©2024 Nat Segaloff

The print edition of my exhaustive history of both Howard Hawks’s 1932 Scarface and Brian DePalma’s brilliant 1983 remake is available in print from Kensington Publishers. This spoken counterpart from Tantor brings both films to life for fans who want to enjoy it on the go or just hanging in the crib remembering what it was like the first time they saw Tony Montana do his thing.

Scarface was a phenomenon. The saga of Cuban refugee Tony Montana (Al Pacino) and his friend Manny Ribera (Steven Bauer) rising through the cocaine trade in South Florida in the 1980s was always a great movie, but it took years for it to find its most appreciative audience. When it did, it exploded: Scarface clothes, posters, do-dads, video games, and even a hip-hop artist who changed his name in homage.

Why does Scarface continue to resonate forty years after its release?

For starters, it’s not about drugs. Well, okay, it is about drugs, but it also isn’t; it’s really about American capitalism, supply and demand, enforcement, chicanery, and, especially, competition. Some people even say it’s really about Hollywood.

At its base, it’s the story of a smart man who does dumb things, a man whose exploits are a mixture of desperation and ambition. It just happens that what he does is illegal. Oliver Stone caught that irony in his script (which he wrote while waiting for Platoon to get financed), and everyone involved with the film shared a commitment to excellence.

I lost count of how many interviews I did about the book when it came out and am still doing. The one thing I constantly heard from everyone I spoke to is how much they loved Scarface because it was so over-the-top. And it’s true. Its characters are larger than life, the violence is beyond description, and the language—well, I’m looking forward to hearing how Johnny deals with it, since Tantor is producing it un-censored.

Going back nearly a hundred years to its source, the 1932 Scarface, which starred Paul Muni, was an original film, but not an original story. Based on the novel by Armitage Trail, it was more or less about the life and sordid career of Al Capone, the Chicago gang boss who ran the Windy City in the 1920s. King of the bootleg booze trade, Capone had his gangland rivals wiped out and bribed enough city officials to keep control of the illegal liquor trade. In the end, he was undone, not by a rival, but by failure to pay his income taxes.

In fictionalizing Capone’s seamy story, Trail added a family conflict, a backstory in World War I, and a brother who was on the right side of the law. When Ben Hecht wrote the script for Howard Hawks to direct for producer Howard Hughes, he stripped the story to its bare essentials, threw in the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, and created a sensation.

Al Pacino happened to see a revival of the 1932 film when he was in Hollywood in the early 1980s and decided he wanted to star in a remake. Pacino being Pacino, he called his manager/producer Martin Bregman, and Bregman called Universal Pictures (who happened to have just acquired the rights to the 1932 movie), and within hours they had a deal.

It turned out that that was the easy part. As I tell in my book, getting the film made after that was an adventure in Hollywood politics. The result, as we all know, was worth it.

Say Hello to My Little Friend: A Century of Scarface answers just about every question for people who already know a lot about the movie but want to hear more. It was a privilege to be able to write it and to speak to some of the people who worked on the film, and that’s what listeners will hear when they embark on the audio book of the story behind the story of Scarface.