Furious Cool: Richard Pryor and the World That Made Him by David Henry & Joe Henry

Author:David Henry & Joe Henry [Henry, David & Henry, Joe]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Comedian, Entertainment & Performing Arts, Nonfiction, Retail, Richard Pryor
ISBN: 9781616200787
Google: vfMhAQAAQBAJ
Amazon: 1616200782
Barnesnoble: 1616200782
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Published: 2013-11-05T05:00:00+00:00

“LET IT STAY HEAVY IF NOT HARD”

Mel Brooks initially turned down the chance to do Blazing Saddles when his agent David Begelman showed him the screen treatment—then titled “Tex X”—written by fellow Begelman client Andrew Bergman. Brooks was only interested in developing projects of his own. But he was at a career low. No acting jobs were coming his way, he couldn’t get his own projects off the ground, and Warner Bros. would pay him well to shape the treatment into a script that he would then direct. “I figured my career was finished anyway,” he said.

To help him with the script, he hired Bergman and the team of Norman Steinberg and Alan Uger, writers he had worked with before. The script would also need the contributions of an authentic black voice. After Dick Gregory turned him down, he went to Richard Pryor.

Richard, by all accounts, threw himself into the project with abandon, spinning out gags and situations like an inspired Rumplestiltskin—even offering up bits from Black Stranger, a cowboy screenplay he’d written while in Berkeley. What’s most impressive, he showed up every day and on time.

“I decided this would be a surrealist epic,” Brooks told Kenneth Tynan in a New Yorker profile. “It was time to take two eyes, the way Picasso had done it, and put them on one side of the nose, because the official movie portrait of the West was simply a lie. For nine months we worked together like maniacs. We went all the way—especially Richard Pryor, who was very brave and very far out and very catalytic. . . . They wrote berserk, heartfelt stuff about white corruption and racism and Bible-thumping bigotry. We used dirty language on the screen for the first time, and to me the whole thing was like a big psychoanalytic session.”

Impressed by what he’d seen from Richard during their months of writing the screenplay together—the way Richard would jump up and act scenes out—Brooks became convinced that he would be outrageous in the title role of “Black Bart,” as the script was then called. Brooks had been delightfully surprised when the studio accepted their profane, illogical, irreverent, madcap script, requesting only a few minimal changes to rein in the running time. So he was perhaps more stunned than he might have been when Warner Bros. flatly refused to consider Richard for the part. He lacked acting experience, they said. What they didn’t expressly say was that he had a reputation for being erratic and uncontrollable and was known to have drug problems. There was no telling what he might do.

Richard was dumbstruck when he got the news from his friend Cleavon Little that he’d signed on for the role. That Richard would later share a Writers Guild of America award for Best Comedy Written Directly for the Screen did little to ease the pain. His name was inadvertently left off the early prints of the film.

“Richard wrote it and Mel Brooks chased him out,” director Michael Shultz said at the time.

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