The Screengrab : larry bishop

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.

Forgotten Films: "Mad Dog Time" (1996)

Phil Nugent — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 17:00:00 GMT

Having had a versatile, many-sided career does have its down side: when Isaac Hayes died last Sunday, it quickly became a hipster punch line that mainstream obituaries often referred to him as "perhaps best known" for his role as Chef on South Park. Hayes was well-known for a great many very different things, and Chef happened to have been the most recent of these. Then there are people like Larry Bishop, who are not especially well-known at all for anything, but have a number of things for which they may be sort of semi-recognizable: add them all up, and it kind of equals minor celebrity. For example, you might trigger a faint recognition in people who are well-versed in Rat Pack mythology by noting that Bishop is the son of the late comedian Joey Bishop. Experts in Hollywood dynasties may care for all of two seconds that he once performed comedy with Rob Reiner at a time when the director of Misery was himself best known as Carl's kid. And bad-movie junkies of a certain stripe may find it in themselves to think it worth knowing that, in the late '60s and early '70s, he appeared in such pictures as The Savage Seven, The Devil's 8, Angel Unchained, and Chrome and Hot Leather. It was these credits that helped convince Quentin Tarantino (who cast Bishop as Michael Madsen's grouchy boss at the strip club in Kill Bill, Vol. 2) that, as a writer-director-star, he had a great motorcycle movie in him. Tarantino served as executive producer on the years-in-the-making Hell Ride, which reunites Bishop with Madsen, and which Tarantino believes it was Bishop's "destiny" to make. Anyone who's seen Tarantino's performance in Destiny Turns on the Radio, which established that our boy QT should be prevented, by federal law if necessary, from throwing around the "D" word, can guess at how well that's turned out.

If Bishop and Tarantino are soul mates of a sort, it's because they share a knack for throwing together ready made slogans and catch phrases and parts of old movies and kinky twists on the same, and getting an incredible number of cool people to come together to act out their fantasies. In his best work, QT has been able to shape these raw materials in such a way that the kick he gets out of them is transferred directly to the audience. In Bishop's only work as a director--Hell Ride and its predecessor, the 1996 gangster fantasia Mad Dog Time--the results tend to be an inert mess, interesting chiefly for the challenging aesthetic questions it raises, such as What was he thinking? and How hid he get this cast? The best answer to the second question probably has something to do with how many favors a man can get owed in the course of a thirty-year career in which he's done everything from episodes of I Dream of Jeannie and Love, American Style to such oddities as the William Castle-Marcel Marceau collaboration Shanks.

Mad Dog Time is set in some weird gangland society where everybody is a mobster or a moll and all the characters spend their time entertaining each other with weird acting exercises and showy turns--it's as they were trapped at an improv comedy club in Hell--while plotting their next bloody move up the ladder. (There's a palpable '50s-Vegas vibe to the decor, which may be an in-joke on Bishop's lineage.) Richard Dreyfuss, whose 1978 starring vehicle and pet project The Big Fix featured Bishop in a supporting role, is the nominal head of the mob, Vic, who, making his entrance wearing a bathrobe over his PJs, has just returned from a stint in the nut house, where it was probably quieter. The other people who appear here doing things that they probably would have thought twice about if they'd known that Larry was going to be able to get the film developed include Jeff Goldblum, Kyle MacLachlan, Ellen Barkin, Gabriel Byrne, Diane Lane, Burt Reynolds, Billy Idol, Michael J. Pollard, Henry Silva, Gregory Hines, Billy Drago, Angie Everhart, Paul Anka, and a sick, callously exploited Richard Pryor. For hardcore devotees of movie character actors, the prize catch was Christopher Jones, whose work in such movies as the 1968 Wild in the Streets (in which Bishop played a bassist with a hook for a hand) and Three in the Attic earned him a reputation as a James Dean a the new age. But Jones, high-strung and drug-damaged, quit acting after finishing his work as the romantic lead in the troubled David Lean production Ryan's Daughter (1970). Tarantino, who offered him a role in Pulp Fiction, was unable to lure him out of the shadows, but Bishop was able to get him to drop by the set just long enough to play a sneering supposedly fearsome assassin whose bite turns out to be worse than his bark. As Tarantino himself pointed out, Jones "really doesn't have a character to play", but he still had the old charisma to go with his creepy, walking-death's-head look, and in this, his only movie appearance in the past twenty-eight years, he makes enough of an impression to make you wish that Bishop had used whatever line it took to get him to come out and play to persuade him to work for someone who might have been able to construct a real movie around him. Larry Bishop isn't the most obnoxious hustler who's ever rolled down Santa Monica Boulevard with show business in his DNA and a pile of I.O.U.s in his glove compartment, but I suspect that if it were his really his destiny to make the kinds of movies he's been trying to make--if he really knew how and it were in his blood--he'd have tried making them before Tarantino showed up and took out a patent on them. It may be that Tarantino's patronage of Bishop is really based on Tarantino feeling touched that one of the people he grew up watching in all kinds of trash is actually now trying to imitate him.

Take Five: Ride Hard

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 21:00:00 GMT

Larry Bishop's Hell Ride opens in limited release this week. Advance buzz about the retroriffic biker exploitation flick isn't great, despite the fact that the movie features one of the most mindlessly entertaining trailers of recent years. Still, it's good to see the biker movie, a cultural leftover from the 1960s that has remained with us despite the transition of Harley culture from last refuge of dangerous lowlifes to weekend amusement of the upper middle class, survive in some form or another. For over 40 years, the lone, leather-clad biker on a flipped-back hog or amped-up chopper has been one of Hollywood's most enduring archetypes, used for everything fom a means to instill mindless terror to cheap comedy relief to, all too often, both. If Hell Ride does nothing more than give Michael Madsen a chance to play an all-new variant on his standard violent lowlife character, it will at least keep this archetype alive. Though, given that plenty of aging Tinseltown stars, writers and producers are themselves motorcycle enthusiasts, it's probably not in any immediate danger anyway. While you're waiting for Hell Ride to come to your local theater -- or, more likely, given its dismal advance hype, while you're waiting for it to show up at your local video rental bargain bin -- here's five more biker movies to help you unleash your inner scuzzball.

THE WILD ONE (1953)

Laslo Benedik's teen-menace movie started it all, in more ways than one. Not only was it the first major motion picture to deal with the alleged menace of out-of-countrol outlaw biker gangs (which, a little over ten years later, would developed into a full-blown moral panic, as exquisitely detailed in Hunter S. Thompson's Hell's Angels), but it was one of the first movies to present us with the raw sexual charisma and magnetic, brooding talents of young Marlon Brando; it almost single-handedly started the 1950s craze among teen boys for leather jackets; and each gang in the film lent a name to a rock band (Brando's Black Rebel Motorcycle Club and Lee Marvin's Beatles). The events of the film -- which is still highly entertaining today, despite literally decades of imitators -- involve the takeover of a small California town by rival gangs of outlaw bikers; based on a story in Harper's (which was itself based on a real-life incident in Hollister, CA in 1947), it also starts a less pleasign tradition: that of ridiculously overstating the biker menace to appeal to your audience. Not only were the events in Hollister terribly mild compared to the dramatization in The Wild One (there was no real violence, and very little vandalism or criminal behavior), but the bikers involved were invited back a number of times over the years until it became something of a local tradition.

EASY RIDER (1969)

By 1969, the myth of the outlaw biker had transmogrified from simple post-WWII recreational activity to mysterious urban legend to full-blown moral panic, and finally, as evidenced in this notorious countercultural masterpiece, a counter-symbol of true freedom and the flight from small-mindedness and oppression in the face of stultifying all-American values. By the time Dennis Hopper, Peter Fonda and Jack Nicholson strapped on the helmets and hopped aboard their custom Captain America choppers, they were engaged in full-fledged reverse myth-making, transforming the rebel biker from the sort of dangerous threat to small-town America that Hopper had played a number of times in other, lesser exploitation movies to a vision of the divine fool, the holy innocent who, while he might consume barrels full of psilocybin and acres worth of grass, was in fact all that was good and decent about this country. And then, wouldn't you know it? Some greaseball redneck goes and blows his head off, just to be a dick. While there's certainly qualities to Easy Rider that make it a treat to watch (most especially Nicholson's performance, Laszlo Kovacs' cinematography, and bits of Terry Southern's screenplay), it's very much a product of its time; you may be glad it exists, but you're likely to spend a lot of time wondering exactly what happened back then.

GIMME SHELTER (1970)

Since Hunter Thompson didn't have a film crew with him when he was writing his Hell's Angels book, the Maysles Brothers' masterful documentary about the Rolling Stones' notorious concert at Altamont is likely to remain the definitive treatment of the most infamous of all outlaw biker groups on film. Unsurprisingly, it shows them at their worst but doesn't entirely play fair: while everyone knows the story of how the security at the concert was disastrously handed over to a lot of drunken, rowdy Angels who worked cheap and didn't care whose head they bashed in, and while there's no doubt that their killing of black concertgoer Meredith Hunter was an overreaction (and the racial slurs they deployed against him didn't help their cause one bit), it was only later made clear that the bikers had been right about Hunter: he was, as they'd said, been carry a gun, waving it around recklessly, and behaving in a very suspicious manner. Filmed evidence of this was why Hell's Angel Allen Passaro, who was primarily responsible for Hunter's death, was acquitted of murder. But as with most stories involving outlaw bikers, the truth got muddled and the legend got exaggerated: Altamont became widely known as the exact time and place that the Sixties died, and the Hell's Angels' reputation as lawless maniacs grew deeper and darker.

THE ROAD WARRIOR (1981)

After decades of imitators, parodies, and its own decreasing dividends in terms of sequels, it's hard to remember exactly how exciting the Mad Max movies were when they first came out. Hard, that is, until you sit down and watch one all the way through. Made at a time when Mel Gibson was still an electrifying performer and not a living self-parody, and directed by a George Miller light-years removed from feel-good movies about talking pigs, they still hold up a gold standard for smart, anarchic, terrifyingly high-velocity action movies, and Mad Max 2 -- more commonly known in the U.S. as The Road Warrior -- is the best of them. It's one of the best action movies of all time, and unlike most movies featuring car crashes, postapocalyptic wastelands, and murderous bandits who look like they were once members of Charged G.B.H., it doesn't sacrifice a shred of intelligence while bringing us its heart-stopping thrills. With oil recently clearing $300 a barrel, gas hitting over $4 a gallon, and many people -- both serious economic thinkers and paranoid tool-shed ranters -- considering what a "post-peak oil" world might look like, now is a good time to contemplate a future without gasoline, where deranged biker gangs run amok, and say: actually, that looks kinda cool.

BEYOND THE LAW (1992)

While public interest in outlaw biker gangs started to die out in the 1970s and had almost totally faded by the 1980s, the biker gangs themselves never went away, and even today, a fringe element of the culture is responsible for some fairly heinous drug dealing and the sort of violent turf wars that go with them. In 1982, an Arizona undercover cop infiltrated one such gang in order to bring them down after a particularly brutal drug killing, and Playboy magazine carried his compelling story. Over 10 years later, HBO produced this dramatic action thriller based on Dan Saxon's story, and while it didn't attract a great deal of attention at the time, it has gone on to become a bargain-bin cult classic, thanks largely to its highly realistic depiction of undercover procedures and its unusually literate storytelling. Okay, admittedly, some of the dialogue is a bit hokey, and Charlie Sheen looks absolutley ridiculous in a biker beard and leather vest, but it's a tightly constructed, nasty little thriller that's a lot better than it has any right to be. And hey, who's that playing a violent lowlife? You guessed it: Michael Madsen! How far we've come...

Trailer Review: Hell Ride

Paul Clark — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 16:00:00 GMT

For the past week the blogosphere has been abuzz with the announcement of Quentin Tarantino’s upcoming project Inglorious Bastards. Which I suppose goes to show you that QT’s fanboy cachet is as strong as ever way. For more evidence of this, look no further than Hell Ride, the upcoming biker flick written and directed by and co-starring QT pal Larry Bishop. Quentin fans will no doubt recognize Bishop from his scene in Kill Bill: vol 2 as Larry the strip-club owner, but while Tarantino’s name is all over this trailer, Bishop’s isn’t mentioned until the very end. For good reason, too- Bishop’s last film, made a dozen years ago, was the godawful crime caper Mad Dog Time. Watching the grindhouse stylings of the Hell Ride trailer, it seems a shame that this is advertising a real movie, while Eli Roth’s Thanksgiving and Edgar Wright’s Don’t exist only in their creators’ imaginations.