![]() If you jump to Chicago now, 20 years later, the city’s ridden with murder and violence, and I still have the same question now as I did back then. It makes me upset and I just wanna prove something. I say this to you sometimes - I like it when we have haters. We developed this chip on our shoulders where it’s like - well fuck you, and fuck you too! We saw it all we got the ugly side of both cultures. The black people didn’t like us and the white people didn’t like us, so we were outsiders. The interesting thing with us was that we were biracial kids growing up, but we were twins, so we always had each other. Especially back then - we used to name names! We didn’t really have a grip on social politics.Īlbert Hughes: We started questioning why we were like that. Early on in our career we definitely stood out because of it. Menace to society meaning movie#Growing up and being black back then, we started to wonder: why are we in an even worse place than we were in 100 years ago? Why has it taken so long for this particular culture to gain footing? Instead of making a movie about glorifying all of the violence, we started back at the LA Riots, and the way the drugs were brought in, and the abuse and the system collapsing.Īlbert Hughes: Another part of the reason we made ‘Menace’ was wondering: what’s wrong with the news and the reporting? Why are they only reporting the aftermath? Why are they not reporting the origin of where this all started? Anger was our main motivation.Īllen Hughes: Our mother always raised us to speak our minds and question authority. ![]() We’d been harassed by enough police that we just had it out for society in general.Īllen Hughes: In ‘93 we couldn’t dream of a black president. ![]() Even though we weren’t gangsters, we identified with that attitude. Back then was a very angst-ridden era - that’s how hip hop and ‘Fuck the Police’ came to being. Racial tensions were geeked out that year, too, in Los Angeles.Īlbert Hughes: That time period is very vivid in my mind. The whole pop culture scene was really bubbling, and probably in its heyday, in ‘93. Allen Hughes says, “For me, that was like the last of the great wave of creativity, in music and even in cinema.”Īllen Hughes: 1993 was the last era of a lot of things, particularly in LA. But the 1993 era holds an indelible place in their minds. Menace to society meaning series#Now both 41, the twins have gone on to produce many society-challenging projects, both separately and as a duo (including blockbusters Dead Presidents, Book Of Eli, From Hell TV series Touching Evil and documentaries Scratch and American Pimp). The movie is quintessentially 1993 - across its soundtrack, fashion and dialogue (the movie also holds the record for one of the highest “fuck” per minute rates, at 3.07 times per minute) – but still poses important questions 20 years later. Menace II Society brought an unprecedented rawness and truth about South Central Los Angeles, a year after the LA Riots, holding no reservations about the brutality, violence and nihilism surrounding the ‘hood. The half Armenian, half African-American brothers gained instant notoriety for their reckless attitude towards filmmaking, the media, and even other young artists (notably their beef with Tupac Shakur, originally slated to star in Menace). Allen and Albert Hughes, aka The Hughes Brothers, sit in the Guinness Book of World Records as the ‘Youngest Filmmakers to Ever Direct a Major Hollywood Motion Picture in History.’ Creating short films in LA from the age of 12, and then directing music videos as teenagers, the fraternal twins made their major directorial debut at 21 with their 1993 breakout, Menace II Society.
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