Blaxploitation is back.

• Author: McKissack, Fredrick L., Jr.
• Position: Black-themed movies and mental slavery

Hollywood is all set to revisit a genre that supposedly died two decades ago -- the blaxploitation film.

Producers Doug McHenry and George Jackson plan on remaking The Mack, a classic of the genre. The two told the Los Angeles Times that the conditions that created the main character, Goldie, exist today. "We're going after a bigger, more epic film -- not a remake," McHenry said. "We see it as a Pulp Fiction and Scarface."

Two points should jump right out at you: First, according to McHenry, conditions inside the black community that created the uberpimp Goldie have not improved since the 1970s; second, the time is right for making a "bigger" movie (50 percent more shooting? Seventy-five percent more 'ho's?).

The Mack was a 1973 film starring Max Julien as Goldie, a recently released convict who enters the highly lucrative pimping business on the mean streets of Oakland. The movie tried to be a morality play involving two brothers -- one a pimp, the other a black nationalist. The two are at constant odds, until white policemen, upset that Goldie won't pay them protection money, kill their mother. This act brings the brothers together in an attempt to clean up the streets.

Technically, the movie was a disaster, with a script so thin that it was barely visible. And it had the look of a not-so-well-made student project, not surprising since it was shot in five weeks.

The director, Michael Campus, went to Oakland and met with the Ward brothers, a couple of real-life street toughs, to get a more realistic view of pimping, and also to get their cooperation in making the film. The head of the Ward family, Michael, was killed a week after the making of the film, and the film is dedicated to him.

So why was this poor-quality film about a pimp so successful within the black community?

"At a time when most black men realized a fundamental freedom and power over their lives was denied them at every turn, the pimp, for better or worse, was equated with self-assertion," writes Donald Bogle, author of Blacks in American Films and Television (Garland, 1988).

"A lot of films today are about victims, but most of the films then were about empowerment," Pam Grier, an actress in some of these films, told Entertainment Weekly in 1996.

Grier starred in Coffy, a film where beauty, brains, and gun-play were the main ingredients. It was Grier's most memorable role. She played a nurse who is out to get the people that turned her sister into a junkie.

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