Frank Ward

The Oakland pimp whose protection made The Mack possible and whose unsolved 1972 murder is written into its dedication.

Frank D. Ward was the eldest and best-known of the Ward brothers, a family of Oakland pimps whose money, cars, clothes and street standing gave The Mack (1973) its texture. The American Film Institute's catalogue entry records that Frank, Ted, Willie and Andrew Ward served as technical advisers and appeared in the film as themselves, that the picture was shot on location in San Francisco and Oakland from early September to late December 1972, and that it opens with the dedication "In memory of a Man, Frank D. Ward." A contemporary Box Office review, quoted by the AFI, put it plainly: "Ward, a pimp, was murdered at some time during the film's production."

The fullest account of who the Wards were comes from the Oakland historian Chloe Sylvers, whose book The Fabulous Ward Brothers was published on the fiftieth anniversary of the killing and discussed on the East Bay Yesterday podcast in March 2022. Sylvers describes the brothers as sons of Southern sharecroppers who dominated Oakland's underground sex trade in the early 1970s, with Frank as the charismatic leader on whom Max Julien's Goldie was modelled. Director Michael Campus, in the interviews collected in Reflections on Blaxploitation (2009), said he needed Ward's permission to film in his territory, and that in exchange for "guidance and protection" Ward appeared in the film and supplied the extras, including the pimps and women seen at the Players Ball. Campus also described friction with the Black Panther Party during the shoot, resolved by a deal with Huey Newton and Bobby Seale and a pledge of first-week profits to the Panthers' breakfast programme.

Ward was shot to death in October 1972, about halfway through production, alongside a woman named Blanche Bernard. The case was never solved. Because of the Panther dispute, a rumour that the Party was responsible has followed the story for fifty years and is still repeated in programme notes, including the Harvard Film Archive's 2016 note, which states as fact that Ward "was killed by the Black Panthers." Sylvers's investigation, per East Bay Yesterday, treats that as unsubstantiated and "points to a very different set of suspects." This archive records the killing as unsolved.

Of the women in the Wards' operation, the sources say almost nothing beyond Bernard's name and the fact that the women filmed at the Players Ball were, in Campus's account, working for Ward. Sylvers's book is the first attempt to reconstruct the family's "brief empire" from the inside, and it is the place to look; the film itself, whatever its documentary feel, is a fiction built on his permission.

ALSO KNOWN AS
Frank D. Ward (per the dedication of The Mack)

STATUS
Died October 1972, Oakland area, California (double homicide, unsolved), age not established

ERA
early 1970s–1972

ASSOCIATED WITH
Oakland, California; the Ward brothers (Ted, Willie, Andrew); The Mack (1973); Michael Campus; Black Panther Party (disputed)

STANDING
Documented