The Notorious Scarface

by Natasha Wolff | October 20, 2014 2:00 pm

No matter where Al Pacino goes, he hears it. It could be New York City, Paris or Tel Aviv, but when he is spotted on the street, total strangers bellow lines from a movie released in 1983: Scarface. “Say hello to my leetle friend,” they yell. Or, “I always tell the truth—even when I lie.” Pacino is the star of more than 40 films and has been nominated for eight Academy Awards, but the role for which he is best known around the world, the performance that is perhaps the most imitated in the history of film, is still Tony “Scarface” Montana, Cuban refugee turned Miami drug lord.

And Pacino is fine with that.

“I always knew there was a pulse in Scarface that kept it beating,” he says. For years, Pacino was one of the few who believed in the film. Scarface was released to mostly bad reviews and indifference from the industry and the public. It took 20 years for it to become one of the most-watched films of all time—beloved by rappers, bankers and college students alike. And for the next decade it stayed popular: Millions of DVD copies have been sold around the world. There are video games and limited-edition boxed sets. Tributes range from comic books and posters to serious works of nonfiction.

This year, as Scarface reaches its 30-year anniversary, there’s talk of a remake from Universal Pictures. But before anybody tries to reimagine the film, it’s time to reveal what took place behind the scenes of the making of Pacino’s movie: the reversals of fortune, fears, rivalries, shouting matches and poor treatment of women that mirrored what would appear on the big screen. For all the turmoil, a powerful story emerged in Scarface, one that struck a deeper chord in society than almost any other piece of pop culture.

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Al Pacino as Tony Montana in Scarface

When Al Pacino was growing up in the South Bronx during the 1940s, his grandfather often talked about Howard Hawks’ violent gangster classic Scarface. Paul Muni played the part of a brutal, vicious Italian 
immigrant hood bearing a scar who prowled the streets of Chicago with a machine gun cradled in his arms and rose to the top of the bootleg-liquor business at the height of Prohibition.

Pacino never forgot his grandfather’s description of Scarface, but he didn’t actually see the 1932 movie until he caught it at a Los Angeles revival house in 1974.

“It was the first time in my life that I was blown away by a performance,” the actor says. “It was almost—uplifting.”

Pacino phoned his friend and former manager Martin Bregman in New York City and told him they had to remake Scarface.

Bregman, who had produced two of Pacino’s most memorable hits, Dog Day Afternoon and Serpico, had, by an odd quirk of fate, just seen Hawks’ Scarface on late-night TV and independently decided it would be “a great part for Al to play—the rise and fall of an American gangster,” he says. “I realized what Al could bring to it. He’d never had the chance to express that steely, streetwise quality he had. Even in The Godfather he was inscrutable—a rich man’s son, not a street gangster like Scarface.”

When it came time to find a screenwriter, Bregman approached Oliver Stone, who was not that interested at first. He didn’t want to write a gangster remake or deal with Prohibition. But Stone was, as he put it, “in a tough place.” According to Bregman, Stone took the assignment because he needed the money.

After Dog Day Afternoon’s Sidney Lumet agreed to direct, Stone got more excited, especially when Lumet suggested setting the remake in present-day Miami and transforming the character of Scarface into a Cuban refugee.

In 1980 the Marielitos were in the news. Following a tense diplomatic standoff with the United States, Cuba’s Fidel Castro opened the port of Mariel to anyone who wanted to leave. Within months, 125,000 Cubans landed in South Florida, crammed into some 3,000 boats. It soon became clear that Castro had forced boat owners to carry with them not just decent, hardworking Cuban families but thousands of “undesirables.” About 25,000 Marielitos had criminal records.

Stone was edgy and hyper, a shaggy-haired Yale dropout and Vietnam vet, a workaholic who by his own admission was pretty “drugged up.” In 1979 his screenplay for Midnight Express had won an Oscar, and for a while he’d been “like on a magic carpet,” living intensely all the fantasies he’d ever heard about Hollywood partying.

Stone stayed in Florida for weeks, getting to know both sides of the drug trade, law enforcement and gangsters. He met street hustlers—the men and women, mostly Colombian, who peddled drugs on the sandy beaches near the Fontainebleau hotel—and so-called banditos who unloaded cargo off the various Keys.

He took copious notes and came up with sketches for some pretty nasty characters, like “Omar,” an acne-scarred creep and coke-head, and “Lopez,” a half-Hispanic, half-Jewish hood who had become one of the richest and most powerful drug lords in Miami. Both would figure prominently in the script, as would a paunchy, corrupt cop. Not to mention some powerful South American families that manufactured cocaine.

Soon Bregman joined Stone in Miami and accompanied him when he went to speak to the authorities. “I was absolutely stunned,” Bregman says. He had assumed the drug business was big, “but when the U.S. attorney general told us cocaine was a hundred-billion-dollar-a-year industry, I thought I hadn’t heard right. ‘One hundred million dollars?’ I repeated. ‘No,’ he corrected me. ‘One hundred billion.’ ”

NEXT: “I wrote all of Scarface as a farewell to drugs, really.”[1]

“Tony and his colleagues lived on the edge all the time. Violence could explode at any moment,” says screenwriter Oliver Stone

In Miami and Palm Beach in the 1980s, “it was like the Wild West,” Bregman says. But the filmmakers found the cops very cooperative—and competitive, too. Who could come up with the best anecdotes? They loved the idea of helping out a big movie that starred Al Pacino.

The police gave Stone endless case histories to read of murders committed over drugs. “Really horrific stuff,” Stone says. He incorporated many real-life details into his screenplay, including the infamous sequence when Tony is double-crossed with a chain saw in a Miami hotel room.

“Colombians did use chainsaws,” Stone said in a telephone interview from L.A. “They were the most blood-thirsty. They would kill entire families of drug pushers if they informed. Colombians were the most secretive.”

As part of his research, Stone traveled to Peru and Ecuador. “It was scary; my life was on the line.” In Bimini, in the Bahamas, he almost got killed. Most of his research took place after midnight and lasted until dawn: “That’s not a very safe time to be out alone when you’re dealing with guys who might have second thoughts about you after they decide they might have told you too much.”

The experience in Bimini put Stone in touch with fear. “Fear is the essence of Scarface. Tony and his colleagues lived on the edge all the time. Violence could explode at any moment. Fear, combating it and confronting it, like I had in Vietnam.”

Stone says he stopped doing drugs the day he finished his research and flew to Paris with his wife. They took an apartment and stayed there for six months.

“The heating was poor, but the food was good, and I had a whole new set of friends who were drug-free. I wrote all of Scarface there as a farewell to drugs, really.” He’d never worked so hard, he says: “Six or seven drafts.”

What emerged was a fairly schematic updating of the Howard Hawks original, the rise and fall of a punk with a 1980s twist. It started off with the sadistic murder Tony and his pal commit in the refugee camp in order to buy their freedom and get green cards.

“It was all terrific,” Pacino says of the script Stone turned in. “Explosive. Powerful. I felt that this Scarface was a piece of so many different kind of gangsters, a collective. In Oliver’s script, Tony was a renegade—angry, vindictive, weirdly funny. Out of control. And those lines of dialogue, like, ‘Who do I trust? ME!’ ”

Lumet, though, thought Stone’s screenplay was “corny.” He disliked the suggestion of incest (which was also part of the 1932 film). He wanted to introduce politics into the screenplay and thought that it needed to explore the CIA’s connection to drugs. Lumet said Stone’s version read too much like a comic strip, Bregman says.

Stone was devastated.

Bregman says, “Sidney wanted to make a different film from the film we wanted to make. He wanted to make a political film. We wanted the make it larger than life, more extreme. Exaggerated. Oliver Stone had achieved that in his script.”

Undaunted, Bregman called in director Brian De Palma, whose earlier films Carrie and Dressed to Kill had been great, nasty entertainments. “Brian really knows how to exploit the audience,” Bregman says. “He uses their fears and their desires to unify his films.” As soon as De Palma read the script, he was sold on Stone’s approach to the material. He says, “The theme reminded me of John Houston’s Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Man driven by greed into a homicidal paranoia.” In Sierra Madre, three drifters sell their souls on a quest for gold. “Gold was now cocaine, De Palma says.

NEXT: “Sometimes making a film is like going to war.”[2]

Michelle Pfeiffer as Elvira Hancock

Casting started in 1982 and went on for weeks, “because we wanted Al to be surrounded by the very best actors,” Bregman says. Robert Loggia, F. Murray Abraham and Harris Yulin won important parts. Ultimately the youthful Steven Bauer (then married to Melanie Griffith) was cast as Pacino’s loyal friend Manny. He was a bilingual Cuban-American and brought to the part “a nifty mixture of businesslike murder and lover-boy sweetness,” as film critic Pauline Kael would later write.

Michelle Pfeiffer, then 23, recalls auditioning over and over again for the part of Elvira, Tony’s fragile, coked-up wife. Pfeiffer, who had not that long ago been bagging groceries at a supermarket, says she auditioned for Scarface so many times she was sick of it, and “then they stopped calling me, and I wanted to forget about it.”

But she was called back to screen-test with Pacino: “I was petrified. I vomited before I went out on the set—I mean, he was one of the biggest stars in the world. I was just beginning.” They did a marvelous, intense scene together from the screenplay, she says—the one in the expensive restaurant where Elvira ends up walking out on Tony. “I was so keyed up my arms went flying and I broke a glass and cut Al. There was blood all over the place. I was sure I’d lost my chance.” But a couple of days later, her agent phoned to tell her the part was hers.

Pacino had been initially dead set against Pfeiffer as had Universal; they thought she was too inexperienced. But Bregman fought for her. He thought she was the best choice. He phoned Pacino and asked him if he wanted to see her screen test but Pacino said, “No, I trust you,” and he hung up.

The cast rehearsed for an entire month in California and New York. By fall 1982 the production was poised to start filming in Florida, but suddenly there were problems with the Cuban community in Miami. Opposition to the project was growing. According to Bregman, no matter how much he argued and pleaded that a great many Cubans would be employed in the production and that the movie wasn’t all negative, the locals wouldn’t be swayed. Bregman was physically threatened and hired a bodyguard armed with a machine gun. The last straw came when a Miami city commissioner demanded that the script be changed to make Pacino’s drug lord a spy sent by Castro to corrupt America.

The production shifted to Los Angeles and Santa Barbara, and the crew made the most of the second-choice locations. The refugee internment camp underneath the Miami freeway was re-created between the intersection of the Santa Monica and the Harbor freeways. Scenes set in Miami’s bustling Little Havana were shot instead in L.A.’s Little Tokyo, where the crew erected storefronts and Spanish-language billboards and used an evocative mural of the Miami skyline.

Pacino worked day and night with a dialogue coach to perfect a Cuban accent. He also spent hours with the makeup man, developing the scar. “I didn’t want it to be too big. I figured the guy was good with a knife. I imagine he might have been nicked during a fights, so I had two scars, one across the cheek and the other above the eyebrow. I liked that, because it suggested a chaotic wildness in the guy.”

In Santa Barbara the production rented a huge estate, a fortress-like Xanadu complete with a sunken bath and a private zoo where Tony Montana kept his pet tiger. Scenic designer Fernando Scarfiotti’s biggest triumph was creating the “Babylon Club,” a lavish fun spot for drug dealers and their friends. The place, built on one of Hollywood’s largest sound stages, was filled with tropical plants, gushing fountains and erotic Greek and Roman nude statues. The pink and blue neon lighting was so bright it hurt your eyes. “I wanted to do it all in Technicolor,” De Palma jokes.

According to Michelle Pfeiffer, “Brian could be stylistically obsessive.” Most of the time she had to slink around in glistening satins and sparkling jewels. “I was objectified. Not a hair could be out of place.” Once, she had a bruise on her leg and De Palma made her take off her panty hose and put makeup on the bruise to cover it. “He wanted no imperfections.”

Pfeiffer adds, “I was terrified all the time. I couldn’t speak to Al [off the set]; we were both too shy. It was like pulling teeth to say one word to each other. And then the subject matter in the script was so dark. There had to be a coldness in the relationship between Elvira and Tony.”

She goes on to say that she and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio were ignored by the mostly male cast: “All the guys were very macho, laughing and joking among themselves; we were never included.” She says she noticed a big difference between Pacino’s temperament when they worked together on Scarface and then, eight years later, on Frankie and Johnnie. In the later movie, Pfeiffer says, “He was a happier person.”

Occasionally during filming, shouting matches ensued, with Pacino and De Palma and Stone and Bregman all jumping in. “Al had all sorts of ideas about how things should be done, and so did I,” De Palma says. “But we worked it out. Sometimes he was right; sometimes I was right. But a lot of screaming and fighting did go on.”

A member of the cast who wants to remain nameless says, “The show was commandeered by Al. He was the real power. Brian had to listen to him in terms of acting values. We didn’t do De Palma’s version of Scarface, we did Al Pacino’s version—and don’t let anyone tell you differently.”

And then there was Stone, who would barrel onto the Universal soundstage every day. He was possessive about his screenplay—he was worried about cuts and changes and what he felt were differences of interpretation.

One evening after work, De Palma, Bregman and Pacino sat in a darkened screening room with Stone, who suddenly started talking back to the screen, “yelling stuff like, ‘What kind of dress does Michelle have on?’ and ‘Where the fuck did that line come from?’ ” Bregman says. Stone was not allowed back to see rushes again.

“Sometimes making a film is like going to war,” Bregman says.

In the last weeks, in spite of continued death threats, the cast and crew finally did go to back to Florida. There they shot the last scenes, in which Tony, high on coke, has a spectacular shoot-out with a Bolivian hit squad—and is finally killed, in a great burst of blood and smoke and noise, and plunges to his death in an ornate fountain.

“Al was on a rampage,” one of the actors remembers. “He’s yelling and screaming, ‘Say hello to my leetle friend,’ as he brandishes that bazooka-like machine gun—he seemed to go absolutely crazy all alone in that vast mansion with the mounds of cocaine on his desk.” At one point, Pacino gripped the barrel of his machine gun and it was so hot it gave him second-degree burns. He landed in the hospital, shutting down production for 14 days.

Throughout the whole dramatic shoot, Pacino stayed away from the rest of the cast. “Al didn’t talk to anybody except me,” Bauer says. “And then when he had to kill me in the movie, he stopped talking to me.”

Pacino says now, “As you do this more and more—acting, that is—you don’t mix up your parts and yourself so much.”

* * * *

NEXT: “Tony Montana is the antihero contemporary kids identify with.”[3]

Scarface tanked at the box office; the $25 million picture earned only $44 million during its first theatrical run and then seemed to melt away.

“I frankly couldn’t understand it,” Pacino says.

Pauline Kael of The New Yorker called it “a long druggy spectacle…manic yet exhausting.” Rex Reed said, “Noisy, grim. Ultimately, it makes you feel mugged.”

Fortunately, the public didn’t listen to the critics. Thanks to cable and video and an enthusiastic response in Europe and the Middle East, Scarface gradually morphed into a cult hit.

At the start of the 1990s, Pacino began receiving more and more residual checks for Scarface. Whenever he was filming in Europe, people would come up to him and say, “Hey, Tony Montana!” Hip-hop was flourishing—as was the crack trade. For a lot of rappers who came up in that era, the movie seemed to embody their moment. In 2003, Sean “Diddy” Combs said he’d seen the movie 63 times. Rapper Trick Daddy put Venetian blinds with Tony Montana’s face on them over his bed and the band Blink 182 claimed it took its name from the number of times Pacino’s character says “fuck” in the film.

“Scarface is a cautionary tale for poor guys who suddenly strike it rich,” says Combs. “Montana violated his own maxim—don’t get high on your own supply. He was destroyed by his own arrogance.”

For a number of years, USC Professor Todd Boyd lectured on Scarface in his course on hip hop culture. “Scarface did everything so big,” Boyd told the L.A. Times. “I know people who modeled their weddings after his, anyone at the bottom of the totem pole wanted to emulate Montana smoking that cigar in his sunken tub.”

The film’s appeal crosses many boundaries. A Wall Street businessman once told Pacino that the line he and his colleagues love best is, “Why don’t you try sticking your head up your ass, see if it fits?” Millions of students, everywhere from Groton to the Sorbonne, own the film. Since Universal released a two-disc digitally remastered DVD in the fall of 2003, it has sold 4 million units worldwide and is going strong. A theatrical re-release for two weeks the same year played to sold-out theaters. In 2011, a Blu-ray edition was released.

Brian De Palma has a theory as to why this film has become a classic. “Tony Montana is the antihero contemporary kids identify with,” says the director. “He’s about greed and power and self-destruction in the land of opportunity, unfettered by morality.”

Still, there are many movies about a hustler who gets rich but then loses it all. Why is Scarface in a category by itself? According to Pacino, it has to do with the “two-dimensional” essence of a man inspired by a blimp floating across the Miami sky flashing the words, “The World Is Yours.” Pacino says: “Brian thought of it as an opera, and so did I. An opera in the Brechtian sense, with an exaggerated sense of style. What you see is what you get—that was the idea. It wasn’t about why he dies but what he does, period.

“Tony Montana,” adds Pacino, “was never meant to be reflective.”

MORE:

Robert De Niro on Pfeiffer, The Godfather and Gandolfini
[4]The Untold History of the National Enquirer[5]
Secrets of Hollywood’s Casting Business[6]

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