The edges of the cinematic classic Scarface haven't softened over the years,
nor has it grown any less divisive. Here's the untold truth of one of the greatest,
bloodiest, most influential films of all time.
The movie that came to largely define Al Pacino's career likely would never have
happened if he'd just stayed home instead of going out one night to watch a movie.
Speaking with author Lawrence Grobel in an interview that
accompanied Scarface's Blu-ray release, Pacino said of the original 1932 film,
"I had heard about Scarface for a long time. [...] When I saw it,
it had a real feeling to it, a grand feeling, and it had a great performance by Paul Muni.
He did something different. I thought it would be interesting to do a remake
of this, [...] so I called (producer) Marty Bregman, and he saw it and got very excited."
Marty Bregman originally wanted Sidney Lumet, who'd directed Pacino in Dog Day Afternoon,
to make the movie. He also tried to get Oliver Stone to write the screenplay,
but Stone wasn't interested. In an interview with Creative Screenwriting, he explained,
"I didn't like the original movie that much, [...] and I had no desire to make another
Italian gangster picture because so many had been done so well, there would be no point to it."
A brilliant idea by Lumet to update the film's setting changed Stone's mind.
Pacino and Bregman had both envisioned the project as a period piece,
more of a straight remake of the original, but Lumet saw the story's potential to translate well
to what was going on in Florida at the time, turning it into a modern retelling of the
classic immigrant gangster tale first brought to the silver screen by Howard Hawks in 1932.
Stone said,
"Sidney had a great idea to take the 1930s American prohibition gangster movie
and make it into a modern immigrant gangster movie dealing with the same problems that we had then,
that we're prohibiting drugs instead of alcohol."
He added that the Cuban immigrants who were deported to the United States in 1981 had,
quote, "gained a lot of publicity for their open brazenness."
At the time, he said, many felt that Cuba's leader,
Fidel Castro, was, quote, "dumping all the criminals into the American system."
Stone and Bregman researched the rocky relationship between the Cuban immigrants
and the communities of Southern Florida, and Stone also traveled to the Caribbean
to document aspects of the drug trade, which he said was an interesting time.
He said,
"There's no law down there. They'll just shoot you in your hotel room. It got hairy."
"So, you got the money?”
“You got the stuff?"
In 2015, Stone spoke with Sabotage Times about his experience researching Scarface.
As it turned out, while he was one of the more qualified Hollywood screenwriters
that Marty Bregman could've picked to tackle the subject
he was also the last man who should've been diving headfirst into the drug trade.
He said,
"I was a cocaine addict for about two and a half years prior to writing Scarface. I
knew that world, the drug world of the early '80s, very well."
When it came time to write a draft of Scarface, Stone decided to move to Paris,
where he knew that getting access to the drug would be more difficult.
Speaking with Empire, the screenwriter said,
"I was doing cocaine during the research phase but then went cold turkey during the
writing in Paris. I knew I couldn't break the habit in Florida, LA, or New York."
Michelle Pfeiffer has been one of the biggest movie stars in the world for so long
that it's easy to forget that there was ever a time when she wasn't.
But at the time Bregman and Brian De Palma, who'd replaced the departed Lumet by this point,
were casting Scarface, she had only appeared in TV movies,
guest roles in series like CHiPs and Fantasy Island, and a handful of minor features.
Bregman had his sights on her for the part of Elvira, Tony's drug-addled but sharp-witted trophy
wife, from the beginning but he was the only one. Pacino preferred Glenn Close, while De Palma
and Bregman auditioned a laundry list of the hottest actresses in Hollywood at the time.
Among those to turn the part down were Kim Basinger, Melanie Griffith, and Rosanna Arquette.
In the end, Pfeiffer won out, and while she may have been a relative unknown,
her star power is obvious in the part.
"What do you do? You do drugs and you kill people? Oh, that's wonderful, Tony.
Real contribution to human history."
Scarface might've offered the definitive portrait of the neon,
drug-choked streets of Miami in the early '80s, but believe it or not,
the flick was only partially shot on location. The city of Miami wanted nothing to do with the movie,
as officials feared it would depict the city as a haven for organized crime and the drug trade.
The crew shot for only 12 days in Miami, mostly exteriors and pickup shots.
Bregman moved the production to LA for the bulk of shooting,
and many of the flick's most famous scenes including the opening Freedom Town riot
and the massive shootout at Tony's mansion at the film's end were shot there.
One scene that was shot in Miami was the infamous chainsaw scene, in which Tony's
friend Angel is murdered in the bathroom of a seedy apartment. The shoot took place at an
actual apartment building on Ocean Drive in Miami, one which regularly attracts throngs of film fans
even today. The exterior of the building was even preserved when it was converted to a CVS in 2017.
"Watch what happens to your friend.
You don't want this to happen to you, you hand me the money, okay?"
It ended up being quite fortuitous for at least one future filmmaker
that Scarface was shot in Miami. In the background of the scene at the
pool — the one in which Tony gives Manny the iconic 'power' speech :
"This country, you gotta make the money first. Then when you get the money, you get the power."
...a very young Brett Ratner can be seen.
Ratner said in an interview with Variety in 2007
that he skipped school to watch them shoot. When he bumped into Pacino years later,
he told Pacino that it was because of his inspiration that he became a director.
Explaining why, Ratner said,
"Because I saw you act,
and I could never be that good, so I wanted to be the guy who told you what to do."
The final few minutes of Scarface feature one of the most epic gunfights of all time a scene that's
so insane and bloody that even hardcore fans could be forgiven for not catching the sneakiest of all
cameos amid the chaos. That's because it happened not in front of the camera, but behind it.
Steven Spielberg, who just the year before had fielded what was then the highest-grossing picture
in history with E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, dropped by the Scarface set during one of the
days the climax was being filmed. Apparently just for grins, De Palma had him direct
one single shot, the one in which Tony's attackers first gain entrance to the mansion.
The infamous mansion scene is one of the craziest movie climaxes
ever put to film. And it's also notable for another reason. While filming the gunfight,
Pacino tripped and accidentally grabbed the barrel of a gun that had just been fired around 30 times,
injuring himself so badly it threatened to shut down the entire shoot.
Pacino was taken to the nearby Sherman Oaks Burn Center. The injury kept him out of action for
over a week, and there was even more bad luck. While the production was picking up
scenes in his absence, two stunt performers were hurt when a bomb prematurely exploded.
Not many films have ever been rated X for violence, but in the '80s, several pictures
came close and Scarface was among them. The MPAA ratings board wasn't exactly taken with the
picture as a whole, but it was the bloody scene with the chainsaw that caused them to initially
slap the film with the X. After two rounds of cuts to the scene, the ratings board still was unmoved,
and De Palma threatened to quit. Rather than bring in a different director to cut the film,
Universal Pictures appealed the board's decision.
Amazingly, they won the appeal, but then De Palma spoke up. The changes he had made
from the original cut were so slight, he argued, that he should be able to restore
them and still get the R rating. The board disagreed and required him to keep the cuts,
but De Palma got the last laugh. In a 2013 interview with The Talks, the director said,
"I was able to beat the ratings board with Scarface. Even though they rated it X,
I was able to appeal to the whole committee, and we got it passed.
There's a lot of controversy about how Scarface was edited, but in reality,
everything I cut out to appease the rating board I put back in, and that's what you see."
It may not shock you to know that upon Scarface's release,
many critics were disgusted with the movie. In a review, People magazine was merciless.
The critic wrote:
"Characterization and plot go out the window. Arms are cut off with chainsaws. [...] The
bloodbath that ends the film is an insult to everything De Palma has done before.
There is no style to this violence; everything seems to be in service of an Oscar-stalking
Pacino performance. His acting isn't acting; it's shameless showing off. So is the movie."
While the flick has obviously undergone a critical reappraisal since then, that was fairly typical of
reviews of the time. The great Roger Ebert, of course, saw the film for what it was.
In his four-star review, he wrote,
"Scarface understands this criminal personality, with its links between
laziness and ruthlessness, grandiosity and low self-esteem,
pipe dreams and a chronic inability to be happy. It's also an exciting crime picture,
in the tradition of the 1932 movie, [...] a wonderful portrait of a real louse."
Scarface is a film that is very much of its time, and this is never more true
than in the infamous montage sequence that occurs roughly midway through the picture.
As Tony builds his empire and begins rolling in the dough,
we're regaled with the insanely cheesy, disco-y strains of "Scarface (Push It to the Limit)."
The song is pure cheese, and the sequence in which it appears is so absurdly typical of '80s montage
sequences that it has become something of an inside joke. It's been used to comedically score
similar montages in shows like South Park, It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, and American Dad.
It's also been parodied countless times. Going back to the Scarface well,
South Park also took that route, employing an extremely similar original tune that was actually
called "Montage" in the episode "Asspen." So spot-on is the song that creators Trey
Parker and Matt Stone even used it again in the 2004 feature film Team America: World Police.
Today, Scarface is considered to be a classic and one of De Palma's best films, but it likely
wouldn't enjoy this reputation if not for a huge assist from the rap genre. Rap artists immediately
took to the film. It was released the same year as Grandmaster Melle Mel's "White Lines,"
a thematically similar work, and it's become inextricably linked with rap, sampled dozens of
times and referenced hundreds more. Perhaps the earliest adopters were the first incarnation of
Houston crew Geto Boys, who extensively sampled dialogue from the film on their 1988 debut
album Making Trouble. The trend would continue through the name change and a massive shakeup in
the group's lineup, and one of the group's rappers even goes by the moniker Scarface.
In particular, the film's most iconic line…
"Say hello to my little friend."
...has been firmly cemented in the public consciousness
almost solely due to its having been excessively sampled.
It almost goes without saying that rap's fascination with the movie
has gone a long way toward helping it remain in the public consciousness.
When Scarface was released on DVD in 2003, it logged the most advance orders ever at the time,
beating out the previous champ Spielberg's E.T. the Extra Terrestrial.
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