But editing with Pryor wasn’t a barrel of laughs. Spheeris edited on a Moviola in Pryor’s home, 12-hour days spent trying to salvage a story. It probably didn’t help that Pryor was throwing out ideas in his bathrobe, receiving creative inspiration from Courvoisier and cocaine.
Things finally went south when Pryor’s wife Shelley screamed that she was sick of his movie and sick of him not paying attention to his wife and child. In response, Pryor attacked the editing machine, shredding every bit of the 2,000 feet of film. Spheeris was speechless -- months of work ripped to bits.
That should have been the end of Uncle Tom’s Fairy Tales, but a $50,000 loan from Bill Cosby (!) helped Spheeris piece the film back together. Once Spheeris had a working print, Pryor screened it for Cosby. His reaction?
“Hey, this s*** is weird.”
The movie never saw the light of day.
Related: Disney Is Destroying Film History By Ditching The Fox Name
He found a way to make blackface work
Richard Pryor’s breakthrough screen role was as Gene Wilder’s partner in Silver Streak, a film made much better once Pryor rewrote all his lines. He also re-engineered what would have been an extremely problematic scene, one in which Wilder tries to escape a sticky situation -- in blackface.
20th Century Fox
In the original version, a white dude walks into a bathroom to find Wilder’s character, George, in his blackface camouflage. With a little stereotypical strutting, George convincingly pulls off his black man charade.
Pryor hated the scene and went to Wilder’s hotel room with a better idea. In the new version, a black man enters the bathroom and isn’t fooled for an instant. Instead, he gives advice: “You might be in pretty big trouble, fella, but for God’s sake, learn to keep time.”
While filming, Pryor kept on rewriting. When George applies shoe polish to his face, Pryor’s character, Grover, was supposed to wisecrack, “Instant suntan!” Instead, George now hesitated to apply the dark tones. Grover’s new retort: “What? Are you afraid it won’t come off?”
In the revised scene, Wilder stops halfway through his make-up work, a white man looking in the mirror and, for a moment, imagining what it would be like to lose his whiteness. Pryor biographer Scott Saul argues the rewrite made blackface a perfect disguise for George precisely because white people preferred not to look too closely at the world around them. Pryor transformed a white screenwriter’s hamfisted attempt at comedy into a hard look at the complexity of race in America.
Richard came up with one other pointed gag that sadly was cut from the movie. At one point, George cried that Grover gave him the wrong shade of shoe polish. Pryor knows that it won’t matter: “All the police look for is to see if you got color, any color.”
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