Remembering Wilder and Pryor, a magical, complicated duo

SOME of the most memorable work from Gene Wilder, who died this week from complications of Alzheimer’s, came from his comedic pairing with Richard Pryor.

Wilder and Pryor made for some on-screen magic and were among Hollywood’s most successful interracial comedy duos.

They co-starred in four movies. Silver Streak (1976) and Stir Crazy (1980), were big commercial successes, together grossing more than $150 million (about R2.2 billion) at the box office.

Their later movies, See No Evil, Hear No Evil (1989) and Another You (1991), didn’t do as well commercially or critically.

Wilder starred in Blazing Saddles, the 1974 classic written by Pryor and Mel Brooks, among others.

Pryor was supposed to be cast in the movie, but his reputation with drugs and alcohol apparently made studios balk. The part went to Cleavon Little.

Later, the head of 20th Century Fox reached out to Wilder for a part in Silver Streak. Wilder wanted to play the part, but he told the studio that for the role opposite his, “you’re going to be in a lot of trouble if you don’t get the right person… The only one I can think of is Richard Pryor,” Wilder recalled in a 2005 NPR Fresh Air interview. Studio executives agreed. “I met him for the first time in Calgary in Canada, a very quiet, modest meeting,” Wilder said of Pryor in 2005.

“We gave each other a hug. He said how much he admired me and I said how much I admired him, and we started working the next morning.”

Pryor “taught me how to improvise on camera”, Wilder said. It was a lesson that began on the first day of filming Silver Streak.

“He said his first line, I say my first line, then this other line comes out of him,” Wilder recalled in a 2007 interview.

“I had no idea where it came from. But I didn’t question it, I just responded naturally. I didn’t try to think of a clever line. A great death trap for actors if you’re improvising is to say, ‘I’ll think of one that’s even funnier than that or cleverer than that’.”

Pryor would return to the script, and so would Wilder, and then Pryor would go off-script again and Wilder would respond with what made sense.

“Everything we did together was like that,” Wilder said.

By their third film, Wilder said in a 1989 interview, “we just get comfortable in the situation, or uncomfortable as it may be, and react to each other”.

It just so happened that people laughed at the result, he added.

In a memorable scene in Silver Streak, Wilder’s face is covered in shoe polish in an attempt to disguise himself.

He’s listening to music, trying to jive-talk. As it was initially written, a white man entered and thought Wilder was a black person.

“It was the one scene that I was the most worried about, and I thought, well, if Richard doesn’t mind my putting on the shoe polish to pass as black, then it must be okay because he’s the teacher here,” Wilder recalled in 2005.

During the read-through, Pryor became “more and more morose”, Wilder recalled, and then told him “I’m going to hurt a lot of black people doing this scene”.

Pryor later explained the problem to Wilder: “You’re in there in the bathroom, in the men’s room, and you’re putting shoe polish on your face, and a white man comes in and he doesn’t think it’s anything unusual because that’s how ******* behave, right?’”

Wilder asked Pryor to explain how the scene should go.

Pryor said: “It should be a black man who comes in, who sees what you’re doing, knows right away that you’re white and doing this because you must be in some kind of trouble. And he says, ‘I don’t know what your trouble is, mister, but you got to keep with the music’.”

The pair called the director and the scene was changed.

Numerous accounts have portrayed the off-screen relationship between the two men as being cold or uneasy, in part because of Pryor’s substance abuse.

Wilder has been quoted as saying they weren’t good friends and that Pryor wasn’t pleasant to be around when he had drug problems.

The Sidney Poitier-directed Stir Crazy came out the same year Pryor accidentally set himself on fire while freebasing.

In an interview on the set of the movie, during which he was allegedly high on cocaine, Pryor referred to Wilder’s using a slur for gay people.

Wilder said in 2013 that “Richard was a bad boy” during the making of Stir Crazy.

Following Wilder’s death, Pryor’s daughter said her father respected Wilder.

“(Wilder) was a caring human being, but I know he didn’t hang out with Dad a lot,” Rain Pryor told the Hollywood Reporter.

Pryor said her father would remark of Wilder, “That man’s a genius, and he’s a good man, that’s for sure.” – The Washington Post