Why Richard Pryor’s Final Film Role Was in a David Lynch Movie
The late, great David Lynch obviously gave us so many wonderful films over the course of his career. I mean, the guy literally turned a failed ABC TV pilot with no surviving costumes or sets into a movie that some have hailed as the greatest film of the 21st century.
Probably one of his more underrated works was 1997’s Lost Highway, the film that dared to ask: what if O.J. Simpson was a saxophone-playing Bill Pullman, and he briefly had the ability to shape-shift? At the very least, it’s the only movie in history to use “Two Thumbs Down” from Siskel and Ebert as a selling point in its marketing campaign.
Lost Highway is especially notable for comedy fans, because it featured Richard Pryor’s final screen performance. Pryor plays Arnie, who owns the auto shop that employs Pete – the young man who may or may not be some kind of transmogrified dream-state version of Pullman’s character, following the murder of his wife.
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By this point in time, Pryor was confined to a motorized wheelchair due to his advanced multiple sclerosis, but his charm and screen presence are undeniable, even in such a small role.
In his memoir, Room to Dream, Lynch wrote of the comedian, “Richard Pryor is someone else I saw on a talk show and kind of fell in love with. He’d been through a lot in his life but he had a wisdom that was really beautiful, and there was a greatness in him that just came through. So when there was a spot for him in Lost Highway I really hoped he’d do it, and it was great having him in the film.”
Even during Siskel and Ebert’s notoriously negative review, Gene Siskel praised Pryor, noting that it was “great to see him in a film, any film, even this one.”
But others were more critical of Pryor’s casting. Author David Foster Wallace visited the set of Lost Highway while writing an article about Lynch for Premiere magazine, and he ended up accusing the director of exploiting Pryor’s disability. “Pryor’s painful to watch, and not painful in a good way or a way that has anything to do with the business of the movie,” Wallace wrote. “I can’t help thinking that Lynch is exploiting Pryor the same way John Waters exploits Patricia Hearst, i.e., letting an actor think he’s been hired to act when he’s really been hired to be a spectacle, an arch joke for the audience to congratulate themselves on getting.”
Wallace continued: “And yet at the same time Pryor’s symbolically perfect in this movie, in a way: The dissonance between the palsied husk onscreen and the vibrant man in our memories means that what we see in Lost Highway both is and is not the ‘real’ Richard Pryor. His casting is thematically intriguing, then, but coldly, meanly so.”
Lynch was later asked about this criticism during an interview, and he unequivocally shot down any such interpretation. “Now why should I want to make fun of Richard Pryor?” a “narked” Lynch responded. “And why shouldn’t he be in the film? Richard Pryor is a great guy. He’s in a wheelchair, and he can’t play a huge role, but I really wanted to work with him.”
Lynch also revealed that he let Pryor let loose and improvise during a scene in which Arnie talks to a customer over the phone, but, sadly, most of it ended up on the cutting room floor. “He did the scripted scenes, and then I put him on the phone in the office of the garage, introduced a mental concept, and let him go for nine minutes,” Lynch recalled. “He was amazing. A fragment of that is in the film.”
As a further testament to Lynch’s greatness, he did not extend the same freedom to Jim Belushi.
