Mack Daddy Maestros - Allen and Albert Hughes - Interview

Interview, April, 2000 by Ed Morales

With American Pimp, the directing duo known as the Hughes Brothers turn new tricks

With American Pimp, a visceral documentary about a seedy "street science," the Hughes Brothers have completed a trilogy of movies, beginning with Menace II Society (1993) and continuing with Dead Presidents (1995), provocatively distilling the black urban experience. Born in Detroit and raised for the most part in Southern California by their Armenian mother, these twin directors have a unique vision and working arrangement. In American Pimp (out this month from Seventh Art Releasing), Allen and Albert Hughes reveal an underground highly exploitative of women through a perspective partially shaped by their white feminist mother.

ED MORALES: The idea of a pimp always seemed elusive. I felt like I knew the style, but with this movie you put an extreme focus on pimps and it's kind of startling.

ALLEN HUGHES: We grew up in Detroit, where you would see these guys, and certain members of our family were involved in this lifestyle. It's kind of appealing to a young kid. In the inner city, it's the dope dealer, the pimp, the preacher, or the thief--the pimp is the one that was fantasized about the most. I think our motivation was to peel back that layer, see what's behind it, and get past that facade. I'm not fascinated anymore. It's not the science I thought it was anymore. There's no real magic there like one would think.

EM: It's really fascinating that you had some family members who dabbled in it but you were raised by a white feminist.

ALLEN: Being raised by her we grew up sensitive to women's issues, because she was the primary parent. I think she taught us to respect women across the board and that became a problem sometimes in our twenties because we just took 'em all like they were angels, and we got burnt a few times.

ALBERT HUGHES: When we were growing up, she wouldn't let us watch The Fall Guy, or The A-Team because Mr. T came off kind of ignorant, but we watched them, anyway. Now she's more easygoing; and she loved the movie.

EM: Did you read the Iceberg Slim autobiography, Pimp, The Story of My Life?

ALLEN: That's what inspired us, actually, because we wanted to do that movie, but we just thought it wasn't smart to make that movie next. If we would have made a pimp movie, I think no matter how real it was, I don't think America was ready for the way we wanted to do it. So we were like, Let's go do the documentary--it's real subjects, and another world we hadn't dealt with, so it was more interesting to take that approach.

EM: With this movie, you seem to say pimps are a dying breed. There's a '70s soundtrack, but no hip-hop.

ALBERT: There is a portion of hip-hop culture--it feels like a third of it--that is all about bitches and money and that kind of stuff. It's the part of hip-hop culture that all the lawmakers are coming down on and the media gets in an uproar about. But doing a record is not the same filtering process as doing a movie. On records they grab some guy off the street and throw him in the studio and he may say the first thing that comes into his head without thinking that much about what he's saying. I think that's the problem that the pimps have, they don't appreciate the way the rappers are handling their lifestyles without even knowing or even talking to one of these guys.

EM: How difficult was this in a business sense, giving up three years to this? Did you go through being depressed or angry?

ALLEN: In that two to three years we were doing it, there were no movies we wanted to do, and we were pretty miserable. But the documentary was a nice hobby to have, because you go out every weekend and go shoot. But it did get really hard just dealing with some of those guys, because they're real leechy and they're playing games. There were certain guys who were really fun to hang out with, just pimps having a normal friendship with you. But some guys were so trifling about the way they were trying to extort us.

EM: So it was almost like they were trying to pimp you.

ALLEN: Exactly.

EM: What kind of stuff happened to you at Sundance?

ALLEN: Overwhelmingly, the audiences were really positive, but during the Q&As, those people that thought the movie was despicable thought we went light on the pimps. The thing that struck us about Sundance was that people feel there's something about a black pimp, especially when he has white women, that is worse than murdering people. And that really was a wake-up call for us.

ALBERT: They say we try to glamorize them or make them sympathetic. No, we're not making sympathetic characters. People are scared of themselves for sympathizing with certain characters, can't deal with themselves that they might actually like a pimp.

EM: Your work can be viewed as a corrective to the blaxploitation era. How do you feel about American Pimp being the culmination of your work to date?

ALBERT: We didn't appreciate blaxploitation the same way they did back then because they were happy to see blacks on screen--we were very critical of it. Then The Mack [1973] was one of those movies that I really liked and Allen really liked. I'd start getting into all the other pimp movies like Willie Dynamite [1974]. These are the movies we found when we were doing the project and we started loving the characters more than the overall story. We had fun with editing and juxtaposing them against the real-life characters, which wasn't that much of a difference in the end.