Bold, black and hilarious, he is Hollywood's biggest hit
Preach, nigger, preach!" Out of the darkness the voice rose—young, proud, urgent, female and black. It was an exhortation that might have been addressed to the spellbinding pastor of a Harlem storefront church, or to a Black Panther stopping pedestrian traffic on a street corner in Oakland, or to an ardent buck accelerating into passion on an apartment-house roof in 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.
In a 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 two films in the year's top 20. And so it goes and grows. His first monologue film, Richard Pryor Live in Concert—the one recorded in Long Beach in 1978—surprised everyone and earned $20 million. The success of that film's current sequel, Richard Pryor Live on the Sunset Strip, is no surprise at all. Since its release on March 12, it has demolished the more expensive competition, pulling in $8 million its first weekend. Next week moviegoers will be able to see yet another facet of Pryor when Some Kind of Hero opens. In it he plays the seriocomic role of a Viet Nam vet who tries to adjust to the apathy and red tape he finds back home.
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 of educing raw emotions from himself and his audience. Vulnerability, untempered rage, urchin craftiness, a rough dignity—all these moods seem to seep through him. In fact, the two Richard Pryors, kamikaze comic and sensitive actor, are overlapping parts of the same intricate talent. If the fates are colorblind, they will start engraving his name on next year's Oscar for his performance as that most exasperating, charming, contradictory of humans—Richard Pryor—in Live on the Sunset Strip. In craft as well as celebrity, Pryor is not merely hot; he is, as Variety has characterized him, "incendiary."