Word: pryor
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Atlanta. As it happens, the voice came from the back of a theater auditorium in Long Beach, Calif. It was shouted to the man onstage, who could lay claim to being all those people: minister to the oppressed, political agitator, champion womanizer. The Hollywood moguls may think of Richard Pryor, 41, simply as the hottest black movie star ever. But to millions of his fans, black and white, this self-described nigger is preaching The Word-four-lettered, furious and achingly funny...
...troubled period for movies, when attendance is slipping and not even the presence of Burt Reynolds or Clint Eastwood can guarantee box office gold, Richard Pryor is the one actor whose name spells HIT. Stir Crazy, the comedy in which he co-starred with Gene Wilder as a bumbling convict, was the No. 3 moneymaking movie of 1981 and, except for National Lampoon 's Animal House, the most successful comedy in industry history. Pryor's other 1981 film, the sugar-and-spice Bustin' Loose, was also a moneymaker, establishing him as the only star to have...
Popularity is one measure of a performer's achievement, but in this case it is the least compelling. Pryor is not a flash, a freak, even a one-man trend; he is the soaring demon angel of movies, concerts and Grammy-winning albums. As a comedy monologuist, Pryor is without peer. Drawing his material from the black hole of ghetto life and death, Pryor uses his dramatic power to magnetize his listeners into the fire-flash fear of the moment-even as his skewed comic perspective offers distance, safety, reassurance. As a straight actor, he has the uncanny knack...
Fire metaphors are ghoulishly appropriate for a man who, in June 1980, was lucky to be alive with third-degree burns over much of his body. Even so, fire images would be in consummate bad taste if 1) Pryor thought there were such a thing as bad taste, and 2) he had not used a recitation of the event and its aftermath as the climax of Sunset Strip. In the days after Pryor was found in shock a few blocks from his Northridge, Calif., home, his attorney declared that he had accidentally ignited a glass of rum with a butane...
Amazingly, Pryor pulled through; within two months he was telling Barbara Walters and a national TV audience how he had died and been born again. More amazingly, and even more typically, he was able to focus the laser of his art on this suicidal immolation. "Before I go to bed," he tells his Sunset Strip audience with a straight face and in the voice of aggrieved reason, "I like to have some milk and cookies. This night I had some low-fat milk, and I mixed it with some pasteurized, and I dipped the cookie in, and ..." Then comes...