American Pimp (1999)

The Hughes Brothers' 1999 documentary let pimps narrate themselves at length; critics agreed it barely let the women speak.

American Pimp is a feature documentary directed and produced by twin brothers Albert and Allen Hughes, who had made Menace II Society (1993) and Dead Presidents (1995). According to a Winter 1999 interview in Filmmaker magazine, the brothers had wanted to adapt Iceberg Slim's memoir Pimp as a fiction film, lost the rights, and turned to documentary instead. They put in roughly $150,000 of their own money, took further financing from Interscope Records, and then bought the project back outright. Interviewees were found through personal introductions rather than any survey, and the brothers told the magazine that the highest-earning operators and the men exploiting crack-addicted women were not represented. The shoot took about two and a half years.

The film premiered in the documentary competition at the 1999 Sundance Film Festival, where the International Documentary Association reported capacity crowds at every screening. It reached theaters in June 2000 through Seventh Art Releasing and was issued on VHS and DVD by MGM in October 2000. Running roughly 86 to 87 minutes, it strings together on-camera interviews with self-described pimps from across the country, among them Fillmore Slim, Rosebudd, Bishop Don Magic Juan, Gorgeous Dre, Mel Taylor, Danny Brown, C-Note, Charm and Ken Red, along with the Oakland rapper Too Short and the Nevada brothel owner Dennis Hof. Clips from 1970s films and a soul soundtrack are cut between the interviews, and the film visits a Players Ball. (The Danny Brown interviewed here is not the Detroit rapper of the same name.)

The men explain their trade in their own words. J. Hoberman in the Village Voice (June 6, 2000) noted that the subjects insist pimping is a matter of image and psychology rather than violence, and that the film "sets the modern record for the use of the word bitch in an 86-minute film." What the film documented, then, was the persona: the clothes, the cars, the talk and the self-justification. Critics were sharply divided on whether that was enough. Tom White of the IDA wrote that the intercut blaxploitation footage "merely reinforces the stereotypes these films perpetuated" and that the subjects displayed "a numbing uniformity." Scott Von Doviak at CultureVulture described the women who do appear as having "hollow, zombie-like stares" and faulted the directors for failing to examine exploitation. Dennis Schwartz wrote that the film "failed to get the women's side to this story of abuse, primarily taking the pimp at his word."

The near-absence of the women is the film's most consistently noted omission. Hoberman observed that only a handful of sex workers are interviewed, that the most articulate is a legal employee of a Nevada brothel rather than a street worker, and that the Players Ball sequence is "virtually the only time in the movie we get to see the pimps together with their employees." He called the film "cowed by its subjects." Several reviewers noted that every pimp interviewed acknowledges the women keep none of their earnings, and that a pimp's passing admission of violence is left unexamined. The Hughes Brothers themselves told Filmmaker that a section on customers and a hostile interview with an intoxicated subject were cut.

Both brothers have since spoken about the film with ambivalence. In separate VladTV interviews, Allen Hughes said HBO's Pimps Up, Ho's Down reached air first with a similar idea, and Albert Hughes described American Pimp as the lowest point in their careers. Whatever its limits, the film remains the most widely seen documentary record of the men who built the pimp persona in the late twentieth century, and a record, by omission, of how little the women were asked.

STATUS
Unknown

ERA
1999–2000

ASSOCIATED WITH
Hughes Brothers (Albert and Allen Hughes); Sundance Film Festival; Seventh Art Releasing; Fillmore Slim, Rosebudd, Bishop Don Magic Juan

STANDING
Documented