richard pryor

From the book... Rich is hired to play a "glossy," discreet gay-rights fundraiser in '77, and...

http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2015/jan/11/richard-pryor-great-meltdown-racist-hollywood-bowl

Wow. I'd heard his dick sucking bit from other performances, bur had never heard of this incident.

Yeah, I remember something similar from ...Is It Something I Said?

I'd heard about the Hollywood Bowl thing before, but the account I'd read portrayed Pryor as nothing more than a vicious homophobe (which obviously didn't jibe with what I'd heard on his records, so I wasn't sure if I was getting the whole story).

Reminds me that earlier today a coworker asked if I'd ever seen The Toy. Nnnnnope. "You haven't?! Oh, it's a classic! Don't you like Richard Pryor?"

I can't even imagine other bad Richard Pryor films being as bad as The Toy.

There's stuff about the Hollywood Bowl show in If I Stop I'll Die from a couple of decades ago, but in nowhere near so much depth. Really want to read this new book.

Live and Smokin is fucking amazing if anyone in this thread hasn't seen it yet

I've got a torrent of "Some Call it Loving", bit of a cult thingy starring Zalman King (who went on to be an erotica auteur supremo). Haven't seen it yet.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Some_Call_It_Loving

Pryor's filmography is total shit for th most part so hoping this does the trick

Live and Smokin is fucking amazing if anyone in this thread hasn't seen it yet

― TracerHandVEVO (Tracer Hand), Wednesday, January 14, 2015 5:35 AM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I only saw it once, maybe 25 years ago, and I remember it being really sad. He's obviously not all there, and it feels like he's stuck in the junkie character, only it's not a character.

It's sad and fuckin amazing and you should see it again

I was unaware of that filmed set, and as it was at the NYC Improv, I'd be very interested as I usta perform there.

xxpost You might be surprised watching it again - he's razor sharp. It is incredibly sad because of some of the places he goes to, the characters he's inhabiting, but I don't know if I've ever seen him quite as on top of his game as that, as far as truly expressing the full range of what he's capable of

well he was not yet HUGE in 1971, possibly not doing as many drugs.

The two lines I remember from that set are among my favorites ("Kiss my ass!...truck!" "There is nothing like the claaap!"), so yeah, I suppose I should see it again.

The live one where he's in the red suit and talking about shooting his car (Richard Pryor In Concert?) was the first I saw, and is still my favourite.

OK, watched a couple of clips of Live & Smokin', and I have no idea how I so colossally misremembered this. I recognize some of this material from Craps and his 1974 record, and yeah, Pryor's totally on.

Live and smokin is revelatory

this sentence has got to be one of the understatements of the year:

Peoria, Illinois, in the 1950s, at a time when there was little in the way of a gay community there

that was a fascinating article, btw. thank you for sharing it.

also, re the anecdote RP tells in the set -- in 1952, he was twelve.

Obviously there is an audio recording, at least, somewhere.

pryor spoke frequenly about losing his virginity at a young age -- he was raised partly in a whorehouse, no?

yes, his grandma's

indeed, i recall that he said he was sexually abused as a small child, although i'm not sure he used the word "abused."

he should have been a film critic:

According to a 1999 profile about Pryor in The New Yorker, Pryor was incarcerated for an incident that occurred while stationed in Germany. Angered that a white soldier was overly amused at the racially charged sections of Douglas Sirk's movie Imitation of Life, Pryor and some other black soldiers beat and stabbed him, though not fatally.[29]

they could wipe out half the screenings these days

i need to get this:

http://www.amazon.com/No-Pryor-Restraint-Life-Concert/dp/B00C6P7I8Y/

hilton als discusses the hollywood bowl incident a bit in the pryor chapter of 'white girls' - also goes into a little more depth re: his friendship with lily tomlin

where does pryor talk about losing his virginity?

i love richard pryor, but thinking of him makes me so terribly sad

[/emo] amazing excerpt, morbs - thanks for posting it

came to me via ex-ilxor Casuistry btw

where does pryor talk about losing his virginity?

― NI, Wednesday, January 14, 2015 2:16 PM (53 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

feel like he has versions of that story in a few routines, but i can't point to one album or video specifically right now.

/lazy

i know he talks about childhood sexual abuse in his memoir, can't recall a specific anecdote re: virginity but it likely comes up in there as well

have begun the Saul book. He idolized Jerry Lewis and Sid Caesar, as a kid growing up in the '50s reasonably would. (And he became a great physical comedian, doing standup.)

(that physicality is what made the concert films a more complete experience, in some ways, than the LPs.)

Yeah, as brilliant as the records are, there's always moments of "[silence] [explosive laughter]" where presumably he did some hilarious physical comedy.

One of my favorite moments in Richard Pryor Live In Concert doesn't come across on record too well:

"...snake..."

The opening 30 pages or so about his family background and Peoria in the first half of the 20th century is just so bleak and heartbreaking. The roots of everything that inspired and traumatized him are completely laid bare.

i should read this.

a key sketch from a 1973 CBS Lily Tomlin special (Alan Alda pops in too). It's totally character-driven, and per the Saul book, Lily had to fight to get it on over the course of a year; the network said it "wasn't funny." Pryor connected with Tomlin, loved her work.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKi7myNZb4o

I'd never heard of this before a few months ago and thankfully found it on youtube. I watched it several times over the course of the day. It's unlike anything I've ever seen on television, and though she had to fight with the network to get it on in 1973, it would never get out of a pitch meeting in 2015. It's astonishing.

Pryor's mockery of the social-work types is deft and not at all heavyhanded. He won an Emmy for co-writing one of these Tomlin specials, not sure which.

is the saul book god, morbs?

bought a VHS of this entire special off ebay years ago, but i think i've since lost it

it's probably the definitive book, for now, on Pryor in the '70s and his early life.

It makes clear RP was ambivalent at best about his crossover vehicles, eg Silver Streak, his breakthrough hit film, which he nearly quit the day before the "Gene Wilder blacks up with shoe polish" scene. Fortunately Wilder and Arthur Hiller let Pryor essentially rewrite and take over the scene.

i'll definitely check it out, thanks for the tip-off

Thanks for posting that clip, Morbs; just got to that point in the book yesterday and was about to seek it out.

And Morbs otm re: the new bio. Absolutely definitive, and Saul's take on "That N-----'s Crazy" is spot-on where he talks about the multiple layers revealed with each listen. I've practically got that record memorized and I still hear something new every time.

should i read the saul book first, or his autobiography?

I actually found his autobio a little thin, but the excerpts in Saul's book make me want to revisit it. That said, I'd still read Saul first.

ok thanks, i'll do that