Spike Lee's Jim Brown: All-American contains a heartbreaking moment where the legendary athlete recounts how buddy Richard Pryor tapped him to help run Pryor's Indigo production company in the early '80s. After years of prostituting his gifts in projects unworthy of his talent, Pryor finally had a chance to control his destiny. Instead of kowtowing to The Man, the brothers were doing it for themselves. And not just any brothers: two towering, larger-than-life, world-famous icons who embodied the promise and pathos of being young, black, and gifted in an American society still emerging from the lingering shadow of Jim Crow.
The enterprising Brown quickly lined up two plucky little films—The Color Purple and Purple Rain—that seemed like good projects for the company, which was fat with tens of millions of dollars in seed money from white capitalist oppressors. (He also presumably aspired to make films without "Purple" in the title.) But Pryor shot those ideas down so he could devote all of his time and energy to killing himself with cocaine, booze, self-hatred, and fire.
Like so much in Pryor's life, Indigo, the great black film company that wasn't, began with boundless promise and ended in bitterness, failure, and squandered potential. Actually, Squandered Potential would be a terrific title for a Richard Pryor biography. Contemplating Pryor's rich, complicated legacy, I'm reminded of the bit on The Simpsons where Homer chides Dean Martin for wasting his talent. An indignant Martin fires back that he made dozens of hit records and countless films. In what world does that qualify as a waste of talent?
How can a career filled with so much achievement qualify as a failure? The same question applies to the legendary, maddening careers of Pryor and Marlon Brando. They both accomplished so much, and yet they were capable of so much more.
In his 65 years, Pryor revolutionized stand-up comedy, inspired countless comedians, won five Grammys and an Emmy, co-wrote the story for Blazing Saddles, made three hit movies opposite Gene Wilder (Silver Streak; Stir Crazy; See No Evil, Hear No Evil), appeared in a string of box-office hits and/or cult classics (Wild In The Streets, The Mack, Lady Sings The Blues, Blue Collar), made some of the most popular, acclaimed performance films of all time, and was one of cinema's top-paid leading men. Yet his film career was characterized as much by wasted talent as achievement.
No film better symbolizes the compromises and cynical calculation that sabotaged a potentially great film career than 1982's The Toy, which cast the man behind such albums as Bicentennial Nigger and That Nigger's Crazy as a hapless dope who becomes the richly compensated plaything of Scotty Schwartz, the spoiled son of tycoon Jackie Gleason.
The symbolism was as queasy as it was unmistakable. The greatest truth-telling griot in American comedy was reduced to a sentient toy, a human jack-in-the-box to be rented, then discarded when it outlived its usefulness. Schwartz later appeared in arguably the single most depressing episode of E! True Hollywood Story. He's widely known as a kid actor turned porn star, but that description is just plain wrong. Schwartz was a porn actor, not a star. Calling him a star is an insult to the good names and impeccable reputations of legitimate porn stars like Juggsy Vavoom and Titsy McBigbosoms. Clint Howard acts in plenty of films. Nobody calls him a movie star. When not appearing in such films as The Wrong Snatch, New Wave Hookers 5, Scotty's X-Rated Adventure, and Dirty Bob's Xcellent Adventures 35 and 36 (which, it should be noted, pales in comparison to volumes 16-27) Schwartz persisted in trying to get a Toy sequel off the ground, in spite of minor obstacles like Gleason's death, Pryor's incapacitation due to multiple sclerosis, and Schwartz's own sad descent from adorable child actor to creepy secondary player in porn movies.
By making movies like The Toy, Pryor became complicit in his own exploitation. The raw edges and anguish of his stand-up comedy and dramatic performances were smoothed away for the benefit of a big mainstream audience.
Onstage, Pryor's painfully intimate, confessional comedy stung and bled. Onscreen, it was often reduced to lucrative shtick.
1986's Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life Is Calling was supposed to change all that, and not just because Indigo Productions was finally making a movie with ambition and scope. Dancer was going to harness the full measure of Pryor's talent: the innovative stand-up comedy that doubled as a raw, cathartic therapy for audiences and performer alike, the dramatic actor of voluminous intensity and riveting emotional transparency, the autobiographical storytelling that transformed Pryor into a stand-up god. Instead, it was released to mixed-to-negative reviews and disappointing box-office. Pryor's days as a top box-office attraction were numbered, though that has as much to do with his multiple sclerosis as the paltry grosses of his last few vehicles.
Pryor has denied that Dancer was autobiographical, which is like Oasis claiming that they've never even heard of The Beatles, let alone been influenced by them. Clearly, Jo Jo Dancer wasn't just about Pryor, it was about every painfully sensitive black man who ever grew up in a Midwestern whorehouse, worked at a Mafia-run nightclub against the wishes of a disapproving father, revolutionized stand-up with unflinching honesty, deftly employed profanity and exhilaratingly raw self-reflection, battled through multiple stormy marriages before ascending to the heights of superstardom, then nearly died after dousing himself in rum and setting himself on fire. Those experiences are fucking universal. Who hasn't experienced them all?
Why, just last week, I was so bummed over missing the season première of Mad Men that I poured rum all over my body and "accidentally" burned myself nearly to death while freebasing. It was rough going for a while, until I had an out-of-body experience, during which a wisecracking cabbie ghost who looked suspiciously like Ray Sharkey led me on a surreal journey through the lives of John Belushi and Richard Pryor. That was some weird shit. I really need to stop freebasing. And get TiVo. On a related note, I would like to preemptively denounce rumors that my forthcoming memoir, The Big Rewind, is somehow autobiographical just because it's written in the first person by someone with my name whose life mirrors my own in every conceivable way. Where do people get the idea that Dancer is somehow autobiographical? Oh right, from common sense and basic intuition.
Pryor's genius lay in making the personal universal. His squirmy vulnerability invited—no, demanded—empathy and compassion. He made people feel his pain, and register his hurt and confusion as their own. In its stellar early scenes, Dancer—which Pryor directed and co-wrote—embodies that rare, wonderful gift.
Dancer opens with an apparently reformed adult Pryor nervously calling up a drug dealer and inviting him to a party. Pryor maintains a strained cordiality throughout the call, but his eyes and jittery body language give him away. Though he professes to be straight, he's jonesing for cocaine. In a twisted bit of junkie logic, he's forcing himself to throw a party for someone he hates, solely as a pretext for being around a drug dealer, and by extension, his poisonous wares. He knows what's right, yet can't keep from doing wrong. We then plunge even deeper into junkie hell. Against Herbie Hancock's rubbery funk score, Pryor crawls around on his floor searching for little bits of leftover rock.
Pryor finds some leftover coke in a suit coat, digs through his fireplace for a makeshift pipe, and gives himself over to his demons completely. We then flash forward to Pryor being wheeled into a hospital, covered in life-threatening burns. His flesh is melted and raw, his survival doubtful. While his body hovers at death's door in a sterile hospital room, his spirit leaves its burnt prison and rages against the mess he's made of his life.
A ghostly Pryor then journeys back in time, in a framing device almost identical to that of Wired, another tragicomic exploration of a funnyman as brilliant as he was self-destructive. The out-of-body Pryor is trying to make sense of his life, to trace the steps leading to his current sad predicament. And even though he's a phantom, he can interact with the people in his past, including his younger selves. By understanding his past, Pryor hopes to change the present and future, to finally slip out of a grim cycle of drug abuse, failed relationships, and self-negation.
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