Original Homies Gang Tapes Iraqi Cards Download Gang Articles Trace Tupac's Murder Some Gangs Get Sued

`MENACE II SOCIETY': AN L.A. STORY A Harrowing Inside View of Gang Violence Newsday; 5/25/1993; Gene Seymour Newsday 05-25-1993 `MENACE II SOCIETY': AN L.A. STORY A Harrowing Inside View of Gang Violence By Gene Seymour. STAFF WRITER KEYWORD HIT YOU KNOW you're scaring people when your movie gets dissed for being too violent, too brutal and too provocative before the cameras roll. The buzz among both black and white film cognoscenti was that "Menace II Society," a saga of random violence among South Central Los Angeles teenagers, was so much darker and far more unsparing in its bloodshed than "Boyz N the Hood," "Juice" and other, similar movies that the film was shut down for a week during pre-production. Eventually Albert and Allen Hughes, the 21-year-old twins whose previous directing credits were for hip-hop videos, were able to get going on their first feature from New Line Cinema - which cost $2.5 million and, they say, came out pretty much as nasty as they wanted it to be. Though some nervousness remains, "Menace II Society," which opens tomorrow, has already generated some positive advance electricity as well. The Hughes brothers were given admiring blurbs in Vanity Fair and Premiere magazines. The film was also selected for the prestigious Cannes Film Festival. Entertainment Weekly's Owen Gleiberman declared the Hugheses to be "major filmmakers" and wrote that their film "evinces a visual dazzle and dark emotional resonance." The film's protagonist - one hesitates to call him its hero - is Caine (Tyrin Turner), whose first summer after graduating high school begins in earnest when he and his best friend, O-Dog (Larenz Tate), walk into a grocery store owned by a Korean couple to buy a beer. By the time they leave, O-Dog, described in Caine's voice-over narration as being "America's worst nightmare. Young, black and doesn't give a - - - ," has shot the couple dead, emptied the cash register and swiped the videotape that recorded the whole thing. In one of the film's queasier moments, O-Dog and his friends are in a living room, drinking beer and watching the video over and over again with glee. "That kind of stuff happens for real," Albert Hughes says in a Central Park South hotel suite shortly before he and his brother were to head for Cannes. "We did research," Allen Hughes continues. "And we found a lot of stuff that was worse than this. Gangs who would shoot videos of a drive-by and then [urinate] on the body and send the videos to rival gangs to show them how bad they were." The rest of the film is just as unsparing and emotionally demanding as it follows Caine doing his share of good and bad deeds. The good centers on his looking after the wife (Jada Pinkett) and 5-year-old son of his convict-mentor. The bad has him engaged in various criminal activities, including a revenge murder of gang members who shot him and his cousin. Having a morally ambivalent central character like Caine is more than enough to distance the film from John Singleton's blockbuster hit, "Boyz N the Hood," to which "Menace" continues to be compared, favorably and unfavorably. But the Hughes brothers, who were born in Detroit and raised in Pomona, Calif., just east of Los Angeles, say they made "Menace" because they believed that "Boyz," which they admire "on other levels," was, in Allen's words, "done more from the outside of the situation." "We wanted to do it more from the inside," Albert says. "See, we knew a lot of young brothers who saw [`Boyz'] and these were guys who were, you know, not bad or anything . . ." "Just kickin'," Allen says. "Right. Exactly. Hangin' out. Havin' fun," Albert says. "And they said what they saw in `Boyz N the Hood' wasn't, you know, the whole story. They knew kids like Caine and O-Dog and the rest and they knew it was, in a lot of ways, even worse than America's willing to accept. So we said, let's show America the way it really is. No sugarcoating. No escape." The original script was, if anything, even rougher and more remorseless than the finished product. ("We started out forty percent colder," Albert says.) But the Hugheses are attuned to the threshing machine that is Hollywood film production. "There's a filtering process we knew we had to get through before we had a final product. So we consciously went over the top to get what we wanted," Albert says. Despite their seeming callowness, the twins have developed, to a high polish, a knack for going against the grain - and profiting from the risk. Allen, for instance, recalls taking a television-production class in his Pomona high school. "And the teacher wanted us to go home and make, you know, a `how-to' video. You know, How to make a sandwich. How to make lasagne. How to dress in the morning. We said, bump this. Let's make `How to Be a Burglar.' And we did a whole skit on how to break into people's houses. I turned it in the last week of class and it raised my grade from a D-minus to a B." Of course, by this time, the twins were adroit at this sort of thing, having been given a video camera by their mother, a vocational rehabilitation specialist, at the age of 11. "It was a reward for being good, which was also meant to keep us out of trouble," Allen recalls. They started with puppet shows and eventually moved to "Star Trek" and "Miami Vice" goofs. "I did one of those `In Search Of . . .' things with me as Leonard Nimoy and as the guy they were looking for," Albert recalls. As their tastes broadened to include Martin Scorsese and Brian De Palma, so did their techniques. "We loved [De Palma's] `Scarface' so much that we did just cocaine epics for a while," Allen says. Such work laid the foundation for their early professional breakthroughs, doing videos for hip-hop artists like Digital Underground, KRS-One and Tupac. Director Tamra Davis ("CB4") was an early patron of their work. Her advocacy helped them get the nod for a full-length feature. On the basis of "Menace's" initial acclaim, the Hugheses seem destined to become the first major filmmakers steeped totally in home video. Certainly, they won't be the last, they say. "One of the best things that came out of the L.A. riots was that after that, every black family in South Central got a video camera," Albert says. "And you know they couldn't afford it," Allen says. "What's good about it is that the kids in those families are gonna be the ones making movies in ten years, I guarantee it," Albert says. News Topics | Home | Research | History | Blood Gangs | Crip Gangs | People| Life in a Gang | Gallery | Iraqi Cards | Memorial | Migration | Graffiti | Resume| Injunctions Homicides | Maps | California Prisons | Contact

Copyright © Streetgangs.com, All RIGHTS RESERVED. Disclaimer
All trademarks mentioned herein belong to their respective owners.