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The Wild Story of Richard Pryor’s Lost Blaxploitation-Style Movie

The bizarre, unfinished film was nearly destroyed, and its whereabouts remain unknown

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In 1968, Richard Pryor set out to write his first movie, which changed titles several times during production. At different points, it was known as Bon Appétit and The Trial, among others. Gary Burden, who photographed the cover shoot for Pryor’s first stand-up album, visited the comedian around that time and found him brainstorming for a documentary-style film about “Black people taking over the world.” According to Burden, Pryor had a bunch of storyboards hanging up of what he described as “Black warriors mowing down the white pigs.”

Following Black Panther Party founder Huey P. Newton’s controversial murder trial that year, Pryor shifted his focus a bit. In his 1995 memoir, Pryor Convictions: And Other Life Sentences, Pryor gives the following breakdown of the beginning of the movie: “The picture opened with a Black maid having her p—y eaten at the breakfast table by the wealthy white man who owned the house where she worked. Then, a gang of Black Panther types burst into the house and took him prisoner. As he was led away, the maid fixed her dress and called, ‘Bon appétit, baby!’”

From there, the white guy is put on trial for every racial crime in U.S. history. Scott Saul, author of Becoming Richard Pryor, revealed that Pryor played a defense attorney in the film who “pled his case in a basement courtroom, in front of a Black judge and a jury stocked with pimps, prostitutes, winos, and drug addicts. The judge had a plate of cocaine and a bottle of liquor in front of him; the jury was similarly well furnished.” Pryor biographers, David and Joe Henry, remembered that one of the bits involved Pryor’s character not being able to say the word white without stuttering.

When a verdict is finally reached in the trial, the members of the jury don’t bother deliberating. Instead, they suggest different ways for the man to be killed. Blaxploitation films like Black Caesar, Super Fly, and Cleopatra Jones hadn’t come out yet, and Pryor felt that they were in the process of breaking new ground with such an idea. He’d also been high on cocaine the entire time he was working on the movie, and tried to destroy it in a drug-fueled rage before they finished shooting it.

Future Wayne’s World director Penelope Spheeris pieced it back together like a jigsaw puzzle, but it was ultimately never completed. On top of that, the only print they had of it was stolen. Pryor eventually got it back and somehow convinced Bill Cosby to invest in the project, though Cosby had just one thing to say about it after viewing the footage: “Hey, this s–t is weird.” The supposedly lost film is rumored to be in Cosby’s possession now, but for better or worse, nobody’s had any luck trying to get it from him to date. 

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