MOVIES : Twins’ Peak : Albert and Allen Hughes, with a few videos to their credit, now have a feature to direct--and they’re only 20!

Relaxing on the front porch of a small house in South-Central L.A, twin brothers Allen and Albert Hughes, 20, had decided to skip lunch. Dressed in baseball caps and baggy jeans worn well below the waist, the two looked more like characters in the movie “Menace to Society” than its co-directors.

They surveyed with disbelief the tangle of lights, cameras and cords that surrounded them.

“This is a weird business,” Allen said while his brother nodded. “They don’t hire you for your age anymore--that’s for damn sure.”

If they did, the Pomona pair might still be flipping burgers and delivering pizzas instead of directing a $2.5-million movie for New Line Cinema. Conceived by the brothers and written by Tyger Williams, “Menace to Society” is a tragedy about a young man trying to break out of his existence as a hustler on the streets of Watts.

Much of the movie is based on the twins’ experience growing up in Detroit and Pomona. While they hope their street sense has helped infuse the film with an air of realism, it hasn’t proved the best training for navigating the back lots of Hollywood.

With their only credits being videos they made for rapper KRS-One and Too Short, the twins found themselves thrown headlong into feature filmmaking. And they have been relying mostly on their youthful ambition to keep them afloat.

“It makes you feel insecure sometimes. It makes you feel great sometimes. It depends on what day you catch us,” said Allen, whose well-trimmed mustache adds a few years to his boyish face. “Some days you go, ‘Oh no, this has got to be a joke, somebody is setting us up.’ Other days you go, ‘Damn, we deserve this--we haven’t stopped working since we were 12 years old.’ ”

On this day, at any rate, the brothers seemed to have a reservoir of self-confidence, throwing good-natured barbs at cast and crew members who passed by with full lunch plates, and bantering with a reporter like a couple of high school pals.

And the jokes were flying, from stabs at President Bush to light-hearted jabs at one another. But one thing rarely served as the butt of a joke: their movie. This is a serious business, the twins have found out, and it didn’t take much prodding to get them to talk about the stress they have faced as young directors with a low budget.

“Lately I have been feeling the pressure a lot,” Allen said as he played with his gold Mickey Mouse watch. “The studio said, ‘Here is $2.5 million, you have 32 days to shoot--and be visual. Give us what you guys have done with music videos.’ It is like creating something out of nothing--it can be done, but will you have your sanity in the end?”

Albert echoed his brother’s sentiments.

“It really hardens you to the B.S.,” he said, stroking his scraggly goatee. “You really face yourself on different emotional levels. Sometimes you go home and cry about something that happened on the set that day. We wouldn’t be doing that if we were normal 20-year-olds.”

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Allen and Albert’s directing ambitions began when they were 12 years old, after their mother gave them a video camera, an expensive gift for her at the time. They say the camera helped them resist the temptation in their neighborhood to sell drugs.

“We have been in situations where we wanted to sell dope and we were that close to doing it,” Allen said gesturing with his thumb and finger. “We were down and everyone around us had jewelry, cars and watches. As corny as it sounds, by throwing us that camera when we were bored and about to sell drugs, she deterred us. ‘Why don’t you go make a movie,’ she said.”

That is what they did. Entire days were spent trying to re-create scenes from their favorite films, which included Brian DePalma’s “Scarface” and anything starring Bruce Lee. They also made a documentary about selling crack cocaine after finding a dealer just outside their schoolyard willing to go on camera.

“We were doing all the elements it takes to do a film, like the wide shot, the medium shot, the close up, the editing styles,” Allen said. “But we didn’t really know what we were doing. It was duplicating what we saw.”

Eventually, Albert went on to take film classes at Los Angeles City College, which led to the twosome’s work on rap videos. It was only a little less than a year ago that the Hugheses were starting to get an industry buzz for their visually brooding music clips that dealt with such issues as teen pregnancy and police brutality. At that point, the pair sketched an outline for “Menace” and commissioned Williams to write the script. He came back with the first draft less than a month later, and the twins gave it to independent producer Darin Scott to shop around town.

New Line made the first nibble at the script early last year, and Kevin Moreton, vice president of production, met with the brothers and encouraged further development of the story. Even before last spring’s riots, the company saw the film as an important social commentary and signed a deal with the brothers, said Moreton.

But the twins say that it was only in the wake of the riots, when the social spotlight was focused on inner-city problems, that New Line committed to produce the project.

Either way, the Hughes brothers ended up with the green light to make the film. Although given only a relatively small budget, the twins were offered a great deal of artistic control. And for the most part, the company has stayed away from the day-to-day production of the film, letting the twins shoot and edit the movie as they see fit. But the final cut is still New Line’s.

“At first the issue was, ‘Can I trust the Hughes brothers to deliver a good movie?” Moreton said in a telephone interview. “Ordinarily, young people who have directed only rap videos and short movies are a big gamble. There is a leap of faith involved. But knowing that they created this story and knowing their vision, I knew they could deliver.”

The movie deal is especially sweet for Williams, who had only written two other still-unproduced scripts before “Menace to Society.”

Off to the side, and easy to miss, the 23-year-old writer had settled his tall, thin body into a director’s chair and was watching the twins choreograph a shot. Williams is a co-producer, and spends time on the set offering advice.

Clasping his hands together, he leaned forward and, in a low, quiet voice, recounted how he went about writing the script.

“I watched ‘GoodFellas,’ ‘Taxi Driver,’ ‘Apocalypse Now.’ I watched a lot of very dark movies over and over again. I watched ‘Boyz N the Hood’ once,” the L.A. native said about the 28 days he spent sequestered in his home working on the script. “(The twins and I) got tired of watching all the films about the kid that makes it out of the ghetto, and we wanted to do the story of all those who stay. If 20% make it out, then 80% don’t, and we wanted to tell their story.”

In ensuing drafts, the Hughes brothers helped flesh out the characters, drawing on their own experiences and on interviews with gang members and street hustlers.

Watching the twins prepare to shoot part of a climactic drive-by shooting, one gets a sense of how the brothers have sidestepped the pitfalls that usually endanger dual-director films. The clash of egos, temperaments and artistic vision that can plague such projects hasn’t materialized. And it seems the secret is staying out of each other’s sphere of influence. In the twins’ case, Albert rules the domain of cameras and lighting, and Allen has the final word with actors.

“It’s like watching two halves of the same brain,” said producer Scott, as he took in the twins’ final preparations for the shoot. “They focus on different things, but their overall vision is the same.”

Albert was kneeling by the camera, head bowed, listening to the director of photography Lisa Rizner go over camera angles. Every so often, he interrupted her to make sure the shot would come out the way he envisioned.

About 10 yards away, some of the main actors stood around Allen, listening as he diagramed the shot. Wearing a bloody sweat shirt, Tyrin Turner, 20, who plays the movie’s hero, Caine, stood next to Jada Pinkett, 21, a regular on “A Different World.” She plays a single mother who falls in love with Caine and hopes to escape with him to the promised land of Atlanta. Also listening in was Larenz Tate as O-Dog, 17, dressed in black and toting a small machine gun that seemed to belie his look of teen-age innocence.

Their eyes followed Allen as he walked through the scene and stopped at points, raising his arms to emphasize a point.

A few minutes later, the shot went off without a hitch.

“It has really worked great on this film,” Albert said later about the brothers’ working relationship. “We still have our sibling rivalry, but we do most of that off the set.”

He and Allen paused for a second and looked at each other as if they weren’t telling the entire truth.

“Oh, sometimes on the set you get a dirty look from the other guy,” Albert said.

“Or you see his middle finger go up in the air,” interjected Allen, sending the pair into a fit of laughter.

Despite their growing professional confidence, there was ample evidence that the brothers had only just come out of their teen-age years. During most of the breaks, conversation drifted to rap music, schools and girlfriend problems. And their slang was fresh enough to leave someone four years their senior wondering what they had just said.

Are they ever self-conscious about their age?

“Never,” Allen said firmly.

“There is an edge that it gives us,” he continued. “A Spielberg can come in here and make a visually exciting film, but I don’t think he can relate to what the characters are thinking. You just can’t be 35 and hanging out with the homeys to find out what’s going on, because it just won’t work.”

“Our film might be a bunch of scenes put together, it might run kind of awkward, but it is the way we envision it and the way our friends live. That is what makes it so different. As 20-year-olds, we bring that kind of insight.”

Even so, both admitted that their age sometimes puts them at a disadvantage when dealing with the cast and crew, who are all in their late teens or early 20s. Most of their problems stem from a tendency to befriend the mostly young people they are supposed to be directing.

“Sometimes you get frustrated,” Allen said, leaning against a chain-link fence while the crew was busy setting up for another scene. “If I were 30 years old, there would be a different level of intellect when you are talking to someone. Some people can’t look at you as the director; they look at you as the homeboy. You can tell them something seriously and they will just laugh it off, and you have to come back and say, ‘No, this is business.’ ”

A few minutes later, Pinkett was standing by a table of snacks. The 21-year-old actress said that while she has really enjoyed working with the twins, there were times when things got a little “shaky” because of their age.

“It is sort of like a family without a parental figure,” she said. “When you are working with a director who is older than you, there’s an authority. Sometimes on this set we go head to head, because everybody is at that age where they think that they are right, and no one is old enough to tell them that they aren’t.”

Relaxing in a director’s chair, Vonte Sweet, 21, who plays Caine’s Muslim friend, said “If (the directors) aren’t 30 or 40 years old, you are going to talk to them like they are one of your homeboys,” he said, rubbing his finger over a fake cut on his cheek. “When I first started working with them I didn’t treat them the way I should treat a director because they were my own age. So I had to get myself together and realize that they were the directors--I had to give them the respect they deserved.”

As filming entered the final week, the brothers seemed to have settled that issue of respect from the cast and crew. But the two were just starting to gear up for another battle--setting themselves apart from other young black directors. In preparation, they set out the differences between their work and films by John Singleton, the director of “Boyz N the Hood,” and Spike Lee.

“This film is the flip side to ‘Boyz N the Hood,’ ” Allen said, his voice filled with unabashed confidence. “ ‘Boyz’ was a great film about father and son relationships, while our movie is about those guys who didn’t have fathers. It is that simple. We aren’t going to college with this one, we are going to the streets.”

Albert rang in with a supportive “That’s right.” He also said they see their roles as directors differently than, for example, Spike Lee.

“Our film comes before us, we don’t come before our film, which is a mistake a lot of black filmmakers commit,” he said. “I’m not trying to strike at them at all, but a lot of directors try to sell themselves before they sell their film.”

He paused for emphasis. “Movies are art and they should stand on their own, and we come next if you want to ask us questions.”