Blaxploitation is back.

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.

These movies presented a strange kind of empowerment. The New Republic's film critic, Stanley Kauffmann, wrote off the entire genre in an April 28, 1978 piece: "All that talk about Black Power and Black is Beautiful, and when they finally get their long-delayed screen time, all they do is show that Black is Ugly -- just as ugly as everybody else."

The established black middle class echoed Kauffmann's sentiments. Richard Pryor, however, gave the most pragmatic reason for making blaxploitation films.

"You know, we used to pick cotton," he said in 1973. "Well, now we are making movies. Same thing. I call them pickin'-cotton movies, but they pay the bills. And some people get over them. All that works, man."

Apparently, blaxploitation still resonates with the hip-hop generation. New Line Home Video released The Mack on video in 1991. In 1997, the movie sold 67,000 copies.

McHenry and Jackson said they have been besieged by requests from actors willing to try out for the film, which could make the original look like an Ibsen play. Rapper Snoop Doggy Dog reportedly has the inside track on playing Goldie.

White producers in Hollywood are very uneasy about the trend.

"The Mack is a throwback to an image blacks have been trying to fight offscreen," producer told the Los Angeles Times. "Every black actor of note talks about turning down maid and slave roles, so why make a movie about the industrial-strength pimp of all time?"

Good question. You have to take a look at why the films were made in the first place. Until the era of blaxploitation, black actors and actresses within the mainstream were generally in subservient roles. Who can forget Butterfly McQueen being smacked by Miss Scarlett in Gone With the Wind? A funny moment for white people, a terribly painful one for blacks.

Steppin' Fetchit's slow-talking style and Mantan Moreland's bug-eyed antics are etched in the souls of black folks. And while Eddie "Rochester" Anderson out-witted Jack Benny, Rochester was still the butler.

If blacks weren't "cooning," then they were exotic and animalistic. Dorothy Dandridge, a talented actress who died after overdosing on pills in the mid-1960s, was constantly given the role of the tragic mulatto.

Mainstream films did nothing to give black people a sense that they were powerful and physically beautiful, or, at least for black women, that they were desired if they were darker than a brown grocery sack.

Cleopatra Jones, made in 1973, was one of the first films to break the pusher/pimp mold, offering one of the first black heroines (albeit of the comic-book variety). Tamara Dobson, a former model, plays a karate-chopping CIA agent who is sent to battle a gang of drug dealers led by an incredibly campy Shelley Winters.

Quentin Tarantino, an unrepentant fan of the blaxploitation genre, used elements (especially the absurd and comedic parts) of these films in Pulp Fiction. His next project, a film version of Elmore Leonard's Rum Punch, will star Pam Grier in the role of Jackie Brown, a flight attendant. In fact, Tarantino had to change the race of the character in order to use Grier.

In the past year, three of the better mainstream films dealing with African American issues -- Rosewood, Get on the Bus, and Love Jones -- were critical successes but commercial failures. Contrast them with Booty Call and B.A.P.S. (Black American Princesses). Both of these did very well at the box office, as did action pictures with African Americans.

Apparently, the community wants movies about the black condition that focus on its criminal elements, and there will be more and more of them as Hollywood sees that these films are going to make money.

The era of blaxploitation films may be upon us again.

Fredrick L. McKissack Jr. is a former editor of the Progressive Media Project in Madison, Wisconsin. He lives in St. Louis.