That Nigger’s… Crazy?

Marlon Wayans may be playing Richard Pryor.

Now I’m not going sit here and say Marlon Wayans can’t act. His performance in Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream showed that he’s capable of more than the goofball mugging that he brings to 90% of his other roles. After all, very few people could’ve predicted Will Smith’s transformation from the “Parents Just Don’t Understand” guy to the mannered con artist in Six Degrees of Separation to Muhammad Ali. A good chunk of artistic motivation can come from defying expectations.

But.

One would hope that Wayans’ ambition isn’t exceeding his grasp. I pray that it’s not ego driving this move. Despite how it may look from the work they produce, I always got the sense that the Wayans Bros. as a collective understood their comedic roots. In Living Color had some cutting satire in its time. (Though as I understand it, Marlon wasn’t necessarily part of that creative engine.) You could even trace a sketchy line from more earnest fare like the Jeffersons and 227 forward to that stupid WB sitcom Shawn and Marlon starred in in the ‘90s. The throughline that connects their project is a stubborn insistence on visibility. They make movies that make money and, while that may seem strictly mercenary, the cold truth in Hollywood is that profitability is the only way you get a spot onscreen or get a producing credit. Hell, I’d even call it brilliantly subversive if wince-inducing crap like White Chicks and Little Man turn out to be the reason the Tinseltown movers and shakers greenlight the project and Wayans as Pryor. And as I sit here and type this, I can’t think of any actor who could play Pryor. That’s ironic when you consider scads of comedians who’ve appropriated—consciously or not—Pryor’s tics and techniques. Could any of them breathe life into a portrayal of the man himself?

Because, y’know, Richard Pryor’s in the Pantheon of Black Genius. He’s one of those love-it-and-hate-it lightning rods that sizzle with raw honesty, self-destructive appetites and daunting psychological complexity. Like Miles. Like Bird. Like Billie. Like Ike. (Yeah, I said it.) A few weeks ago, prompted by Ta-Nehisi’s blog post, I watched Live on the Sunset Strip. (Netflix Instant Watch on the Xbox 360 FTW, y’all!) One thing I noticed in my viewing is those same moments of incredible confession and vulnerability that Ta-Nehisi mentions—“the artistic courage… where Pryor tells millions of people, precisely, how he set himself on fire”—get undercut when the audience clamors for Mudfoot. You see Pryor chuckle to himself, immediately grasping the dilemma. Does he stay telling his ugly truth, cleansing his conscience and growing his art in the process? Or, does he please the crowd and give ‘em what they paid for, even if it’s material he’d rather leave? On top of all that, he’s gottta be thinking about what’s gonna keep him working and paid and fed. Suffused through all of that is probably an intense need for adulation, too. You can kinda glimpse the man’s whole psychology in those scant few seconds.

And, if you’re gonna play Pryor, you gotta get all that in.

I want this movie to get made. If it hits the right beats, it’ll illuminate the sweet-and-sour nature of Black Genius, where an individual stands in for the aggregate. The great risk here is that if it’s poorly executed, it invalidates the idea of Black Genius. Them’s some high muthaeffin’ stakes. Somehow, a Nas quote seems appropriate: “Good luck to ya/even if you wish me the opposite./Sooner or later, we’ll all see who the prophet is.”