Originally Written: Wednesday, 27 March 2002, 09:16pm
Mood: Overwhelmed
I just had a weird experience.
Sometimes, I'll just be sitting there, fartin around or reading or whatever I'm doing, and all of a sudden I'll be hit with a series of images... sometimes it's really powerful and sometimes it's nothing... but almost always, it's got something to do with a movie I want to do... or a movie I never thought about doing but suddenly want to do after the flash...
I was just sitting outside, having a smoke and rereading Richard Pryor's autobiography (it's kinda weird anyway, cause Richard Pryor's been coming up a lot lately in my mind... part of it's due to Denzel winning the Oscar... but more on that later) and I was reading this scene where he's talking about when he was a kid and was molested by this guy. Then he goes on to talk about how he went back to his home town (Peoria, Illinois) to film scenes for his autobiographical 1986 film Jo Jo Dancer Your Life is Calling, and the guy that molested him contacted him, saying that he wanted to meet up.
At this point, I started getting major flashes. It was freaky, because they've never been this powerful before. It was like a memory... a very recent memory. Suddenly I could see the movie, and I could see the scene in my head even before I finished reading it in my book. I could see Don Cheadle playing Richard Pryor with the kind of frizzy, poofy fro and the mustache, completely terrified because he was gonna see this guy who'd fucked him up so bad when he was a kid. I could see his eyes... those haunted Don Cheadle eyes, staring at the guy with a kind of mixture of complete terror and complete hatred and complete despondency as to what to do about the situation. In the scene, the guy (his name was "Hoss") brings his son to meet Richard, because his son is a big fan. The kid wants an autograph.
It was fucked up. Not just the scene itself, but sitting there, I could literally SEE it, you know? It was clear as day. It was like watching the film. I could see him sitting in his trailer, kind of nervously sucking on a bottle of JD before the guy shows up... then seeing the guy and seeing that he's just a tiny, sad old man... with a little boy. I can see the intense pain in Don's eyes as he realizes that the little boy is the same age that he was when the guy raped him. I see him signing the autograph and watching the man and his son walk away, knowing that there isn't a goddamn thing in the world he can do to fix what happened to him and what may be happening to that kid.
It fucked me up.
 I dig Don Cheadle as Pryor SO much too. He's been one of my favorite actors for a while now (since Boogie Nights... he was so awesome in that)... he's just so intense. He's got these just like, haunted eyes... he always looks like he's feeling everything just a little too much... more than a regular person should. He's amazing in everything he does. He and Benecio Del Toro were what really carried the movie Traffic, and his portrayal of Sammy Davis Jr in The Rat Pack was fucking unbelievable. He doesn't exactly look like Richard, and he definitely doesn't sound like him... but I know I could make it work, because he's a brilliant actor.
 I've wanted to make a movie about Richard Pryor for a long time. I've talked about it before in this journal, but I'm talking about it again because it's pretty important to me.
A while back, a similar thing happened to me. I was in the bathtub (where most of these "flashes" tend to happen... unfortunately I don't have a tub anymore, so now they happen when I'm smoking) and I got flashes of a scene (this was a good five years ago) with Don Cheadle playing Richard in the early/mid sixties, and he's in a night club with a fairly young Bill Cosby. In my "vision" Denzel Washington was playing Cosby... he had the fro and the cigar, and it was really quite stunning. Anyway, the scene was pretty short, and basically consisted of Bill kind of mentoring Richard... teaching him the ropes of being a black stand up comic... telling how to deal with racism in the industry and the best way to get through to the crowd. It was a fucking great scene.
That's all I've had up to this point. I've never really been able to get a hold of much more than that, content wise. I mean, I know Richard Pryor's story, and I know that I could make a good movie out of it... but up till tonight, that's been the only real scene I've been able to get grab on. The thing is that Richard Pryor has had a pretty harsh life, with no real upside to it... all of the ups came with a lot of huge downs, ya know? He had a fucked up childhood, and he went on to have a fucked up adult hood. Between multiple failed marriages, hardcore drug addictions, a major suicide attempt (set himself on fire for crying out loud) and ending with him getting MS... there's not much of a happy ending in that.
...but I think I've got my hook now.
For one, I've got to stop worrying about "where's the happy?"... I mean, christ, Jim Morrison didn't exactly lead a happy go lucky life... he was a crazy kid, got famous and then drank himself to death... but they managed to make a fairly decent film outta that.
What I realized tonight is that the focus isn't Richard's life so much, but the way that he was able to take the really fucked up shit in his life and turn it into comedy. He managed to take something like setting himself on fire and getting 3rd degree burns on over half of his body) and make it funny. He can make being locked in a room for weeks on end, freebasing his entire life away funny. That's what was brilliant about Richard Pryor, and that's what the movie has to be about. It's not about a shooting star rising and fizzling out (like Morrison)... it's about a man who was able to turn the worst that life had to offer into art.
I realized that the best way to go about it would be similar to the 1974 film Lenny, about Lenny Bruce (starring Dustin Hoffman) and really, the format that the book took... intercutting scenes of real events and biographical information with scenes from his stand up act. Showing the kind of cause and effect... and maybe hitting home just how powerful it is that he can take something so horrible and make it funny. Incredibly funny. That's the way to go.
Another reason I've always kind of kept this project not only on the back burner, but on the back burner in someone else's house on someone else's stove... is because this kind of rule that goes around "if you don't have the rights, don't start to write"... basically saying that it's entirely pointless to write a screenplay based on a story that someone else owns because chances are, someone else isn't going to let you have it.
But, I was thinking...
There are a lot... and I mean a LOT of comedians out there that absolutely worship Richard Pryor. Keenen Ivory Wayans once said "if you're a stand up comic working today, and you say that you haven't been influenced by Richard Pryor, you're either a liar or you're not funny."... there are enough people that (providing it's a good script, which it will be) would love to see this film get made and made right, that I think that no matter who has the rights (I would assume it would be Richard himself, but what do I know) I could get this film made... and I think I could get it made with Richard's blessing.
Holy shit I want to make this movie.
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upyourmind's journal
I should start off by saying that I'm not a fan of the books. I tried to read em and they bored the shit out of me. I got about fifty pages into the first book and then I threw it across the room. The whole genre really bores me. Elfs and orks and swords and eurotrash accents.... it all kinda just gets on my nerves. Yeah, I played some D&D when I was a kid, and I even hated it then. I was always trying to bring guns and time-traveling-to-present-day into the game because I was so annoyed by the genre. 