Ahoy, squirts! Quint here. News broke over the weekend that the long-in-development Richard Pryor biopic is finally moving forward over at The Weinstein Company and the cast list is insane.
Oprah Winfrey will play Pryor's brothel-owning grandmother, Eddie Murphy will be playing Pryor's father, Kate Hudson will be his widowed wife and Mike Epps will be Pryor himself.
Bill Condon co-wrote the script and normally that means I'd be jumping for joy about this particular kind of "prestige film" but we have The Butler's Lee Daniels directing and that gives me a little pause.
Daniels isn't my favorite director in the world and has a penchant for making his biopics overly sentimental and surface level, but if he's working off of a Bill Condon script and takes this picture as an opportunity to show everybody the real Richard Pryor then it could be something special.
I'm also really happy that Eddie Murphy is involved, ironically playing Pryor's father. I say ironic because in a stand-up sense Pryor was Murphy's father. His influence on Murphy is crystal clear to anybody who pays attention to funny people and it feels right that Eddie gets to help pay his respects in this way.
Good luck, folks. I'd love for this project to turn out amazing. Richard Pryor deserves nothing less than greatness. Although I wouldn't mind seeing a recreation of his time making Superman III in the movie somewhere...
-Eric Vespe
”Quint”
quint@aintitcool.com
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