Richard Pryor’s Bizarre Autobiographical Movie Is Getting a Prestige Re-Release
As movie fans are likely well aware, the Criterion Collection is the home video company that distributes prestige editions of some of the greatest films ever made, plus Armageddon. Cinephiles love Criterion so much that they’ll even wait for several hours in the rain just to climb into the back of a van that resembles one of their office’s storage closets.
Criterion recently announced their latest batch of additions to the collection, and it includes a fairly surprising title: a 4K restoration of 1986’s Jo Jo Dancer Your Life Is Calling.
As we’ve discussed before, Jo Jo Dancer is essentially an experimental Richard Pryor biopic that was co-written and directed by Pryor. He also stars as his fictional surrogate who, in the film’s opening moments, nearly burns to death, not unlike Pryor, after freebasing cocaine.
Jo Jo’s soul departs his burned body as it struggles to survive, then revisits, and even interacts with, key moments in his life — from growing up in a brothel, to working in mob-owned nightclubs, to becoming one of the most famous stand-up comedians in the world.
The fact that it’s getting a Criterion release isn’t surprising because the film isn’t good, it’s surprising because the film has been largely ignored for so long. As director Richard Linklater noted during a screening in 2019, Jo Jo Dancer Your Life Is Calling is a “brave” film that’s been unjustly overlooked, even by Pryor fans. “It was like it never happened,” Linklater noted.
“Brave” may be a bit of an understatement. Pryor crammed the film full of all of his personal demons and agonizing regrets. It was an earnest confession, one that Pryor wasn’t able to put into words until months later. At the end of Jo Jo Dancer (spoiler alert if such a thing is possible for this movie), we learn that Jo Jo’s accident was really a suicide attempt, all while his spectral self desperately tries to talk him out of it.
Jo Jo Dancer Your Life Is Calling came out in May 1986. In December of that same year, Pryor sat down for an interview with Barbara Walters and admitted that his real life “accident” was, indeed, a suicide attempt.
While all of this might have been ruinously self-indulgent in other hands, somehow it mostly worked in Jo Jo Dancer, possibly because the whole thing came about so organically. As the comedian noted in his memoir Pryor Confessions, the project began as a book. “Following my accident, I tried to write my autobiography,” Pryor recalled, “but never quite got a grip on the 300-pound alligator that was my life.” So he took his autobiographical scraps to co-writers Paul Mooney and Rocco Urbisci and enlisted them to help “stitch it all together.”
Once it became a movie, Pryor “intended it to be a straight out comedy” but “couldn’t keep the sadness and emotion from spilling out onto the page,” eventually ending up with an existential drama that, for Pryor, was “like therapy.”
Even if you don’t love the film, it’s hard not to respect it for its soul-baring frankness. Sadly, it ended up being Pryor’s only narrative directorial effort, probably because it was a box-office flop and branded a “devastating disappointment” by the press.
Of course, not all critics were dismissive of the film at the time. Who had four thumbs and were ahead of the critical reappraisal of Jo Jo Dancer Your Life is Calling?
These guys:
You (yes, you) should follow JM on Twitter (if it still exists by the time you’re reading this).
