Arizona is well accustomed to the derision of its countrymen.

Arizona is well accustomed to the derision of its countrymen.The state resisted adopting Martin Luther King’s birthday as a holiday years after most other states embraced it. The sheriff in its largest county forces inmates to wear pink underwear, apparently to assault their masculinity. Residents may take guns almost anywhere, but they may not cut down a cactus. The rest of the nation may scoff or grumble, but Arizona, one of the last truly independent Western outposts, carries on.Now, after passing the nation’s toughest immigration law, one that gives the police broad power to stop people on suspicion of being here illegally, the state finds itself in perhaps the harshest spotlight in a decade.

The law drew not only the threat of a challenge by the Justice Department and a rebuke from the president, but the snickers of late-night comedians. City councils elsewhere have called for a boycott of the resort-driven state; one trade group of immigration lawyers has canceled a conference planned for Scottsdale at a time when the state is broke and desperate for business. Meanwhile, a continuous protest is taking place at the State Capitol.

Bruce D. Merrill, a polling expert here, is tired of picking up his phone. “Usually it is somebody asking me, ‘What the hell is going on in Arizona?’ ” Mr. Merrill said.But while Arizona may have become a cartoon of intolerance to much of America, the reality is much more complex, and at times contradictory. This state is a center of both law and order and of new age om. Red-meat-loving. Red-rock-climbing.

Arizona is home to some of the toughest prison sentencing laws in the country, and one of the cleanest campaign finance laws, too. Voters overwhelmingly re-elected Janet Napolitano, a Democrat, as governor the same year they returned the conservative senator Jon Kyl to Washington. The current Republican governor signed this law, but is also pushing for a tax increase.

Further, while Arizona may seem on the fringe with its immigration law, the measure mirrors the 1994 battle in California over a voter-approved law that Gov. Pete Wilsonsigned barring illegal immigrants from getting health care, public education and other services. Like California then, Arizona is taking its own tack instead of waiting on the federal government to change policies.

“The political and emotional landscape is almost identical,” said Dan Schnur, director of the Jesse M. Unruh Institute of Politics at the University of Southern California, who served as an aide to Mr. Wilson. “History doesn’t repeat itself, it just moves east.”

The table was set for the passage of the new law by a confluence of factors, say residents, political scientists and businesspeople in Arizona. Those factors include shifting demographics, an embattled state economy and increased violence in Mexico, as well as the perception that the federal government has failed to act. Arizonans find that particularly irksome, given that Ms. Napolitano is now head of the Department of Homeland Security.

Hispanics make up 30 percent of the population here, up from roughly 25 percent in 2000, according to census data. As the state’s economy, largely dependent on construction and development, has slumped, hostility toward illegal immigrants has increased in recent years. “More people now seem to think Hispanics are taking jobs from Anglos,” said Mr. Merrill, the polling expert.

Further, laws like the immigration statute and another new law requiring political candidates to prove citizenship are generally written by the hard-right lawmakers who dominate the Legislature — with far-left-of-center minority members opposing them — but neither side reflects the relatively centrist political views of most residents.

More than 30 percent of registered voters here are independents, double the proportion in 2000. “People have been leaving both political parties, which leaves the remainders in the party much more ideological,” Mr. Merrill said.

Residents are unnerved by the violence in Mexico and the heavy drug trade and illegal immigrant trafficking in Arizona. Most studies have shown illegal immigrants do not commit crimes in a greater proportion than their share of the population, and Arizona’s violent crime rate has declined in recent years. But in this state any crime tied to illegal immigrants gets notice.

Half of the drugs seized along the United States-Mexico border are confiscated in Arizona, and it is a major hub for human smuggling. Last month, Robert Krentz, 58, a member of a prominent ranching family, was killed on his property 20 miles from the border, and the police said the gunman was probably connected to smuggling.

“People outside of Arizona are not living in this state and don’t understand the issue,” said Mona Stacey, a computer technician from Mesa. “Most of them coming across are mostly good, Catholic families getting over here. But you also have the drug lords and the smugglers. It makes the good guys look bad, and you don’t know who is who.”

Conversations here about the new law tend to begin or end with a reference to Ms. Napolitano, who personified the state’s blended politics. As governor, she backed the posting of National Guard troops on the border, expanded the use of the state police in antismuggling operations, and pressed Washington for an overhaul of immigration law.

When it came to the Maricopa County sheriff, Joe Arpaio, however — a staunch supporter of immigration enforcement and one of the highest profile figures on the issue — she took a largely hands-off approach.

Now, as Homeland Security secretary, she has played up the administration’s devotion of resources to the border, while resisting pressure to put National Guard troops there.

This, too, is an echo of California circa 1994. There, Proposition 187, the measure limiting services for illegal immigrants, was struck down by the courts (a possibility here, too, say legal experts). The Clinton administration responded with Operation Gatekeeper, an effort to strengthen the border in California. It ended up pushing trafficking east, and as a result, Arizona posts the highest number of people arrested for crossing along the 2,000-mile border.

The former director of Operation Gatekeeper has just been appointed President Obama’sCustoms and Border Protection commissioner.

With more rallies opposing the law set for Thursday, Sheriff Arpaio has planned another of his controversial sweeps to net illegal immigrants.

“Arizona is the most unpredictable political patch of earth I’ve ever seen,” said Chip Scutari, a former political reporter who now runs a Phoenix public relations firm. “It’s the land of Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s tough-as-nails Tent City, and super-liberal Congressman Raul Grijalva calling for a boycott of his own state. That’s Arizona.”

Marlon Wayans and not Eddie Murphy would be portraying Richard Pryor in the long-discussed biopic of the comedy giant

Marlon Wayans and not Eddie Murphy would be portraying Richard Pryor in the long-discussed biopic of the comedy giant, the news was greeted with Internet jeering. Wayans wasn’t surprised when he read the disparaging comments  you can’t hang your star on films like “White Chicks” and “Little Man” without consequences.”Look, I want to be able to make the stupidest movies ever, because they make people laugh and they make money,” Wayans recently said with a smirk. “But that’s not all I want to do. And I think I’ve proven to some people  the ones paying attention   that I can do more. Everybody else, well, they can wait and see and make up their mind.”

Wayans believes he is on the verge of winning over skeptics and just maybe establishing a name for himself that goes beyond his status as “the other Wayans” or maybe even “the other-other-Wayans.” The 37 year old is the youngest of 10 children in the show-business brood that came to fame on “In Living Color,” the 1990s television show created and written by Keenen Ivory Wayans and Damon Wayans. His position in the family photo has given Marlon Wayans plenty of opportunity   he and sibling Shawn got their own show, “The Wayans Brothers,” for four seasons on Fox beginning in 1995   but also an ongoing challenge in establishing anything resembling an individual identity.”I have no complaints,” Wayans said, “but I do have a plan. I love doing comedy, but I also love to do drama.”

When it comes to laughter and tragedy, it would be hard to think of a figure that bundles them together in more compelling fashion than the late Richard Pryor, a Peoria, Ill., native who grew up in his grandmother’s brothel, was expelled from school at age 14 and went on to become a firebrand force in pop culture as a stand-up comic, movie star, writer. When, in 1998, he became the first recipient of the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, he was described by Lawrence Wilker, the president of the Kennedy Center, as a signature voice in the national conversation: “He struck a chord, and a nerve, with America, forcing it to look at large social questions of race and the more tragicomic aspects of the human condition.”

The Murphy factor

The effort to bring Pryor’s story to the screen has been underway for a number of years and Jennifer Lee Pryor, the comedian’s widow, is part of the process. For many months, the conventional assumption was that Murphy would play the lead role. That’s not the case. Instead, Wayans arrived at lunch at a Los Angeles restaurant recently with the smile of a man who had a winning lottery ticket in his pocket.”You need to be lucky in life, but it’s also what you do with your luck,” said the New York native, who still has sinewy arms from his role in last summer’s action movie “G.I. Joe.” “I’m ready.”

As of now, the defining image of Wayans in the public mind is likely a tiny con man impersonating an infant in the 2006 film “Little Man,” which was made with some unsettling CG-effects. There’s also 2004’s “White Chicks,” another gimmicky farce, where he played a black FBI agent in rubbery pale-face drag. The films were relentlessly crass and made a combined $215 million in worldwide box office. Many film critics, of course, were aghast, among them British writer Mark Kermode, who wrote, “There is no pit deep enough in the world to dispose of every single copy of this film. . . . ‘Little Man’ is bad for the world.”

That may well be true, but Wayans is trying to join a surging number of stars who specialize in coarse comedy and then pull their pants back up, step into a drama and ask the moviegoing world to quit laughing (But, seriously, folks. . .). Wayans doesn’t have to look far from his family history to see role models.”In Living Color” alumnus Jim Carrey pretended to talk out of his butt (literally) in “Ace Ventura: Pet Detective” but then won critical acclaim playing Andy Kaufman in “Man on the Moon.” Will Ferrell and Jamie Foxx have had similar successes, and Adam Sandler, producer of the Pryor film project, with films such as “Punch-Drunk Love” and “Spanglish” has aspired to be art-house as well as outhouse in his screen times.

For Wayans, “Richard Pryor: Is It Something I Said?” (which begins shooting in the fall) is the sound of opportunity. “This is like an invitation to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro for me, and I’ve never been more excited in my life than when I got the role,” he said last week. “I want to be in dramas, I want to produce, I want to write and I want to prove I can handle a role such as this one.”

Fans of “Little Man” might have missed an earlier flash of dramatic ambition from Wayans. In 2000, he held his own in a cast with Oscar winners Ellen Burstyn and Jennifer Connelly and gave a shuddering performance as a hard-luck heroin addict in Darren Aronofsky’s junkie epic “Requiem for a Dream.”

He also veered away from expectations in 2004 with his role as the doomed heist man Gawain MacSam in “The Ladykillers,” the Southern crime farce by Joel and Ethan Cohen. Those two performances may have gotten him an audition for the Pryor film, but he locked up the role with a screen test that has already created a buzz about the movie in Hollywood circles. Bill Condon, the writer-director of the Pryor film, and Amy Pascal, the co-chairman of Sony Pictures Entertainment, locked in on Wayans after watching the tape of him re-creating Pryor monologue material.

Condon directed and wrote the screenplays for “Dreamgirls” and “Kinsey”; picked up an Oscar for adapted screenplay with the 1998 film “Gods and Monsters,” the story of “Frankenstein” director James Whale; and was nominated again in the same category for the 2002 film version of “Chicago.” He declined to be interviewed for this article — he said it’s premature to publicly discuss a project that won’t reach theaters until next year — but producer Mark Gordon said the Wayans screen test was “absolutely marvelous” and made him the “clear choice” for the film.

Still, Wayans will have two comedy legends breathing down his back on the project. Not only does he have to live up to the legacy of Pryor, he has to step out of the shadow of Murphy. Arnold Robinson, Murphy’s publicist, said his client was in talks regarding the project but that “differences on the creative front” led to the star and the filmmakers going in different directions.”Eddie thinks Marlon will be wonderful in the role and he’s given his blessing for Marlon to do it,” Robinson said. “He’s looking forward to seeing Marlon in the role.”

Murphy was a friend to Pryor and the two also costarred in the 1989 period piece “Harlem Nights,” the only feature film ever directed by Murphy. The casting also made sense since Murphy’s last dramatic role was as a bombastic but scandalized R&B star in “Dreamgirls,” a role that earned him the only Oscar nomination of his 27-year film career. Gordon, the producer of “Saving Private Ryan” and executive producer of “Grey’s Anatomy,” said that in the end Wayans was the star who made sense.

“Obviously there are a number of requirements to playing Richard Pryor — you have to be funny, of course, but this role also has so many colors to it that you need to be a strong actor who can handle the dramatic scenes,” Gordon said. “There were discussions with Eddie Murphy . . . Eddie Murphy is a great star, and I have no doubt he would be a great Richard Pryor. But Eddie Murphy is Eddie Murphy in the eyes of the audience. Marlon Wayans is a great actor and will be a great Richard Pryor, but he brings less baggage.”

Gordon added that “sometimes actors chase roles, more often producers and directors chase stars, but in this case we chased each other, and that’s a very exciting place for us to start off on.”Gordon said the film will have “the light and the darkness” of Pryor’s odyssey but that “it’s a commercial film” and “a celebration of Pryor’s life.” Certainly, there are shadowy episodes to choose from, such as the 1980 incident in which he set himself on fire while drinking 151-proof rum and freebasing cocaine.

And Pryor’s life is not unfamiliar on the screen: He himself directed and starred in the 1986 movie “Jo-Jo Dancer, Your Life is Calling,” which was widely viewed as a semi-autobiographical tale, and there was a 2004 Showtime pilot called “Pryor Offenses” that starred Eddie Griffin as a character named Richard Pryor in situations inspired by Pryor’s comedy. Pryor, who died a year later, was executive producer of that show.

‘He changed comedy’

Pryor is a towering figure in comedy, especially in the African American community, where his mix of brashness, bravery and vulnerability on stage became a compelling conversation about the modern American black experience. He was audacious on issues of sex and race.”He’s huge, there is so much feeling for Richard Pryor,” Wayans said. “It’s hard to be bigger than Richard Pryor. He changed comedy, and he did it in his own unique way.”

Wayans grew up listening to Pryor on vinyl records but only through a closed door. In the New York projects where the Wayans family lived, Keenen and Damonwould secretly listen to their father’s comedy albums and their little brother Marlon would in turn secretly listen to them listen to the albums.”My brothers would react and laugh and imitate Richard and debate it and play it over and over, and that’s how he came to me,” Wayans said. “Richard Pryor meant so much to black people. Bill Cosby was like Martin Luther King but Pryor, he was like Malcolm X.”Despite his cultural stature, Pryor was someone who might admire the filmography of Wayans, with its mix of class and crass. Pryor had no problem with lewd material  and Wayans likes to think the long-gone comedy giant would approve of the “Little Man” who will portray him. “I think he would smile. And most of all, I hope, wherever he is up there, he laughs when he sees the movie.”