richard pryor

Pryor in Regular Showbiz Land is a fascinating era.

he seems understandably nervous, almost shy

well showbiz was still an essentially segregated affair, and he was meeting one of his idols

he bridles at some moments with lewis though. fascinating footage.

Try if you will but you'll never be able to unpack Richard Pryor into any sort of 21st century understanding of a "problematic" artist. The pain and suffering he endured/caused can't be grasped in today's digital screen-world of virtue-signalling & Nazis. pic.twitter.com/zC1S74mHFU

— K D R (@kdr_2020) February 8, 2018

People acting surprised about the Pryor thing when dude made the most true, beautiful short film about interracial same-sex love that I've ever seen: https://t.co/lQU1oIsvIn

— BANDZ STACKHAGE (@NickPinkerton) February 8, 2018

The Scott Saul biog from a little while back - which is mostly brilliant - is explicit about Richard's sexuality being fluid.

Luv thread revives that talk around a thing without ever making explicit mention of the thing they're talking around. Luv them.

I figured everyone knew! Pryor and Brando got it on, per Quincy Jones and Pryor's widow.

I'm always the last to learn about secret celebrity fucking. Sigh.

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

i read this last night, seems relevant

yep (posted it 3 years ago -- I again recommend the book)

Best film criticism of 1959: Teenaged Richard Pryor, in the Army, stabs a fellow soldier for laughing at Douglas Sirk's Imitation of Life.

— BANDZ STACKHAGE (@NickPinkerton) December 18, 2012

Thx Quincy Jones for giving me the opportunity to share a light-hearted Marlon Brando-Richard Pryor story that suggests why they were birds of a feather @jasondashbailey pic.twitter.com/6fPH2EYsjs

— ScottSaul (@scottsaul4) February 7, 2018

more champagne!

Can I just say once more what a fabulous read that Scott Saul biog is? I've read a number of Pryor-related tomes over the years, including his own memoir, and this is the best.

from the AOC thread (never mind)

Blue Collar is the only movie Pryor is in that isnt bad

Some Call It Loving
Uptown Saturday Night
Car Wash

And Superman 3.

Wattstax

i've been meaning to check out Which Way Is Up? for a couple years, since I saw The Seduction of Mimi (its origin)

as I posted in the AOC thread:

Wild In The Streets
Lost Highway

also The Muppet Movie, and iirc The Mack is entirely capable at what it's aiming to do

I should have been more specific, limited it to films he stars in.

The Mack counts then, and I'm prepared to believe that Blue Collar (by Schrader) and Silver Streak (d. Arthur Hiller, w. the writer of Harold & Maude) are non-terrible

saw See No Evil, Hear No Evil when I was a kid bcz Wilder/Pryor were supposed to be good, and that was definitely fuckin awful

Any way you cut it, the disparity between Pryor's talent and the quality of his films is off the charts. Hard to think of many people who were so poorly served by their choice of material.

Blue Collar probably is his best starring role.

God only knows how many times I watched the horribly offensive The Toy as a kid.

Blue Collar was good. Others I tried, I couldn't stay awake. I read the bio "Furious Cool" that makes it sound like a miracle he managed to make any films.

Thread reminds me to give his "semi-autobiographical" film "Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life Is Calling" a try. Anyone seen that?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fUIKBlT_Ef8

Hard to think of many people who were so poorly served by their choice of material.

You can only do what you're offered! Hollywood had no idea what to do with him.

Thread reminds me to give his "semi-autobiographical" film "Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life Is Calling" a try. Anyone seen that?

It's a mess, but a brave and fascinating mess.

Watched Which Way Is Up? last year, following that great biog that came out the year before, and it is really hard to watch, especially as the Pryor character's romantic approach is to stalk the female lead in a really creepy way, and then she inexplicably falls in love with him. It's a bad movie.

I recently read Jenny Lee Pryor's memoir from the 90s, which I'd owned for years but never cracked open. It's not very well written, but vivid, and it's a gruelling read, as Pryor basically abuses her terribly and she keeps leaving him but then going back to him, and then getting psychologically and physically abused by him again. He seems to have been a real horror-show to be around, a towering inferno of self-doubt, paranoia and anger, onto which he poured the gasoline of drugs. It reminded me of that thing on the internet a bunch of years ago written by a scriptwriter working on a movie with him, where he basically came into writing sessions completely out of it and raging with paranoia and violence.

I had no idea about this material - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution/Revolution

Was relistening to this on a long drive recently. The first disk is fascinating and well-titled, as you hear Richard morph from gifted Cosby/Allen copyist into his own sublime thing. The later stuff is great too, mostly taken from the releases Laff put out alongside the LPs Richard was doing concurrently for Warners, and very much of a piece (if not sonically as clear or clean). The comp is up for streaming IIRC, if you don't fancy tracking down a CD.

Soz, I meant the Laff stuff was released at the same time as the Warners records, but the material and recordings often date earlier, before he was signed to Warners iirc

Seem to recall a (silent?) sketch where he plays a whiskey doctor. He needs to have a drink to steady his hand for what one expects is going to be dealing with a bullet wounds but instead the joke is he delivers a baby. Hard to google, wonder if I dreamt it.

Some Call It Loving
Uptown Saturday Night
Car Wash

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