by David Henry
Richard took top billing in the barely acknowledged and largely forgotten Dynamite Chicken—a frenetic hodge-podge of performances, skits, interviews, and archival footage that writer-producer-director Ernie Pintoff presented as “a multi-media movie magazine inspired by the TV generation.” The film included rapid-fire clips of John & Yoko, Andy Warhol, Al Capp, Joan Baez, Allen Ginsberg, Muddy Waters, Malcolm X, the Ace Trucking Company, Lenny Bruce, Jimi Hendrix, Sha Na Na, Robert Mitchum, and on and on. Interspersed throughout the movie, a scruffy-looking Richard in a paint-spattered work shirt does perhaps eight minutes of stand-up material outdoors amid the rubble surrounding a boarded-up cinder-block building. A text crawl at the beginning of the film states:
In the late ’60’s, Penelope Gill, Chairperson of the Daughters of the American Civil Patrol, filed this special report:
“On June 18, I attended a Richard Pryor performance in the company of policewoman Elsie Schoenberg, #6492. During his presentation, Mr. Pryor used the following words on several occasions:
bullshit
shit
motherfucker
penis
asshole
The substance of Mr. Pryor’s dissertation was primarily based on denouncing the Military, the Pope, the President and the Police.
In addition, Pryor greatly offended us by graphically illustrating how family, friends and luminaries pass gas.”
Perhaps being on set for the filming of You’ve Got to Walk It Like You Talk It reinvigorated Richard’s resolve to complete Uncle Tom’s Fairy Tales. Upon his return to California, he arranged to show the movie to Bill Cosby and asked Penelope to reserve a screening room at UCLA.
* The Green Berets starring John Wayne is often erroneously cited as Richard’s second film role by commentators who generally express puzzlement as to why he would be billed as Richard “Cactus” Pryor. They might well be puzzled, too, by the fact that he never once appears onscreen. The role of Collier was, in fact, played by the son of vaudevillian Richard “Skinny” Pryor. Born January 7, 1923, Cactus was a popular Austin, Texas, media personality and a close friend to John Wayne, who, coincidentally, introduced Richard “Cactus” Pryor to the cast and crew of The Green Berets as “the funniest man alive,” some years before that mantle would be more prominently and lastingly bestowed upon Richard Franklin Lennox Thomas Pryor.
MONDAY, DECEMBER 22, 1969
Penelope Spheeris gave birth to a daughter, Anna, on Saturday, December 13, 1969. Nine days later, she was back on the job at Richard’s house with her infant daughter in tow. Penelope fashioned a makeshift bassinet for Anna on the floor next to the Movieola. Richard paced around the room while Penelope worked to finish a cut of the movie to show Bill Cobsy.
“Richard had a whole collection of samurai swords in the living room. He got the swords out and started flailing them around. And I remember going, ‘Yeah, those are really nice swords, Richard, but could you kind of do them away from where the baby is.’ ”
As that first day wore on, Penelope began to worry seriously if the film’s dialogue (example: “Eat shit, you pig-faced motherfucker”) might inflict emotional or psychological damage on her infant daughter as she ran the scenes over and over and over again to get the edit just right. “And I’d wonder, is this going to screw up my child? Today I think I was right,” she says with a laugh.
At some point that afternoon, Shelley came in and announced that she was sick of this shit. Sick of their movie and of the pretense that it somehow mattered or ever would. The money was all gone and, in case Richard hadn’t noticed, he had a wife and daughter to take care of.
Richard thought he knew how to placate her.
“He said, ‘Well, look at what I did. I got you a present.’
“He brought out a big box and takes out a full-length fox coat—red fox, ironically. I don’t know how much it would’ve cost back then, but thousands of dollars. A lot of animals went into that coat.* Shelley said thank you, and five minutes later they were arguing again.”
Spheeris had just shown Richard her edit of the whole film up to that point, about forty-five or fifty minutes on a 16mm reel. The way a Movieola works, as the edited film unspools, it can either go onto a take-up reel or collect loose in a large bin.
“On that particular showing, I let it go into the bin,” she says. “The bin was about three and a half feet off the ground and it was full of film.
“They were still fighting. He said, ‘You think I love this film more than you? Watch this.’ ”
Richard grabbed an armload of edited film out of the bin and tore the whole thing up. Literally, he ripped more than a year’s worth of work and all their hopes and wedding money to shreds with his bare hands.
“I mean, we’re talking little four-inch pieces,” says Spheeris. “I’m going, ‘No, no, no, no,’ because it ain’t like the digital age where you’ve got it stored somewhere.”
Shelley at that point retreated upstairs and got in the shower.
“So Shelley’s running away. I’m screaming, ‘Don’t do it!’ He finishes tearing up the film, goes out and gets in his car. I could look out the window and see him getting into this Volkswagen Squareback they had. He starts to take off and she comes running down from upstairs and she’s naked.
“She runs out the door and jumps on the hood of the car. She’s beating on the windshield and Richard takes off with her naked on the front of the car. That’s what I saw as I looked out the window.
“So I grab the fox coat and I run out to my own car and I follow them. He goes north on Plymouth, hangs a left on Wilshire Boulevard—major street, okay?—and Shelley is still on the front of the car.”
At some point Richard decided to pull over and stop.
“Shelley gets off the car. I pull over. I give Shelley the coat. She covers up. Richard takes off again.”
Shelley refused Penelope’s offer of a ride back home, opting instead to wait for a cab so she could go after her man.
Penelope spent days splicing the pieces of the film back together like a jigsaw puzzle. She reconstructed the forty-some minutes of film by arduously piecing together the mangled pieces, some only a few frames long. The result was so crumpled and patched together that the film danced all around as it ran through the projector gate, adding an unintended element of slapstick to the story.
That’s what they showed to Cosby.
At that time the movie was between forty and fifty minutes long.
“My understanding was that Cosby bought the film, but it still wasn’t finished. Maybe he just wanted to give Richard some money. Maybe because Richard was his primary competition, he wanted to take the movie and shelve it. But that’s pure speculation.”
Penelope doesn’t know whether or not Cosby ever took possession of the print or the negative. (Richard, in his book, says that he convinced Bill Cosby to pay for a final edit. When Richard screened the completed print for Cosby his only comment was, “Hey, this shit is weird.” Richard agreed and stashed it away somewhere.) Wherever the footage ultimately wound up, only four people are known for certain to have seen the film in its final but unfinished form: Richard, Penelope, Bill Cosby, and whoever was running the projector that day at UCLA.
—————
Richard had been paying Penelope an agreed-upon day rate, a minuscule amount by today’s standards but not bad for a twenty-three-year-old aspiring filmmaker in 1969. But by the time they screened the movie for Cosby, he hadn’t paid her in three months, and now she had a baby daughter to care for. She went to him—he was sitting at the dining room table, she remembers, deep in one of his moods—and said to him, “ ‘Richard, I don’t think I can keep working anymore unless you pay me.’ And he said something like, ‘Why don’t you just take the whole thing and get the hell out?’ ”
She didn’t take his movie, of course. “I knew that wasn’t right,” she says. But she left and would not see Richard again until the early 1980s when she got a job directing sales presentations and
music videos for Warner Bros. Records. She was assigned to do one for Richard’s latest LP, a long-form promo that the label would send to distributors worldwide and recut as a thirty-second commercial to promote the album on TV. Richard had proposed doing a skit at Licorice Pizza, a record store on Sunset Boulevard kitty-corner to Whiskey a Go Go. The premise was that he would go into the store and buy his own record. Penelope had the lights set, everything ready. He showed up late (“He was always late”) and when he saw her there, his mood turned dark. He was cordial, but there was a palpable discomfort because of how their relationship on Uncle Tom came to an end.
The shoot did not go well. Richard’s performance was flat, unengaging and uninspired. He complained about having to do multiple takes and clearly just wanted to get the fuck out of there.
—————
As to the story line and possible whereabouts of Uncle Tom’s Fairy Tales, there are multiple conflicting accounts from which to choose. In Pryor’s own telling, the film, which he recalled shooting in March 1969, tells the story of a wealthy white man abducted by a group of Black Panther–type militants who hold him prisoner in a basement and put him on trial for all the racial crimes in U.S. history. For a time, the film was called “The Trial,” although Richard ultimately retitled it “Bon Appétit,” a line the chamber maid reportedly shouts at the protagonist as he is being hauled away following an episode of interclass cunnilingus. Penelope Spheeris has no idea why he chose that title. She, of course, shot and spent months and months editing the footage and she recalls no such scene. “Nobody in the film ate anything,” she says. She suspects that Richard simply liked the sound of the phrase.
—————
Richard writes that he borrowed money from shady characters to complete the edit, but after a falling out, the unfinished print was stolen and held for ransom. Richard bought it back, but then it disappeared again. Some time later, Paul Mooney saw it advertised at an art house theater in downtown L.A. Pryor managed to get the print back. Flash-forward some thirty-five years. Spheeris, while relocating her archives, discovered a reel of dailies from the shoot, approximately thirty minutes of raw unedited footage with no audio, and donated it to the Motion Picture Academy’s archive collection. A brief clip was included in a 2005 tribute to Pryor, prompting a lawsuit by Richard’s wife, Jennifer Lee, against both Spheeris and Richard’s daughter Rain for the return of what Jennifer presumably believed was the only existent print of the finished movie, which, the suit claims, had been stolen from Pryor’s home in the mid-1980s.
Listed on the Internet Movie Database under its original and best-known title Uncle Tom’s Fairy Tales, the film enjoys an 8-out-of-10-star user rating, despite the near certainty that not one of the raters has actually seen it. If the film still exists at all, Penelope’s best guess is that it’s in Bill Cosby’s vault.
—————
After all her stories of cocaine and chaos and samurai swords, the screaming fights and Lady Godiva rides down Wilshire Boulevard, we had to ask Penelope: Was it ever fun working with Richard?
“Oh my God! Hilarious! Are you kidding me? Richard Pryor!”
Penelope remembers he would walk around in his pajama bottoms, a silk robe, and slippers, carrying a plate or mirror of coke and a bottle of Courvoisier, riffing on current events and making fun of people. “It was like having my own private concert right there.”
“There was one time when he was in an amazingly good mood. I think he might’ve been bipolar . . .”
The doorbell rang and Richard sent Penelope to answer it. It was some guy in a suit looking for Richard Pryor.
Acting on a hunch, Penelope told the man she wasn’t sure if Richard was there or not. “I said, ‘What’s this about?’ and he said, ‘I’m with the IRS.’ ”
Penelope went back and told Richard. (She didn’t know then that Richard had not filed a tax return since 1966.) He said to tell the guy that he’d just left to go to the airport. While she was explaining this to the man from the IRS, Richard came around the side of the house with a pair of gardening shears and started trimming the hedges right next to the guy. Richard grinned and nodded to him like, “I’m just the gardener, suh.” It was all Penelope could do not to break up laughing. “He must not have known what Richard looked like because he didn’t hassle him or anything, he just left.”
The IRS would finally catch up with him in June of 1974. By that time, everyone knew who Richard Pryor was.
—————
In the meantime, Richard devoted himself to woodshedding his newfound voice(s) at the Troubadour, the Redd Foxx Club, and John Daniels’s Maverick’s Flat, a converted Arthur Murray dance studio that became a symbol of integration in the mid-1960s as Hollywood stars like Marlon Brando and Steve McQueen came to hear musical performers such as Parliament, Marvin Gaye, and Ike and Tina Turner and to see upcoming black comics like Richard and Flip Wilson. The Temptations were the first act to play Maverick’s when it opened in January 1966, and the title song on their 1970 LP Psychedelic Shack was an homage to the club’s funky decor and visionary mindscape artwork on the walls.
—————
On February 8, 1970, Richard was back in New York for his twelfth appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, sandwiched between a chimpanzee and saxophonist Boots Randolph. For weeks after that broadcast, Harry Belafonte recalls that he was liable to burst out laughing at the most random and inopportune times—waiting for an elevator, in a meeting, riding in a cab—recalling the comedian he’d seen on Sullivan that Sunday night. Richard had introduced himself as a defiant, in-your-face poet. His first poem consisted of a single word shouted for a full breath as loud as he could: “BLAAAAAAACK!”
He politely acknowledged the audience’s applause as he shuffled through his sheets of notepaper, then introduced his next work. His second poem was a street-inflected stanza from the nursery rhyme “Hey Diddle Diddle.” However, he explained, his poem had been altered by the establishment, “as are the works of most black artists.” The rant that followed is what floored Belafonte: “Now a lot of you out there probably doubt this coming from a black man, but if a wh-wh-wh-white man was to stand up here and tell you, you might believe it.” That was why, Richard exhorted his audience, “We got to get together and organize ourselves against wh-wh-wh-whitey, because, if we don’t, we gonna be in a lot of trouble.” Each time he tried to say the word white, Richard’s proud, defiant poet was reduced to a wincing, stammering mess, contorting his entire body as he struggled to expel the word. “Now, a lot of you out there, you’re sayin’ to yourselves right now, Well, if you feel that way about wh-wh-wh-white people, how come you married to a wh-wh-wh-wh-white woman?’ That ain’t got nothin’ to do with it.”
At first, Belafonte didn’t recognize Richard as the rail-thin comic with the ill-fitting suit who had appeared on the 1967 special he’d produced for ABC showcasing African American humor. That show, a part of the ABC Stage 67 anthology series, was titled A Time for Laughter: A Look at Negro Humor in America. Hosted by Sidney Poitier, it starred Moms Mabley, Redd Foxx, Godfrey Cambridge, Diahann Carroll, George Kirby, Harry Belafonte, and Dick Gregory. Richard contributed a skit in which he played a funeral home director who, when the deceased’s minister failed to show up, delivered a—this hardly needs saying—crude and irreverent eulogy while perched atop the coffin. He’d come a long way in just three years.
—————
For the remainder of that year, Richard knocked around L.A. with Mooney, landing occasional gigs doing guest shots on TV dramas and sitcoms such as The Young Lawyers, Wild Wild West, The Mod Squad, and an interesting episode of The Partridge Family intended as a pilot for a proposed series that would have teamed Richard with co–guest star Louis Gossett Jr. as brothers trying to make a go of an inner-city Detroit nightclub housed in an abandoned fire station. In that episode, titled “Soul Club,” a booking agent’s error has the Partridges showing up at the club instead of the scheduled headliners, the Temp
tations. The Partridges get busy and organize a block-party fund-raiser that saves the club from being taken over by a local loan shark known as Heavy (Charles Lampkin).
In April of 1971, Richard returned to New York to film his first stand-up movie—perhaps the world’s first stand-up performance film—at the Improvisation. Directed by Michael Blum, the forty-six-minute feature, Live and Smokin’, wouldn’t be released for another decade.
Back in L.A. later that spring, Richard sat in Mooney’s car, parked on Crenshaw at the corner of Santa Barbara, a block up from Maverick’s, just before dawn, drinking Courvoisier from a paper cup.
“I’m losing my motherfucking mind, Mr. Mooney.” Richard always called him that, after a character on The Lucy Show. “This city is driving me nuts.”
The past two and a half years had left him wrung out, strung out, and hung out to dry. Maxine had an arrest warrant out on him for nonpayment of child support. His movie and his marriage to Shelley were both in tatters.
Mooney had been planning a trip up the coast to Oakland to visit his grandmother—his mama—and invited Richard to come along.
Oakland. The Black Panthers. San Francisco. Berkeley. Hippie chicks with no bras.
But most important, Mooney told him, “It ain’t L.A.”
“It ain’t L.A.” Richard repeated the words softly, almost magically, as though scarcely able to believe, in that moment, that there could really be such a place as “ain’t L.A.” It sounded mythical and magic, like Shangri-la or Oz.
A week later, they were driving up Interstate 5 in Richard’s blue Buick convertible, with Mooney behind the wheel and Richard behind a bottle of Courvoisier (“I’m getting better mileage than he is,” Mooney quips), singing along with the Temptations’ song, “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg” at the top of their lungs. When the song ended, they switched off the radio and kept on singing a cappella, beginning with “I Heard It through the Grapevine” as they approached Grapevine, California. When they’d exhausted the Motown catalog, they started making up their own songs.
