Blowin’ Up on the Big Screen : Hip-hop movies are relatively inexpensive to make and they enjoy a dependable audience among urban youths--at least for now.

If it took first-time screenwriter Mark Brown only a month to write “How to Be a Player,” the comedic tale of a smooth operator juggling five girlfriends, it took less than a week for the onetime actor’s new career to take off. Six days after he handed the script to his agent in December, Island Pictures’ six-figure bid beat out 20th Century Fox, as well as operations such as Warner Bros., which had expressed interest in the project.

“The studios are now paying attention to the proverbial ‘hip-hop nation’--a significant part of which is urban youth,” said Brown, 28, who has been asked to rewrite two other hip-hop comedies, one for Fox and one for Columbia, and turned down additional work, including a TV pilot, for lack of time. “With the help of MTV and the video market, a genre that was once a niche has crossed over. You go to Beverly Hills and see young white guys with baggy pants and the new Air Jordan tennis shoes, caps turned backward, saying, ‘Yo, yo, yo.’ ”

Eyeing the $27 million taken in by the $4.2-million “Friday” last year, the $9.6-million opening of “Don’t Be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood” in January and the current box-office success of Martin Lawrence’s “A Thin Line Between Love & Hate,” Hollywood is stepping up its pursuit of the urban youth market. Generally accompanied by lucrative rap/funk soundtracks (“Don’t Be a Menace . . . “ should hit platinum in the next few weeks), these low-budget projects with predominantly African American casts are a way of counteracting soaring production and talent costs. They’re also a means of reaching black teens who, studio marketers say, head for the movies more frequently than any other group.

“Hip-hop comedies are regarded as an area of profitability and, for a company like ours, provide synergy in the soundtrack as well,” said Barry Josephson, president of worldwide production at Columbia Pictures. “With ‘grass-roots’ casting, actors often drawn from MTV or HBO’s ‘Def Comedy Jam,’ they’re a great platform for new talent. If the budget is kept to $5 [million] or $6 million, they can break even with a domestic gross of $10 [million] or $12 million. The downside isn’t bad and the upside is great.”

In early June, Polygram-owned Island Pictures plans to start shooting “B.A.P.s (Black American Princesses),” a comedy about two Harlem women who come to Beverly Hills in search of a wealthy husband, starring Halle Berry and directed by Robert Townsend. Two months later, the $5-million “How to Be a Player,” the feature debut of music video director Brett Ratner, will get underway. Columbia is producing the $6-million “Booty Call,” a film about the comic misadventures of a guy trying to bed his girlfriend for the first time, set to go in mid-May. And at 20th Century Fox, the Fox 2000 division is developing “Separated at Birth,” a comedy about two brothers, one black and one white, while the studio’s family unit is fine-tuning “Homeboy,” the story of two brothers adopting a 7-foot white youth who they think will be the next Larry Bird.

As further evidence of an increasingly packed field, Freaknik--the annual spring break festivities in Atlanta for African American college students--is the focus of competing “Animal House”-type projects in development at New Line Cinema and Beacon Communications.

While some say that hip-hop comedies are often “substandard” and inadequately marketed, others find them a welcome relief from the violence-laden “ ‘hood” movies that have predominated in years past.

“ ‘Waiting to Exhale’ reminded the industry that the African American market is not a monolith, that there are a lot of stories to be told,” said Caitlin Scanlon, vice president of production at Beacon, which is producing “B.B.Q. (Black Beauty Queens),” a story about a competitor in a black beauty pageant, for Columbia Pictures. “After a bit of a hip-hop glut next summer, I expect the urban comedies to become another staple of the movie business--just like ‘Uptown Saturday Night’ and ‘Car Wash’ were in the 1970s.”

For years, New Line dominated the hip-hop arena, a genre rejuvenated by the $2.5-million “House Party” (1990), which took in $26 million and spawned two successful sequels. The company’s “Talking Dirty After Dark” (1991) failed to ignite. But “Who’s the Man?” (1993) took in a respectable $17 million and “Friday”--a comedic look at the day in the life of a South-Central man (Ice Cube)--became one of 1995’s most profitable movies, relative to cost.

While there may be a built-in market domestically, these comedies are a much tougher sell abroad. “For every dollar a hip-hop comedy takes in in North America, it earns approximately 10 cents in the rest of the world combined,” said Mark Burg, president of Island Pictures, which produced the comedic “Strictly Business” and “Don’t Be a Menace . . . ,” before plunging into “Player” and “B.A.P.s.” “In terms of the bottom line, making a $10-million hip-hop comedy is like making a $20-million movie with foreign appeal. That’s why a $12-million picture like ‘B.A.P.s’ is much harder to get off the ground.”

The need to contain costs makes for “damaged” product with little likelihood of penetrating the mainstream, said Russell Simmons, chairman of Rush Communications, owner of Def Jam Records and Def Pictures.

“Crossover in black music is easy--white artists, in fact, have a harder time selling than the African American ones,” said Simmons, who is a producer of “How to Be a Player.” “But in movies, hip-hop comedies use young, untested directors and have no budget, no marketing, no quality control.”

Similar concerns are voiced by Doug McHenry and George Jackson (“House Party 2”), who consider themselves “pioneers” of the hip-hop industry. Their feature film career began with the 1985 “Krush Groove” (to which they’ll soon shoot a sequel for Warner Bros.) and took them most recently to “A Thin Line Between Love & Hate”--an $8.5-million picture they produced that has taken in an impressive $26.3 million during its first 19 days of release.

“Everyone thinks there’s a black gold rush, and Hollywood is engaged in strip-mining,” McHenry said. “But if these pictures aren’t done well, Hollywood will throw up its hands and say that hip-hop comedies are a bust, not a boom. The trouble is that the studios have less at stake in a hip-hop comedy than in a ‘Batman’ or a ‘Lethal Weapon.’ If one of them flops, there’s always a Tom Cruise film waiting in the wings. What they need are youth culture divisions, similar to the classics divisions they’ve set up. That would not only make for better movies but ensure constant product flow.”

Funding bad product will turn people off--a phenomenon reminiscent of the blaxploitation films of the 1970s, Jackson adds. “Unlike the record business which has a lot of African American managers and producers, the movie business is virtually all white,” he said. “Fools rush in . . . and if there’s a blatant attempt to capitalize on the genre instead of nurturing it, nothing will pan out.”

The genre can be profitable even if only African American audiences turn out, said New Line marketing president Chris Pula. But crossing over--and quality--is, without question, the goal. Ads are placed on “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air,” “Living Single,” “Martin” and “New York Undercover,” shows with mainstream as well as ethnic appeal.

“Blacks are no longer so underrepresented on the screen that they’ll come out and support anything,” Pula said. “And word of mouth spreads faster in the hip-hop community than in any other group. If a movie is a stinker, it hits the ground fast. If there’s a hungry niche, the challenge is playing ‘catch-up’ to find quality cooks to feed it. Fortunately, the amount of good material is growing, along with the competition.”

“Friday” director F. Gary Gray sees both sides of the issue. Like a number of the urban comedy directors, he came out of the music video arena and used hip-hop to break in.

“These movies are a double-edged sword,” Gray acknowledged. “Though any other comedy would have three times the budget and twice as long to shoot, I appreciated New Line giving me a shot. How often does anyone write a check like that to an unproven 23-year-old? Though I was besieged by hip-hop offers, I moved on to a $10-million drama and will be doing a $15-[million]-$20-million ’48 HRS.’-type action-comedy for TriStar. Hip-hop may be substandard, but it’s an invaluable steppingstone.”