Photo Courtesy Bounce TV
Photo Courtesy Bounce TV

After publishing a memoir that bared her rise as a ‘70s screen siren and a private life that included love affairs with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Richard Pryor and Freddie Prinze, Pam Grier is focused on Pam, the working title of a biopic that will bring her life story to the screen. A script by Bennie Richburg is about to be shopped, one that Jay Pharoah read and attached himself to play Pryor, whom Grier saw at his best and worst.

Grier met Pharoah when they were recording voices for the video game Infinity Wars. “I watched him and heard his voice and closed my eyes and said, ‘It’s Richard,’” she recalled. Said Pharoah, the former Saturday Night Live star who just toplined the Showtime series White Famous, “The story is heartbreaking, raw, honest and beautiful, all rolled into one testimony.”

I sought out Grier because I wondered, with all the testimony emerging from actresses about sexual harassment and assault incidents they had suffered in silence for so long, what must Hollywood have been like for Grier during the alpha male chauvinist ’70s culture, when she was one of the few actresses of color playing the heroine in movies like Foxy Brown and Coffy.

Her path has led her to interact with some recently fallen figures — Harvey Weinstein made the Quentin Tarantino-directed Jackie Brown, which reignited Grier’s career — and even more recently, Grier said she had been set to star in the Amazon Studios series that David O. Russell was directing with Robert De Niro and Julianne Moore. That series imploded directly because of the Weinstein scandal, but she still is hopeful it will come back around as the Weinstein Company is about to be resuscitated by a female-led board and leadership. I was surprised to hear that Grier experienced relatively little sexual harassment during her rise.

For the full story, visit Deadline.com/Film.

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