I Dreamt of Richard Pryor Last Night
Last night, I dreamt of Richard Pryor.
I don’t often remember my dreams but was awakened at 4:30AM by a weather alert on my cellphone for a storm that never transpired.
I knew Richard fairly well at one point. I worked with him from approximately 1979 for a couple of years on a film—“Bustin’ Loose”—that reached the theaters in 1981.
It was something of a long haul because this was during the time Pryor set himself ablaze from a crack pipe and shooting had to be interrupted.
It was, not surprisingly, a rather rocky road, even for Hollywood. I was hired three times and fired twice on the film, partly, I suspect, at the behest of the NAACP that was pressuring Universal Studios to have all major participants on the biggest black production of the year be black, including the screenwriter.