Scarface
Cocaine-fueled gangland epic thrives by virtue of its vigorous cast
Video Days is Mad About Michelle in the month of April, with ten films starring leading lady Michelle Pfeiffer, born April 29, 1958 in Santa Ana, California and celebrating her 67th birthday this month.
SCARFACE (1983) is a film that puts its shoes on before its socks. Characters aren’t fleshed out to cushion its critical messaging. Instead, its political themes suffocate the characters. This is unfortunate because the movie has some very large shoes to fill, with the leading man from The Godfather (1972) and The Godfather Part II (1974), the screenwriter/ soon-to-be director of Platoon (1986) and Wall Street (1987), and the director of Dressed To Kill (1980) and Blow Out (1981), all tackling a remake of the gangland classic directed by Howard Hawks.
The genesis of what audiences know today as Scarface was Al Pacino, who while in Los Angeles in January 1980 went to see a movie at the Tiffany Theatre, a revival house in West Hollywood. The film was Scarface (1932), adapted by screenwriter Ben Hecht from a 1929 novel of the same name by pulp fiction writer Maurice R. Coons (publishing under the pseudonym “Armitage Trail” in the event his fictitious gang leader offended anyone, namely Al Capone, at large and running the Chicago Outfit at that time). Pacino was awestruck by Paul Muni’s performance as Antonio "Tony" Camonte, an Italian immigrant who pulls himself out of the gutter and is returned there after leading a life of crime. Pacino was inspired to take it to the limit playing a gangster like Muni and proposed a remake of Scarface to Martin Bregman, his manager since 1968 and the producer of Serpico (1974) and Dog Day Afternoon (1975). They wanted playwright/ screenwriter David Rabe to adapt a script. To get him, Bregman called director Brian De Palma.
De Palma had just spent a year collaborating with Rabe on an adaptation of the book Prince of the City before United Artists dismissed them in favor of a version director Sidney Lumet developed with his own writer. Rabe hopped aboard Scarface on the condition that he’d work with De Palma, but if asked to take a meeting with Bregman and Pacino, he’d rather quit. Rabe and De Palma’s first draft was set in Chicago of 1932, and when Bregman summoned the pair for a meeting to discuss it, Rabe quit. Standing in solidarity with his writer, De Palma exited too. Bregman turned to Oliver Stone, the screenwriter who’d labored over an adaptation of the Ron Kovic memoir Born on the Fourth of July for Bregman and Pacino before financing difficulties led Pacino to drop out. After the poor reception of his directorial debut The Hand (1981), Stone needed the work, but uninterested in generating another Mafia picture, passed on penning a remake of Scarface. To direct, Bregman initially hired the director of Serpico and Dog Day Afternoon: Sidney Lumet.
Lumet’s epiphany was to set a remake of Scarface in present day Miami, focusing on the prohibition of drugs, with a Cuban immigrant who comes to America as part of the 1980 Mariel boatlift, in which Fidel Castro released hundreds of convicts among a mass exodus of Cubans seeking asylum in the United States. Stone now heard a movie he wanted to see, a geopolitically themed one about the cocaine trade that would touch on the CIA’s involvement. In the summer of 1981, Stone agreed to write Scarface. Bregman took the screenwriter to Miami and Fort Lauderdale to introduce him to local law enforcement, as well as the DEA. This led Stone to state and federal prosecutors, who provided background on what they were fighting. Stone next met with the defense attorneys representing those characters. His contacts then directed him to Bimini, where Stone made contact with middle management types smuggling cocaine on cigarette boats eighty miles west to Miami. A cocaine user since 1979, Stone was able to ingratiate himself reasonably well in the scene. Stoned throughout his research, he decamped to Paris–where knew no one and figured cocaine would be harder to acquire–to write sober.
Stone’s draft–loaded to the eyeballs with what the screenwriter thought of as “over-the-top realism”–proved too extreme for Lumet. Martin Bregman returned to Brian De Palma to direct. Bregman represented Alan Alda, who’d starred in, wrote and/or directed The Seduction of Joe Tynan (1979) and The Four Seasons (1981), prestige moneymakers for Universal Pictures, whose president Ned Tanen agreed to bankroll Scarface at a production budget of roughly $15 million. Al Pacino committed to playing Tony Montana. For the gangster’s moll Elvira, Stone had written the character as an upper class lady from New York slumming in South Beach with drug smugglers. He championed Glenn Close for the part. Bregman vetoed this and based on her chemistry with Pacino in auditions, cast a younger and less experienced actor, Michelle Pfeiffer. With Steven Bauer, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, Robert Loggia, F. Murray Abraham, Harris Yulin, Paul Shenar (as Sosa) and Mark Margolis as the Bolivian landowner’s hatchet man (credited as “Shadow”), De Palma and his production team arrived in Miami in the summer of 1982 to scout locations.
The biggest obstacle in making Scarface was a controversy ginned up by Miami City Commissioner Demetrio Perez Jr., wary that from what he’d heard of the film, the image of Cuban Americans was under attack. In a written request to De Palma, Perez lobbied that Tony Montana be rewritten as a Communist infiltrator and that the efforts of anti-Castro activists be addressed in 20% of the script. While De Palma had hired a Mexican-American cinematographer (John A. Alonzo), no one took the councilman’s script input seriously, and a few newspaper columnists picked up the mantle of criticizing the manner in which Hollywood was set to depict their city and its largest ethnic community (if its critics had bothered to read the script, they’d have noted that Tony is a free market capitalist who despises the Communist regime, and that even as an immigrant, holds particular disgust for Colombians, not Cubans). In response to the backlash, Bregman pulled the production from Miami, then reconsidered, but Ned Tanen, citing the safety of the cast and crew, blinked. An estimated $10 million earmarked for the South Florida economy was moved to Southern California, where shooting commenced in November 1982.
Freedomtown was shot in downtown Los Angeles under the Santa Monica Freeway (I-10) and Harbor Freeway (I-110) interchange. Exteriors for Mama Montana’s home were filmed in Torrance. The two lavish drug lord estates were shot in the Montecito area, Sosa’s palace known locally as Casa Bienvenida, and Tony’s mansion as El Fureidis. Interiors were shot on sound stages at Universal Studios, including the motel chainsaw massacre and the climactic shootout, as well as interiors of the Babylon Club. Once the furor had died down, the production sneaked back into Miami for two weeks of location work. The pool area where Manny demonstrates to Tony how to seduce American women is the Fontainebleau Hilton Resort and Spa in Miami. The exterior of the “Sun Ray Apartments” where Chico is dismembered is in the 700 block of Ocean Drive in Miami Beach. It’s since been demolished to make way for a CVS Pharmacy, but a plaque outside the store commemorates Scarface filming there.
Getting Scarface distributed ignited another controversy. The version Brian De Palma submitted to the MPAA received an X-rating. So did his second cut. And his third. In the time since the last major motion picture had been released in the U.S. with an X-rating (Last Tango In Paris in 1972), most theater chains now refused to exhibit movies prohibited to viewers 17 and under, while newspapers and radio uniformly refused to advertise them, regardless if the name Marlon Brando or Al Pacino was on the marquee. De Palma had endured all he could from the ratings board and restoring Scarface to the first cut he’d submitted to the MPAA, turned the film over to Universal, leaving it up to the studio to cut a version that could secure an R-rating. Instead, Universal appealed the MPAA’s decision. On November 8, 1983, twenty film distributors and exhibitors met in New York to convene a hearing over whether the film’s X-rating should be upheld. De Palma, Bregman and Universal’s new president Robert Rehme faced Richard D. Heffner, chairman of the Office of Code Administration at the MPAA.
By a vote of 17-3, Universal won the appeal, allowing De Palma’s cut to be released under an R-rating. Though the jury had a vested interest in getting Scarface into theaters without the stain of censorship messing its commercial prospects, the decision was a victory for the filmmakers and the First Amendment. Few newspaper critics gave Scarface a ringing endorsement. Two notable exceptions were Vincent Canby in the New York Times and Roger Ebert (giving the film four stars) in the Chicago Sun Times. On his syndicated television program, Gene Siskel praised the film’s action choreography but cited Tony Montana for being a bore, turning thumbs down. Ebert credited the film as a return to greatness for Al Pacino. Two other influential critics–Pauline Kael in the New Yorker and Andrew Sarris in the Village Voice–deplored the movie. Scarface opened on December 9, 1983 in 996 theaters in the U.S. It proved popular, remaining near the top of the box office for six weeks and among the top ten grossing films for nine of ten weeks. Its cost, controversy and 170-minute running time gave it the taint of being a commercial draw.
Released nationally on VHS in the summer of 1984–an uncommonly narrow window for a film to hop from theaters to home video at that time–as a two-tape set, Scarface became the first movie to sell 100,000 videotapes. When Oliver Stone began researching Wall Street, young men in the financial services sector quoted dialogue from Scarface back to him. Hip hop artists like Geto Boys and Public Enemy began mimicking or sampling the film’s dialogue in their music, in 1990. They were the first of many. In New Jack City (1991), the Harlem drug lord Nino Brown (Wesley Snipes) screens Scarface in his penthouse. For the film’s 20th anniversary release on DVD, Def Jam Records produced a documentary short (Scarface: Origins of a Hip-Hop Classic) in which numerous musicians including Nas and Snoop Dogg discussed the movie. Stone traced the appeal of Tony Montana to the character being a little guy standing up to the big, legitimized crooks: bankers, corrupt law enforcement, the U.S. intelligence community. He suggested that if Tony hadn’t stepped on toes, he’d have become a character in Wall Street, managing an investment portfolio.
Scarface leads with an idea: a Nobody claws his way from the jailhouse to the penthouse with his word and his balls, only to be brought down by his own appetite. This was the plot of the Howard Hawks film and many gangster movies since, but was brilliantly innovated here to address the prohibition of drugs, updating yesterday’s immigrant class (Italians) with a newer one (Cubans). Everything in the movie serves that conceit, for better and for worse. Oliver Stone blows open the gangster movie of the 1930s by documenting the South Florida underworld of the 1980s, fueled by narcotic-induced paranoia and military grade weapons (or power tools), a bad combination that resulted in never before seen violence and chaos. As a director, Stone’s technical wizardry would feast on big subjects, with data zipping at the viewer from all angles. He wouldn’t have done as fine a job as Brian De Palma directing Scarface in 1983, but might have by 1989. De Palma is more attuned to how things look or feel, Miami brighter and wider open than New York, with white suits and a leopard-skin Cadillac and coke music (by the godfather of disco, composer Giorgio Mordoer). De Palma is a good tandem with Stone for scenes of business negotiation, where the threat of violence is usually in the background. What he doesn’t do is ask the extra question of how narcotics are getting to the U.S., who by and why.
Al Pacino excels at playing contemporary men and hit his first career peak as Tony Montana, holding the screen and playing a jungle animal to the hilt. Stone’s dialogue is sticky (“You need people like me. You need people like me so you can point your fucking fingers and say, ‘That's the bad guy.’ So, what that make you? Good?”). The last third of the movie starts to spiral along with its title character. The catalyst that precipitates Tony’s downfall–his unwillingness to kill women or children–doesn’t mesh with the psychotic individualism exhibited by Montana up to that point. That’s a minor complaint, because by this time, Scarface has turned into a comedy, parody-proof due to how well the movie is parodying itself, particularly its take on greed. But characters who call Tony a “space cadet” and “boring” are right, De Palma and perhaps Stone uninterested in showing any other dimension to the character. De Palma’s mastery of information reveal isn’t very well suited to material like this with an invulnerable main character. We don’t think any harm will come to Tony through the first two and a half hours and don’t care if we’re wrong. The film’s saving grace is its cast, everyone opposite Pacino going toe-to-toe with him, especially Michelle Pfeiffer, who disappears from the movie without any fanfare, neglecting an exit as strong as her entrance.
Video rental category: Action/ Adventure
Special interest: Gangland Hit
Say hello to my little friend! Don’t know why Joe, but I loved this movie! As always, great information as to how it came to be, and all those involved… Great job! CPZ