Eddie Murphy, "Dreamgirls" Director to Collaborate on Richard Pryor Biopic

Phil Nugent — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 20:30:00 GMT

It's been reported that Eddie Murphy is prepared to waive his usual fee for the chance to play Richard Pryor in Is It Something I Said?, a biopic of the late comic that's being planned by Bill Condon; Condon's last movie, Dreamgirls, earned Murphy the first Oscar nomination of his 25-year-old movie career. It's not the first time that Pryor and Murphy's names have been uttered in the same breath. In the early 1980s, when both men were at the height of their box office appeal, the freshly hatched Murphy was featured on the cover of People magazine alongside Pryor and often described as his comedic heir, and in 1989, the two co-starred in Harlem Nights, the only movie that Murphy has ever directed. Pryor himself took directing credits on two features: his final stand-up performance feature, the 1983 Here and Now, and the autobiographical Jo Jo Dancer...Your Life Is Calling, in which Pryor played a comedian who rises from being the son of a Peoria, Illinois prostitute to a rich and beloved celebrity entertainer who can't manage his love life or his taste for addictive substances. A shapeless mess that restages, to diminishing returns, many scenes from Pryor's life that he had already turned into comic gold in his stand-up act, the movie is perhaps most notable for portraying the calamitous 1980 event when Pryor suffered life-threatening over more than half his body, as a suicide attempt, with Pryor's character lighting himself on fire after dousing his clothes with rum. Pryor's injuries had been officially reported as having been the result of a freebasing accident, but some ten years after Jo Jo came out, Pryor, in a book and in interviews, would describe it in much the same way it was shown in the movie. By that time, the comic had been physically waylaid by multiple sclerosis.

The idea that Eddie Murphy is the best possible fit for the role of Richard Pryor may be one of those ideas that seems so obvious that the first thing that should be done with it is to re-examine it. Even back when the two of them were sharing magazine covers, it was clear that they had little enough in common in terms of presence, image, shared experiences and preferred subject matter that the talk of Murphy as being "the new Richard Pryor" seemed redolent of a bygone era when it was thought that America could only handle one black superstar in any particular medium at a time. Whatever was going on in his personal life, there was always something childlike about Richard Pryor, whereas Murphy could credit his fast rise to the fact that, even when he was barely out of his teens, there seemed to be a forty-year veteran of the Vegas club circuit inside him. In the age of Reagan and Rambo, he had his biggest success in what were essentially action pictures (48 Hrs., Beverly Hills Cop and its sequel) in which he functioned as both the gun-waving hero and the wisecracking comic relief; he may have been willing to double as a thief (in 48 Hrs.) or dress down (in the Beverly Hills Cop movies) if it would help audiences relate to him as an "underdog", but he was still an authority figure at heart, compared to Pryor's eternal outsiders. In this week's "Random Roles" feature in The Onion, Margot Kidder says that the key to the much-married Pryor's great appeal was partly his "vulnerability"; that's not a quality that ever turned up much in Murphy's character descriptions.

Pryor himself had a long-cherished, off-and-on plan to star in a bipic about Charlie Parker, who would eventually be portrayed by Forest Whitaker in Clint Eastwood's Bird, which came out in 1988, around the same time that Pryor's movie career wa winding down. (Pryor's last starring role was in the 1991 Another You. He later contributed cameo roles to two movies, Larry Bishop's 1996 Mad Dog Time and David Lynch's 1997 Lost Highway, made after M.S. had him firmly in its grip, which might not have been the greatest idea in show business history.) We'll never know whether Pryor, under ideal laboratory conditions, would have been able to get far enough outside his own very powerful persona to convincingly play Charlie Parker, though another lacerating stand-up comedian, Dick Gregory, gave a performance, as a character based on Parker in the 1967 Sweet Love, Bitter, that compares quite favorably to the one Whitaker gave in Bird. One thing that Pryor, Gregory, and Parker had in common was that they had all spent their young adulthood struggling to make it in a tough business; it's no insult to Murphy's talent or imagination as an actor that, having achieved superstardom at twenty on Saturday Night Live, he may not be able to really imagine what drove someone like Pryor, who worked him way up from performing in strip clubs and neighborhood bars to mainstream success in Vegas and on TV, only to dynamite and rebuild his career from scratch because he felt that his early success was a betrayal of what he really knew. There's also the fact that, at 47, Murphy is already much closer to being the age where Pryor's career began rolling itself up than the point at which he was firing on all cylinders and shooting off sparks. I'll keep my fingers crossed, but I'd be more interested in seeing him played by someone like Dave Chappelle--someone who's not just funny and talented, but whose concept of show business success has traps and demons in it.

The Rep Report (January 11-15)

Phil Nugent — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 21:00:00 GMT

BERKELEY: Pacific Film Archives launches a wide-ranging new retrospective, "The Medieval Remake" (January 11 - February 16), devoted to the many different flavors of medieval fantasy on film. (The series "was inspired by The Contagious Middle Ages in Post-Communist East Central Europe, an exhibition on view at the Townsend Center for the Humanities on the UC Berkeley campus through January.") We're not talking Robert Taylor and George Sanders jousting in tin costumes here; the whole program is strictly high end, with Takovsky's Andrei Rublev, Eisenstein's Alexander Nevsky, both Dreyer's and Bresson's takes on the story of Joan of Arc in the dock, a pair of Ingmar Bergman's flashbacks to the Dark Ages (The Seventh Seal and Virgin Spring), and Fritz Lang's two enormous, silent Nibelungen, baroque visual extravangas so large-scaled that Wagner himself might have wondered if maybe the director were laying it on a little thick. It's striking to be reminded of how many great directors of wildly varying ranges and styles have been drawn to this period and these stories, and it promises to be an amazing series. But you might want to stick Ivanhoe or Excalibur in your Netflix queue just to help you lighten up afterwards.

Hepcats, zoot suiters, and beboppers can usher in the new year at PFA with "Cool World: Jazz and the Movies" (January 12 - February 6), a series that mixes well-known films with jazzy scores and settings (such as The Man with the Golden Arm, featuring Frank Sinatra's great performance as a junkie poker dealer) and relative obscurities. Notable among the latter category are Sweet Love, Bitter, a low-budget 1967 drama that features a strong performance by the comedian-activist Dick Gregory as a character modeled on Charlie Parker, and All Night Long, a 1962, modern version of Othello set in London, that features Charles Mingus in an acting role as himself. (A clip from it appears in the documentary Mingus.)

NEW YORK: "John Ford at Fox" (January 12-February 2) spotlights the glory period that was the director's time at "the Hollywood studio closest to being Ford’s base." (It's the same body of work honored in the new DVD box set Ford at Fox.) There are films here, such as The Iron Horse, Young Mr. Lincoln, and My Darling Clementine, where the director defined the popular version of key chapters of American history; others, such as the folk comedies Steamboat 'Round the Bend and Judge Priest, which preserve the performance style of Will Rogers, now are American history. The series begins with the new documentary Becoming John Ford, featuring interviews with Ford biographer Joseph McBride and Peter Fonda.

The Screengrab : dick gregory

Eddie Murphy, "Dreamgirls" Director to Collaborate on Richard Pryor Biopic

The Rep Report (January 11-15)