Hustle & Flow (2005)

Craig Brewer's Memphis drama made a pimp its underdog hero and sent "It's Hard Out Here for a Pimp" to an Oscar win.

Hustle & Flow was written and directed by Craig Brewer and produced by John Singleton and Stephanie Allain. Variety's January 2005 review reported that Brewer and Allain spent more than two years pitching the script around Hollywood before Singleton financed it himself; the film was shot on 16mm in Memphis over a four-week schedule. It premiered in competition at the Sundance Film Festival on January 22, 2005, where Paramount paid a reported $9 million for distribution rights after the first screening, and it went on to win the festival's Audience Award for a dramatic feature and a cinematography prize for Amy Vincent. Paramount Classics and MTV Films released it on July 22, 2005.

Terrence Howard plays DJay, a Memphis pimp and small-time drug dealer approaching middle age who decides to record a rap demo. Taryn Manning plays Nola, the woman whose street earnings support the household; Taraji P. Henson plays Shug, who is pregnant and sings the hooks; Paula Jai Parker plays Lexus, a stripper who leaves. Anthony Anderson, DJ Qualls and Ludacris round out the cast. Roger Ebert, awarding three and a half stars on July 21, 2005, wrote that Howard "never cheapens him, or condescends. He builds him inside-out," and read DJay as an intelligent, ambitious man who "in another world with other opportunities" would have gone to college. Variety compared Howard's performance to the young Brando.

How the film framed the figure is the point of contention. Brewer's DJay is a pimp presented as a striver, and the pimping is the obstacle he must transcend through art. Akiva Gottlieb in Slant (July 13, 2005) objected that DJay's triumph "is predicated by the cultivation of a violent image rather than actual talent," and called the film's songs "unimaginative odes to misogyny." The Boston Globe, as summarized on Wikipedia, ran divided reactions, one calling it "a limited view of options for disenfranchised African-Americans." Ebert, by contrast, praised the women's roles as fully realized and singled out Henson's Shug as "wounded, so vulnerable, so loyal." The film's women are written as DJay's dependents whose labor funds his ambition; Nola's demand for something of her own is the closest the script comes to naming that arrangement.

At the 78th Academy Awards on March 5, 2006, Howard was nominated for Best Actor and Three 6 Mafia's "It's Hard Out Here for a Pimp" won Best Original Song over Dolly Parton's "Travelin' Thru," making Three 6 Mafia the first hip-hop group to perform at and win at the ceremony; Henson sang the hook on stage after Howard declined to perform. Juicy J told XXL: "We didn't prepare no speech because we didn't think we was gonna win." The film earned about $23.5 million on a budget reported at $2.8 million. Hustle & Flow is the moment the word "pimp" was spoken from the Oscar stage as a sympathetic title, and it remains the most influential fictional framing of the figure since The Mack.

STATUS
Unknown

ERA
2005–2006

ASSOCIATED WITH
Memphis; Craig Brewer; Terrence Howard; John Singleton; Stephanie Allain; Paramount Classics; Three 6 Mafia

STANDING
Documented