Richard Pryor
Richard Franklin Lennox Thomas Pryor was an American stand-up comedian and actor. He was known for reaching a broad audience with his trenchant observations and storytelling style. Pryor won a Primetime Emmy Award and five Grammy Awards. He received the first Kennedy Center Mark Twain Prize for American Humor in 1998. He won the Writers Guild of America Award in 1974.
Pryor's body of work includes numerous concert films and recordings. He won the Grammy Award for Best Comedy Album for That Nigger's Crazy, ...Is It Something I Said?, Bicentennial Nigger, Richard Pryor: Live on the Sunset Strip, and Richard Pryor: Here and Now. He is also known for Richard Pryor: Live & Smokin', Wanted: Live in Concert, and Richard Pryor: Live in Concert. Pryor served as a co-writer for the Mel Brooks satirical western comedy film Blazing Saddles.
As an actor, he starred mainly in comedies. He gained acclaim for his collaborations with Gene Wilder, including the films Silver Streak, Stir Crazy, See No Evil, Hear No Evil, and Another You. He also acted in films such as Uptown Saturday Night, Blue Collar, The Wiz, California Suite, Superman III, Harlem Nights, and Lost Highway. He appeared as himself on Sesame Street and Saturday Night Live before hosting The Richard Pryor Show, and Pryor's Place.
Early life
Pryor was born on December 1, 1940, in Peoria, Illinois, and grew up in a brothel run by his grandmother, Marie Carter. His alcoholic mother, Gertrude L., was a prostitute. His father, LeRoy "Buck Carter" Pryor, was a former boxer, hustler and pimp. After Gertrude abandoned him when he was 10, Pryor was raised primarily by Marie, a tall, violent woman who would beat him for any of his eccentricities. Pryor was one of four children raised in his grandmother's brothel. He was sexually abused at age seven, and expelled from school at the age of 14.Pryor served in the U.S. Army from 1958 to 1960, but spent virtually the entire stint in an army prison. According to a 1999 profile article about Pryor in The New Yorker, Pryor was incarcerated for an incident that occurred while he was stationed in West Germany. Angered that a white soldier was overly amused at the racially charged scenes of Douglas Sirk's film Imitation of Life, Pryor and several other black soldiers beat and stabbed him, although the soldier survived.
He was a member of Henry Brown Lodge No. 22 in Peoria, where he became a Prince Hall Freemason.
Career
1963–1969: Early performances
In 1963, Pryor moved to New York City and began performing regularly in clubs alongside performers such as Bob Dylan and Woody Allen. On one of his first nights, he opened for singer and pianist Nina Simone at New York's Village Gate. Simone recalls Pryor's bout of performance anxiety:Initially inspired by Bill Cosby, Pryor began as a middlebrow comic, with material less controversial than what was to come. He began appearing regularly on television variety shows such as The Ed Sullivan Show, The Merv Griffin Show, and The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. His popularity led to success as a comic in Las Vegas. The first five tracks on the 2005 compilation CD Evolution/Revolution: The Early Years , recorded in 1966 and 1967, capture Pryor in this period. In 1966, Pryor was a guest star on an episode of The Wild Wild West.
In September 1967, Pryor had what he described in his autobiography Pryor Convictions as an "epiphany". He walked onto the stage at the Aladdin Hotel in Las Vegas, looked at the sold-out crowd, exclaimed over the microphone, "What the fuck am I doing here!?", and walked off the stage. Afterward, Pryor began working profanity into his act, including the word nigger. His first comedy recording, the 1968 debut Richard Pryor on the Dove/Reprise label, captures this particular period, tracking the evolution of Pryor's routine. His parents died—his mother in 1967 and his father in 1968.
By 1968, Pryor had broken with Cosby's style of comedy and became more controversial.
In 1969, Pryor moved to Berkeley, California, where he immersed himself in the counterculture and met people like Huey P. Newton and Ishmael Reed.
1970–1979: Breakthrough and acclaim
In the 1970s, Pryor wrote for television shows such as Sanford and Son, The Flip Wilson Show, and a 1973 Lily Tomlin special, for which he shared an Emmy Award. During this period, Pryor tried to break into mainstream television. He appeared in several films, including Lady Sings the Blues, The Mack, Uptown Saturday Night, Silver Streak, Car Wash, The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars & Motor Kings, Which Way Is Up?, Greased Lightning, Blue Collar, and The Muppet Movie.Pryor signed with the comedy-oriented independent record label Laff Records in 1970, and in 1971 recorded his second album, Craps . Two years later Pryor, still relatively unknown, appeared in the documentary Wattstax, wherein he riffed on the tragic-comic absurdities of race relations in Watts and the United States. Not long afterward, Pryor sought a deal with a larger label, and he signed with Stax Records in 1973. When his third breakthrough album That Nigger's Crazy was released, Laff, which claimed ownership of Pryor's recording rights, almost succeeded in getting an injunction to prevent the album from being sold. Negotiations led to Pryor's release from his Laff contract. In return for this concession, Laff was enabled to release previously unissued material, recorded between 1968 and 1973, at will. That Nigger's Crazy was a commercial and critical success; it was eventually certified gold by the RIAA and won the Grammy Award for Best Comedy Album at the 1975 Grammy Awards.
During the legal battle, Stax briefly closed its doors. At this time, Pryor returned to Reprise/Warner Bros. Records, which re-released That Nigger's Crazy, immediately after ...Is It Something I Said?, his first album with his new label. Like That Nigger's Crazy, the album was a critical success; it was eventually certified platinum by the RIAA and won the Grammy Award for Best Comedy Recording at the 1976 Grammy Awards.
Pryor's 1976 release Bicentennial Nigger continued his streak of success. It became his third consecutive gold album, and he collected his third consecutive Grammy for Best Comedy Recording for the album in 1977. With every successful album Pryor recorded for Warner, Laff published an album of older material to capitalize on Pryor's growing fame—a practice they continued until 1983. The covers of Laff albums tied in thematically with Pryor films, such as Are You Serious? for Silver Streak, The Wizard of Comedy for his appearance in The Wiz, and Insane for Stir Crazy. Pryor co-wrote Blazing Saddles, directed by Mel Brooks and starring Gene Wilder. Pryor was to play the lead role of Bart, but Mel Brooks didn't want to share credit with the quickly-rising comic. Brooks has always maintained Warner Brothers' executives vetoed Pryor's casting, but no studio executive has ever corroborated this claim. It was only after Pryor's death that Brooks began insisting the comic was "uninsurable" because of a "drug arrest;" but to date, no studio executive employed at Warner Brothers during this era has ever gone on the record to corroborate these assertions—either the director's vigorously advocating or the studio's absolute rejection for hiring Pryor to act in Blazing Saddles. According to director Michael Shultz, "Richard wrote it and Mel Brooks chased him out," Shultz said at the time. "Mel Brooks was trying to get total credit for the picture.... To be outmaneuvered and ripped off at that early stage in his career is something that's a little hard for him to get over. I'd feel the same way." Moreover, Brooks assured Pryor that the role of Sheriff Bart was his, but after Pryor departed the director's writer's suite, he never heard from Brooks again. In early-1972, Pryor was reportedly dumbfounded when he had to first learn from Cleavon Little that Brooks wasn't going to use him on-screen.
In 1975, Pryor was a guest host on the first season of Saturday Night Live, making him the first black host. Pryor's longtime girlfriend, actress and talk-show host Kathrine McKee, made a brief guest appearance with Pryor on SNL. One of the highlights of the night was the controversial "word association" skit with Chevy Chase. He later did his own variety show, The Richard Pryor Show, which premiered on NBC in 1977. The show was cancelled after only four episodes, probably because television audiences did not respond well to his show's controversial subject matter, and Pryor was unwilling to alter his material for network censors. He later said, "They offered me ten episodes, but I said all I wanted to in four." During the short-lived series, he portrayed the first black President of the United States, spoofed the Star Wars Mos Eisley cantina, examined gun violence in a non-comedy skit, lampooned racism on the sinking Titanic, and used costumes and visual distortion to appear nude. In 1979, at the height of his success, Pryor visited Kenya. Upon returning to the United States from Africa, Pryor swore he would never use the word "nigger" in his stand-up comedy routine again.
1980–1989: Established career
In 1980, Pryor became the first black actor to earn a million dollars for a single film when he was hired to star in Stir Crazy. On June 9, 1980, while on a freebasing binge during the making of the film, Pryor doused himself in rum and set himself on fire. Pryor incorporated a description of the incident into his comedy show Richard Pryor: Live on the Sunset Strip. He joked that the event was caused by dunking a cookie into a glass of low-fat and pasteurized milk, causing an explosion. At the end of the bit, he poked fun at people who told jokes about it by waving a lit match and saying, "What's that? Richard Pryor running down the street."Before the freebasing incident, Pryor was about to start filming Mel Brooks' History of the World, Part I, but was replaced at the last minute by Gregory Hines. Likewise, Pryor was scheduled for an appearance on The Muppet Show at that time, which forced the producers to cast their British writer, Chris Langham, as the guest star for that episode instead. After his "final performance", Pryor did not stay away from stand-up comedy for long. Within a year, he filmed and released a new concert film and accompanying album, Richard Pryor: Here and Now, which he directed himself. He wrote and directed a fictionalized account of his life, Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life Is Calling, which was inspired by the 1980 freebasing incident.
In 1983 Pryor signed a five-year contract with Columbia Pictures for $40 million and he started his own production company, Indigo Productions. Softer, more formulaic films followed, including Superman III, which earned Pryor $4 million, Brewster's Millions, Moving, and See No Evil, Hear No Evil. The only film project from this period that recalled his rough roots was Pryor's semiautobiographic debut as a writer-director, Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life Is Calling, which was not a major success. Pryor was also originally considered for the role of Billy Ray Valentine on Trading Places, before Eddie Murphy won the part. Despite his reputation for constantly using profanity on and off camera, Pryor briefly hosted a children's show on CBS called Pryor's Place. Like Sesame Street, Pryor's Place featured a cast of puppets, hanging out and having fun in a friendly inner-city environment along with several children and characters portrayed by Pryor himself. Its theme song was performed by Ray Parker Jr. Pryor's Place frequently dealt with more sobering issues than Sesame Street. It was cancelled shortly after its debut.
Pryor co-hosted the Academy Awards twice—the 49th Academy Awards in 1977 with Warren Beatty, Ellen Burstyn, and Jane Fonda and again at the 55th Academy Awards in 1983 alongside Liza Minnelli, Dudley Moore, and Walter Matthau. He was also nominated for an Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Guest Actor in a Drama Series on the television series Chicago Hope. Network censors had warned Pryor about his profanity for the Academy Awards, and after a slip early in the program, a five-second delay was instituted when returning from a commercial break. Pryor is one of only three Saturday Night Live hosts to be subjected to a five-second delay.
Pryor developed a reputation for being demanding and disrespectful on film sets, and for making selfish and difficult requests. In his autobiography Kiss Me Like a Stranger, co-star Gene Wilder says that Pryor was frequently late to the set during filming of Stir Crazy, and that he demanded, among other things, a helicopter to fly him to and from set because he was the star. Pryor was accused of using allegations of on-set racism to force the hand of film producers into giving him more money:
Pryor appeared in Harlem Nights, a comedy-drama crime film starring three generations of black comedians.