I was saddened to hear about Richard Roundtree’s passing. I had two professional encounters with him….
The first was back in the early 1990s. William Rabkin & I wrote a BLADE feature script for New World Pictures, which owned the Marvel library at the time. New World was courting Richard Roundtree to star. So we joined a bunch of New World execs and Roundtree at a fancy restaurant for an expensive lunch to pitch him the project. That went fine, but a few hours later, we all got horrific food poisoning. I was vomiting for days. I don’t think I’ve ever been so sick. It was a bad omen. The movie…well, our version of it anyway… never got made.
Then, in 2004. Roundtree was cast in an episode of MISSING, a Lifetime series that we were writing & producing…and I ended up spending the day with him in an ADR studio in Sacramento, where I think he may have been living at the time, to re-record his dialogue which, for some reason, was in bad shape. He didn’t remember me, so I mentioned the BLADE meeting and he started laughing. “All I remember about that lunch,” he said, “is that it nearly killed me.”
I love reading your stories, books. Thank you for sharing your adventures with Richard Roundtree and Dame Edna.
I can remember every single time I got food poisoning so I’m not surprised Richard Roundtree knew exactly what you were talking about! Great story
Just finished Malibu Burning, fantastic
Richard and Isaac Hayes both became famous with that movie.
What a unique and memorable journey with Richard Roundtree! Even in challenging moments, the stories created and shared are everlasting.