show is Richard’s refusing to get pushed around by corporate types. But another part of it is that he’s afraid he’s going to bomb.
Stalemate. All of us who got cranked up to do the show are expecting paychecks. But they’re not coming. Some fools on the crew go out and hire an airplane to fly over Richard’s house in the Valley, trailing a banner that reads SURRENDER RICHARD, as if that would change his mind.
In the middle of this Richard flies to Europe with his family. He’s got four kids living with him, and a new wife, Deborah. The trip is supposed to be a vacation to get Richard away from the stresses of Hollywood. But he’s not used to acting the family man. He comes back from vacation needing a vacation.
But the break gives him some perspective. Richard suggests a compromise on the show—four episodes, instead of the ten called for in the contract. What can the network do? Everybody wants a piece of Richard. Four shows isn’t as good as ten, but it’s better than nothing.
From our experience with The Richard Pryor Special?, we know we’re going to run up against the NBC censors, so we come up with a beautiful sight gag to open the show. Richard comes on, shot from the head up, and swears to the camera he will never be compromised, he’s going to be just as edgy and controversial as ever.
“I’ve given up absolutely nothing to be on network TV,” he says. The camera pulls out to show his full body. Richard is naked and dickless.
The gag is done with a bodysuit, so he isn’t nude at all, but it is still too much for NBC. They hate the criticism, but they use the “nudity” excuse to kill the bit.
Richard is furious, but the censorship backfires on NBC. The controversy shows up on all the network news broadcasts. Many more people see the sketch on the news than ever watch the show. I have a good laugh about it, but Richard doesn’t see it as funny. He’s too angry at NBC to see that the controversy just makes people love him more.
“See how that shit works? NBC gets all the free publicity. Those motherf*ckers always win,” he says. That’s how Rich-ard sees it. The way I see it is that we’re starting to kick down the walls of Fortress Hollywood brick by brick, gag by gag—“just trying to stay three steps ahead because you know they’re going to push you back two.”
On the set, Richard swings from highs to lows like some sort of bipolar crazy person. The werewolf comes out repeatedly. The ensemble cast I put together never knows who they’re going to get when they approach him. He places himself under enormous pressure. I feel as though it’s too much for him, as though he’s going to explode and wind up, like he warns me again and again, “with a bullet in my head.”
I don’t “nigger, please” him when he says shit like that. It scares me.
But despite all the tension on the set, we produce some of the best television ever broadcast. The Maya Angelou bit comes off beautifully, unbelievably good. Nothing like it has ever been shown before or since.
I get to act in a Chaplin-style pantomime bit with Richard—no dialogue, just music on the soundtrack. He plays Mr. Fix-It, and I am his customer, with a broken-down car. In a series of sight gags, Richard totally demolishes the car. At the end, miracle of miracles, he manages to start the wreck’s engine. Overjoyed, he leaps out to shake my hand. My arm falls off.
It’s the purest form of comedy, a sketch that would play in Thailand just as well as in Oakland. You don’t need words. I treasure it as one of the highest achievements of my life, to share a stage with my best friend Richard, just me and him, making people laugh.
Other sketches are less stripped-down. A parody of the bar scene in Star Wars has Richard as a bartender keeping a rowdy crowd of aliens in check. It reminds me of him trying to keep the ensemble of actors and writers on track, trying to keep it real. Richard loves Star Wars. He’s obsessed with it. He tells me because the characters are from a galaxy “far, far away,” then they can’t be prejudiced.
Richard does a samurai skit that shows off his obsession with all things Asian. He and Robin Williams slip a cocaine-snorting reference into an Egyptian tomb-of-the-pharaohs sketch. Racial politics keep creeping into the content of the show. There’s a lot of Afrocentric material, because Richard is getting more and more interested in Africa. African dances, glorification of the black female, a voodoo skit where Richard attempts to heal Robin’s crippled arm.
In another bit, more than three decades before Obama, Richard acts as the “Fortieth President of the United States” at a press conference. He starts the sketch solemn enough, but becomes increasingly raucous, calling only on black reporters while telling the white journalist from Mississippi to sit down. He appoints our old Oakland friend Huey P. Newton as the head of the FBI.
I do the audience warm-up for the show, because Richard doesn’t trust anyone else. Not only do I perform multiple functions on the show, I go home with Richard and buck him up during his dangerous moods. I have the professional and the personal at the same time.
By the fourth show, Richard has had it. He’s ready to bail. It’s clear from the ratings that NBC won’t be interested in going forward. We’re scheduled up against the two top-rated shows on TV back then, Happy Days and Laverne & Shirley. We barely dent their numbers. No one has succeeded in mounting a new TV variety show for years, and we don’t break that trend.
In public, Richard talks about his inability to work under the rules of network censorship. It’s a good story, and every-one in the media buys into it. But from the inside, I know the truth. Richard can’t stand the demands of a weekly TV show. It’s the pressure, the drugs, the obligations. He can’t handle it. So he uses the “censorship” excuse to slide out of it. The explanation has just enough truth to it that it’s widely accepted, even today.
Richard and I charged Fortress Hollywood and got shut down. The show crashed. We got flattened.
I have a big hand in the failed show, from casting to writing. So why am I happy? I swear that my life could end right there, laughing with my best friend on national TV, and I would be cool with it. I don’t let any of the stresses of the show weigh on me the way Richard does. He goes into a deep funk. He’s the biggest star in Hollywood, but in his own mind, he’s a failure.