{"id":4040,"date":"2005-12-15T13:12:53","date_gmt":"2005-12-15T18:12:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=4040"},"modified":"2010-07-13T18:00:59","modified_gmt":"2010-07-13T22:00:59","slug":"richard-pryor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=4040","title":{"rendered":"R.I.P., Richard Pryor"},"content":{"rendered":"

A wonderful and observant obituary by Roger Ebert.<\/a><\/p>\n

A lot of great stuff in there – but I loved the part about the blackface scene in Silver Streak<\/i> – which honestly? It’s rare that a movie brings THAT kind of laughter out of me. Like – the kind of laughter where you miss the next 3 scenes because you can’t stop laughing. That one scene in Silver Streak<\/i> was like that for me.<\/p>\n

But here’s the bit from Ebert’s obit about that one scene:<\/p>\n

In “Silver Streak,” Mr. Pryor told me, there was concern about a scene where Wilder appears in blackface and fools a white man. Mr. Pryor suggested a simple change that turned a possibly embarrassing scene into one of the biggest laughs in the film:<\/p>\n

“Instead of a white dude being fooled by the disguise, a black dude comes in and isn’t fooled. Here’s Gene snapping his fingers and holding his portable radio to his ear, and the black dude takes one look and says, ‘I don’t know what you think you’re doing, man, but you got to get the beat.'”\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In looking back – yes, it’s funny to see Gene Wilder pretending to be a hip jive-talking black guy – but what is REALLY funny is the black guy taking one look at him and being like: What the fuck …<\/p>\n

A wonderful look back at this amazing journey.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A wonderful and observant obituary by Roger Ebert. A lot of great stuff in there – but I loved the part about the blackface scene in Silver Streak – which honestly? It’s rare that a movie brings THAT kind of … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[7,23],"tags":[299,323,1169],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4040"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4040"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4040\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19928,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4040\/revisions\/19928"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4040"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4040"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4040"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}