Pimps Up, Ho's Down (1998)

HBO's 1998 America Undercover documentary put the Players Ball on cable television and drew criticism for paying its subjects.

Pimps Up, Ho's Down is a television documentary produced for HBO's long-running America Undercover strand, which ran on the network from 1983 to 2006 and specialized in vice, crime and sexual subcultures. Brent Owens is credited as the film's maker on IMDb and AllMovie, where he is listed as director; AllMovie gives a 1998 release and a running time of 64 minutes, and IMDb lists a 62-to-64-minute broadcast version with a later director's cut said to add about 30 minutes of footage. The subjects listed on the film's home-video release include Bishop Don Magic Juan, the Chicago-born former pimp who founded the Players Ball, along with the rapper Ice-T; comedian Mike Epps appears uncredited. Production companies listed are Delta Entertainment and Going Out Productions. A DVD followed in 2000.

What the film documented was the pimp as he wished to be seen in the late 1990s. Its subjects talk to camera about their methods, their rules and their money, and the film travels to the Players Ball, the annual Chicago gathering where self-described pimps and players are presented with trophies for titles such as "Pimp of the Year." It was the first time that ceremony was shown at length to a national cable audience, roughly a year before the Hughes Brothers' American Pimp premiered at Sundance in January 1999. Allen Hughes has said in a VladTV interview that the HBO film reached air with an idea his brother and he had been developing; that is his account, not an established sequence of events.

The reception that survives in the record is thin but consistent. Wikipedia and AllMovie both record two lines of criticism: that HBO paid pimps for the rights to film their businesses and the Players Ball, and that some pimps afterwards used the broadcast as an instructional video for the women working for them. Neither claim is traced in those summaries to a named reporter, and this archive was unable to locate the original newspaper or trade coverage; both are therefore recorded here as widely repeated rather than confirmed. The film also had an afterlife: IMDb notes that footage from it was used in Bill Maher's 2008 documentary Religulous, and it became a staple of hip-hop references to the Bishop in the early 2000s, when he toured as Snoop Dogg's adviser.

As with American Pimp, the women are present mainly as the men's property and audience. The title itself states the film's hierarchy. Advocates quoted by Women's eNews in November 2003, including Rachel Lloyd of Girls Educational and Mentoring Services, argued that this era of pimp media, and the hip-hop that borrowed from it, glamorized what was in practice the recruitment and control of girls; Lloyd's phrase for pimps was "child abusers." The film is best understood as a primary document of how the men presented themselves, and as an early data point in the mainstreaming of the pimp persona that followed.

STATUS
Unknown

ERA
1998–2000

ASSOCIATED WITH
HBO; America Undercover; Brent Owens; Bishop Don Magic Juan; the Players Ball

STANDING
Partly documented