Talented filmmakers’ second movies tend to be flashy, sprawling, look-what-I-can-do-with-a-bigger-budget affairs, and “Dead Presidents” is no exception.
Twenty-three-year-old fraternal twin directors Allen and Albert Hughes’ follow-up to 1993’s “Menace II Society” covers so much ground that they and Hollywood Studios devised two sharply contrasting advertising campaigns for it.
“It was originally going to be marketed as a Vietnam movie, and we reversed it and marketed it as a heist movie,” Allen says in a downtown hotel suite, noting that the recent box-office failure of the black-themed Vietnam movie “Walking Dead” had something to do with that decision.
Still, the Hughes brothers don’t really want to label “Dead Presidents” as a heist flick either. “It’s a coming home, soul-festival-with-music film,” Allen says.
Pigeonholing is something that the Hughes brothers tend to resist. The widely acclaimed, bleak “Menace II Society” won them entry to the club of up-and-coming black filmmakers, many of whom had launched their careers with portrayals of inner-city turmoil.
But don’t bother sending Allen, the twin with the earrings, and Albert, the slightly skinnier one, their membership cards.
“We don’t like being lumped together, and we don’t like our culture being taken into account with our filmmaking,” Allen says. “Mario , John , Spike –we don’t all think alike. We’re not all the same people.”
“And we don’t all get along,” Albert adds. “We’re doing our thing, and they’re doing their thing. Their thing is on a whole other agenda from what we’re doing.”
“Dead Presidents” follows 18-year-old Anthony Curtis (Larenz Tate) as he enlists in the Marines in 1968, fights alongside two boyhood buddies in Vietnam and returns home to the Bronx in 1972 to find few opportunities. Ultimately, he and his friends decide to rob an armored truck to get their hands on the “dead presidents” that stare out from paper money.
The movie has its roots in one of the 20 black Vietnam veterans’ oral histories compiled in Wallace Terry’s 1985 book “Bloods.” “We went out and interviewed a lot of other vets, and after viewing a lot of documentaries, we incorporated . . . stuff into the story that wasn’t there originally,” Allen says.
The movie is on a grander scale than “Menace” and takes place in an earlier era, yet it revisits similar themes. Both movies’ protagonists face a series of trials and choices and, as the unblinking camera looks on, don’t always take the right path.
As with “Menace,” the new project’s grimness attracted the filmmakers. “You’re able with a dark subject matter to go wherever you want to go,” Albert says. “With a regular Hollywood character, you have to stay true to a protagonist, make sure the good guy always does good things and the bad guy always does bad things.
“Somebody told us good fiction is when good characters do bad things and when bad characters do good things. I totally agree with that.”
Hence, the moral in a Hughes brothers film comes wrapped in gray. “The greater percentage of all the Hollywood movies don’t have morals,” Albert says. “They try to. In the end they sell you short and say the good guy prevailed over evil, but that’s not a moral movie. A moral movie is staying true to what the subject matter is all about.”
This area is where the brothers say they part ways with Lee and Singleton. In fact, when they went to see Lee’s “Clockers” recently, they walked out not long after it started.
“Their agenda is a promotion of a whole people in a good light,” Albert says. “That’s wrong. . . . I think force-feeding people messages is not the way to go. It’s propaganda filmmaking.
“Our agenda is just making good movies and staying true to the story,” he adds. “That’s the only agenda we have.”
Born in Detroit, the unmarried brothers have lived in Pomona, Calif., for 14 years, and each bought a house there after “Menace” came out. Living nearby is their mother, who gave them a video camera when they were 12 and thus launched a stunning career trajectory that moved from homemade street documentaries to music videos to their first feature film at age 20. Allen has a 4-year-old son, and Albert has a 1 1/2-year-old daughter.
Another way their lives have changed since “Menace” is that “a lot of friends we used to have before, we don’t have anymore,” Allen says. “Social housecleaning. After the success of that movie, they started leeching.”
For “Dead Presidents,” the brothers worked with a budget that started at $10 million and ran to $15 million, the cost overruns exceeding the $3 million price tag of “Menace.” The extra money, they say, gave them the freedom to experiment more while shooting over a longer period.
Tate, the Chicago-raised actor who played the trigger-happy O-Dog in “Menace” before taking the lead in “Dead Presidents,” noted a contrast between the two filming experiences. “This time they were a lot more confident, even more creative,” he says. “They had a lot more control.”
The brothers say their roles were more defined on “Dead Presidents” than they had been on “Menace,” with Albert concentrating on the cameras and Allen working with the actors. “Outside that, we do everything together,” Allen says.
Brothers will be brothers (and collaborators will be collaborators), so the directors had their share of disagreements, particularly in the editing room. “If I told you they didn’t get into brotherly spats, I’d be lying,” Tate says. “But it wouldn’t last very long.”
They say one eventually would convert the other to his point of view–such as when Allen convinced Albert that a shot of Anthony in a car should show him drinking, not smoking–or the crew would take a vote.
Still, they say, their antennae are usually tuned to the same frequency. They say they walk out on most movies. (“I didn’t walk out on `Babe,’ ” Allen says. ” `Babe’ was cool.”)
They’re both big fans of Carl Franklin (“One False Move,” “Devil in a Blue Dress”)–a black director “we both respect because he’s a filmmaker,” Albert says–and they much prefer Quentin Tarantino’s “Reservoir Dogs” to “Pulp Fiction.”
They also aren’t squeamish about putting blood and guts in their own movies. “I prefer the guts more than you prefer them,” Allen tells his brother.
“No, I like the blood and all that , but I just know where it’s too much,” Albert says.
In addition, they share the opinion that the world somehow became less colorful not long after they were born on April Fool’s Day 1972. Their mutual fixation with the late 1960s and the 1970s is evident in “Dead Presidents” and the flashback scenes in “Menace,” and they perk up when discussing the heavy soul grooves of Isaac Hayes, Curtis Mayfield and James Brown that appear on their latest soundtrack.
Tate recalls, “Allen would set the tone of each scene with music from the ’70s so we could have a sense of our surroundings.”
The brothers say they’re trying to get the rights to the Jimi Hendrix story, but whatever their next project, they know it won’t be set in the 1980s or ’90s.
“We’re dead set against doing any movies set in the ’90s, that’s for sure,” Albert says. “There’s just nothing interesting about this decade.”
The ’60s and early ’70s “was more of a revolutionary period and people were speaking out,” he adds. “In the ’80s and ’90s, people ain’t doing nothing but just sleeping.”
Plus, for filmmakers who pride themselves on seductive imagery, style counts, and the current decade just hasn’t got it. “The cars aren’t even visually interesting,” Albert complains.
“The ’70s cars are way more interesting than ’90s cars. The buildings of the ’90s are , and the houses of the ’90s are all track homes. You can’t find a good location in a ’90s movie.”
