AP-090 · SCREEN PORTRAYALS

Super Fly

Priest sells cocaine, not women; the film enters pimp iconography through the coat, the Cadillac and Mayfield.

Edited still: converted to black and white. Source: IndieWire.

Super Fly (Warner Bros., 4 August 1972) is about a cocaine dealer. Youngblood Priest, played by Ron O'Neal, wants one last big sale before he leaves the trade; the AFI catalogue notes it cost under $500,000, was "the first black-oriented film to be financed entirely by blacks," a consortium of Harlem businessmen and professionals, and was among the year's top grossers by September. Curtis Mayfield's score was a commercial hit in its own right. The NAACP and CORE objected that it "glorified drug usage, violence, obtaining wealth through crime and sexual stereotypes." The Library of Congress added it to the National Film Registry in 2022.

Priest is not a pimp, and this archive does not call him one. The film is here because pimp culture absorbed its surfaces. The customised 1971 Cadillac Eldorado Priest drives belonged, the AFI records, to K.C., a real Harlem pimp who plays one in the film; the wide-brimmed hats, long coats and coke spoon on a chain became the screen pimp's wardrobe within a year, from The Mack (1973) on; and Mayfield's "Pusherman" and "Superfly" were sampled and quoted by a generation of rappers who used "superfly" to mean the pimp's kind of sharp. By the 1990s the word described a look, not a job.

The 2018 remake, Superfly (Director X; Trevor Jackson as Priest), moved the story to Atlanta with a Future-curated soundtrack; the critic Odie Henderson found it "quite watchable" but without the original's moral tension. Both films are about the drug trade; their place in pimp iconography is style, not story.

ERA
1972; 2018

ASSOCIATED WITH
Harlem; Gordon Parks Jr.; Ron O'Neal; Curtis Mayfield; Sig Shore; Director X; Trevor Jackson; Atlanta

STANDING
Fictional

DOCUMENTED RECORD

4 August 1972 — Super Fly released by Warner Bros.; directed by Gordon Parks Jr., produced by Sig Shore, written by Phillip Fenty, score by Curtis Mayfield (AFI Catalog).
1972 — Financed by a consortium of Harlem investors; production cost under $500,000; a top-three grosser by September (AFI Catalog).
1972 — NAACP and CORE criticise the film for glorifying drug dealing (AFI Catalog).
13 June 2018 — Superfly remake (Director X; Trevor Jackson) released by Sony/Columbia.
14 December 2022 — Super Fly named to the National Film Registry.

NOT ESTABLISHED

The lifetime gross ("over $30 million") is an industry estimate, not an audited figure.
K.C.'s full name and later life are not documented in the sources consulted.
The claim that Priest is a pimp, common in listicles, is contradicted by the film itself.