Never Made Movies - No.3 The Hughes Brothers' Howard Hughes Biopic

How the men behind Menace II Society tried and failed to tell the history of the legendary recluse.

They were very hot for a while there, Allen and Albert Hughes. Following the critical and commercial success of their debut Menace II Society (1993), the twins were all but able to write their own ticket.

Of the pictures that followed, Dead Presidents (1995) was a brave attempt to mate a crime movie with a critique of the African-American experience in Vietnam, while From Hell (2001) - though a pretty lousy adaptation of the Alan Moore-Eddie Campbell graphic novel - deserved praise for trying to depict the ghetto as something that’s not unique to either America or the 20th/21st centuries.

It’s common to attribute the brothers’ decline to their being kicked off the Robert De Niro spooky child picture Hide And Seek (2005). However, things had actually begun to go wrong a while earlier, in the years following Dead Presidents’ premiere, in fact.