The Mack (1973)

Shot in Oakland with real pimps as advisers, The Mack fixed the screen image of the pimp; its adviser Frank Ward was killed mid-production.

The Mack was directed by Michael Campus from a screenplay by Robert J. Poole, produced by Harvey Bernhard for Harbor Productions and Harvey Bernhard Enterprises, and distributed by Cinerama Releasing Corporation. The AFI Catalog dates production to September–December 1972, records a March 1973 release with a 1977 re-release, and gives a running time of 100 or 110 minutes with an R rating. Max Julien plays John "Goldie" Mickens, released from prison and rising as a pimp in Oakland; Richard Pryor plays his friend Slim; Don Gordon, Carol Speed, Roger E. Mosley, Juanita Moore and George Murdock fill out the cast. Willie Hutch's Motown score, including "I Choose You" and "Brothers Gonna Work It Out," became one of the most sampled soundtracks in hip-hop.

The film's documentary value lies in how it was made. According to the AFI Catalog, Poole had himself been a pimp and based the script on his experience, and "many pimps played themselves in the film." Frank D. Ward, an Oakland pimp, served as technical adviser and was murdered during production; the opening credits carry the dedication "In memory of a Man, Frank D. Ward." His brothers Ted, Willie and Andrew Ward were also credited as technical advisers and appear on screen. The A.V. Club's 2018 assessment, drawing on Campus's own accounts, describes Ward as the local kingpin who let the crew film on his territory and "supplied all the real-life pimps, homeless people, and sex workers" seen in the film, and who was shot to death in his Rolls-Royce partway through the shoot. The same accounts describe the Black Panther Party initially disrupting filming before Huey Newton and Bobby Seale negotiated for Panther members to appear as extras; the film's Oakland premiere reportedly benefited the party's breakfast program. The AFI Catalog also records that an NAACP board member in 1973 approved the film as containing "truth" and "realism."

What the film framed was a pimp with a conscience and a code: Goldie hands out money to neighborhood children and tells them to stay in school, is shown as a victim of corrupt white police, and is set against his brother Olinga's Black nationalist politics. The A.V. Club argues that Campus, Julien and Pryor used the material "to better interrogate the stereotypes," and that the result is a precursor to the 1990s crime films of Singleton and Van Peebles. The Players Ball sequence in the film, with trophies and a "Mack of the Year," is the scene most often cited as the template for the real Players Ball that Bishop Don Magic Juan later ran in Chicago; whether the ceremony imitated the film or the film recorded an existing ritual is not settled.

The women of The Mack are Goldie's workers, his mother (Juanita Moore) and Lulu (Carol Speed), the childhood friend he recruits. They are given lines but no independent story; Lulu's fate is the film's clearest acknowledgment of what the trade costs. Initially dismissed by reviewers, the film is now widely described as the strongest entry in its genre, screened in repertory (Brooklyn Academy of Music, March 2025) and quoted in rap for five decades. It is the origin of much of the pimp iconography this archive documents, and the record of a real man's death in the making of it.

STATUS
Unknown

ERA
1972–1973; re-released 1977

ASSOCIATED WITH
Oakland; Michael Campus; Max Julien; Richard Pryor; Frank D. Ward and the Ward brothers; Cinerama Releasing; Willie Hutch

STANDING
Documented