ATLRetro

Ed. Note: ICEBERG SLIM: PORTRAIT OF A PIMP played Tuesday March 19 at the Plaza Theatre, but with the Atlanta Film Festival running through Sun. March 24, there are still plenty of movies to come. Check out our top Retro picks here.

Retro Review by Andrew Kemp
Contributing Writer

There’s a paradox at the heart of Iceberg Slim’s legend. Slim spent decades of his life speaking out against the world of the pimp, and each of his books, especially Pimp: The Story of my Life, are meant as cautionary tales. But if Slim had been writing about his former career in dishwasher repair, he never would have achieved so much success, or reached nearly as many people. Slim hoped to stop young black men from falling into the same trap he once did, but many read his books only because the pimp lifestyle is so alluring in the first place. So is Slim an author? Is Slim a pimp?

Director Jorge Hinojosa grapples with that paradox in his exceptional new documentary about the man, ICEBERG SLIM: PORTRAIT OF A PIMP. Hinojosa wisely leads with his ace card, placing “pimp” right there in the title, but he takes time in the film to carefully explore all sides of Slim’s tumultuous life, spending equal time with Slim the pimp and Slim the writer. Make no mistake, the film has plenty of lurid detail to share as it describes Slim’s life and criminal career, from his complicated relationship with his mother to his repeated incarcerations and open brutality against the women in his “stable.” But once Slim has his change of heart, Hinojosa follows him into the square life, chronicling his troubled first marriage, the birth of his children (three daughters; Slim considered it payback for his mistreatment of women), and the collaboration that led to Pimp‘s publication. Hinojosa knows that the true answer to Slim’s paradox is that he was both an author and a pimp, and the film reflects that, ensuring both stories are told.

Among the many attempts to film Slim’s life over the years, The Hughes Brothers (MENACE II SOCIETY (1993), THE BOOK OF ELI (2010)) were among those who came the closest, but their planned project eventually morphed into AMERICAN PIMP (1999), a Slim-free documentary often criticized for failing to live up to the larger-than-life style of their subjects and relying too much on talking heads. Hinojosa seems to have learned from this and pushed in the opposite direction, delivering a kinetic and highly-stylized experience using pulp art, animations and vintage video to visualize Slim’s tawdry stories. The film moves and never bores, perfectly suiting a man who never lived a boring moment.

Iceberg Slim, as pictured in documentary ICEBERG SLIM: PORTRAIT OF A PIMP

For his day job, Hinojosa manages rapper and actor Ice-T, and so the talking heads that do show up are heavyweights like Henry Rollins, Quincy Jones and Chris Rock, all willing to share the ways that Slim’s work has influenced their lives. But the real stars of the doc—apart from Slim himself who appears in archive footage—are Slim’s family, who hint at the struggle and tragedy that haunted him in his later years. Slim’s first wife, dying of emphysema and taking drags off a cigarette in between labored breaths, is absolutely riveting in her descriptions of their courtship and early marriage, and how she helped him to write the first manuscript of Pimp. She reveals a side of Slim that doesn’t appear in his books, a man so determined to go straight that he worked as a roach exterminator, and so worried about the acceptance and safety of his mixed-race children in white suburbia that he moved the family to the outskirts of the ghetto, where the children could grow up in relative peace. But there’s a heavy weight to the stories, and an impression that we’re not getting the full scope of the family strife. For the most part, Slim’s daughters appear separately, trading conflicting stories and memories about their dad’s behavior. One daughter speaks frankly about her drug arrests. I later learned that she passed away before the film was completed, and her name appears in a dedication at the end. It’s clear the demons that hounded Slim outlived him.

When the screening ended, I found myself wanting more. I wished that the film had dug deeper into the family issues, or had provided a more definitive answer about whether he returned to pimping when money got tight (the family is deeply divided on that detail). For its relatively short running time, however, ICEBERG SLIM delivers the goods and may hopefully send a new generation to discover Slim’s books. ICEBERG SLIM breezes past a lot of details, but it’s as close to definitive a work on Slim there has ever been. It’s a remarkable documentary on a troubled man who thrived in the darkness and then spent the rest of his life trying to keep the lights on.

Andrew Kemp is a screenwriter and game writer who started talking about movies in 1984 and got stuck that way. He writes at www.thehollywoodprojects.com and hosts a bimonthly screening series of classic films at theaters around Atlanta.