“Make the money. Don’t let it make you.” Twenty-eight years ago today, Diamond (LisaRaye McCoy) delivered one of the film’s coldest lines in Ice Cube’s ‘The Players Club’ to her young and impressionable cousin Ebony (Monica Calhoun), warning her about the cost of chasing the dollar.
Starring McCoy, Calhoun, Chrystale Wilson, Adele Givens, Ice Cube, Jamie Foxx, and Bernie Mac—alongside Anthony Johnson, Alex Thomas, Charlie Murphy, Michael Clarke Duncan, John Amos, Faizon Love, Tracey Cherelle Jones, Samuel Monroe Jr., and more—the film offers a hilarious, tumultuous, and gritty portrayal of a young Black college woman navigating two different worlds defined by paper: a degree and dollars.
‘The Players Club’ was released during the 1990s “Golden Age of Black Cinema,” within the era’s “hood film” wave, and has since become a cultural staple, celebrated for its all-star ensemble, iconic one-liners, and lasting influence on Black aesthetics and style.
Nearly three decades later, we have to ask: what’s your favorite line from the movie?
–Dominique Young // @heyyydommm