a movie that very few people ever knew about. It was Pryor’s production. Here is what TC explained in the Richard Pryor biography, Furious Cool: Richard Pryor and the World That Made Him:

The movie’s cast and crew were never sure what sort of domestic mayhem they might walk into when they reported for work at Richard’s and Shelley’s (Richard’s then-wife) Hancock Park House. Massive amounts of coke coupled with Richard’s samurai sword collection did little to calm jittery nerves.

For Franklyn Ajaye, the filming was not a pleasant experience. The first day they met, Ajaye remembers that Richard was screaming at his wife in the kitchen. “It was a pretty rough scene.”

When the two comedians came to know each other later on in the seventies, appearing regularly on The Midnight Special and The Tonight Show, and together on Flip Wilson’s show and in the movies, Car Wash and Stir Crazy, Ajaye never mentioned to Richard that he’d been in his movie. “I doubt he remembered me from that, and i never saw it. I don’t know if he ever finishes it. I didn’t even know what it was called.”

See how much Ajaye got paid for his work in that film…

Ajaye recalls that his character had to wash the man standing trial (that was a scene in the movie) “like in a car wash or something. It was kind of a strange-ass fucking movie.” Ajaya put in a seventeen-hour day for a fee of thirty-four dollars and Richard paid him with a bad check. “It certainly didn’t make you want to be in movies, I can tell you that,” he says with a laugh.

Like I always say, there was never a dull moment in the life of the talented legendary Richard Pryor…LOL.

Here’s an Old School fun fact about Franklyn Ajaye:
He attended UCLA in 1968-69 at the same time as Lew Alcindor (who later became Kareem Abdul-Jabbar).

-ILoveOldSchoolMusic, Old School news with a new point of view