![]() ![]() Everyone was wild about it except Lumet, who departed the picture due to that old standby, “creative differences” all Bregman would say at the time was, “Lumet wanted to make one kind of movie and I wanted to make another.”Įnter Brian De Palma. “I don’t think my writing benefited from cocaine, but I did write Scarface completely sober.” He holed up in Paris to do so, away from the chemical temptations of Miami and L.A., and banged out a Stone special: big, boisterous, provocative, and operatic. “I started to hit the trail in ’79, and continued till ’82,” he told Seitz. Intrigued by the hook, Stone took the assignment and spent two months in South Florida doing research - and coke. A fifth of these Marielitos were rumored to be “undesirables,” petty thieves and worse, released from Cuban prisons and mental institutions and sent to the States as a middle finger from Castro. “Sidney’s idea,” which Stone adapted into the film’s opening crawl, went like this: In the spring of 1980, roughly 125,000 new Cuban exiles departed the Port of Mariel for the shores of Florida. Pacino at a Q&A after the film’s anniversary screening. I said, That’s interesting! Sidney’s idea was a good one.” But then Bregman came back to me and said, Sidney has a great idea - he wants to do it as a Marielito picture in Miami. “I didn’t want to do an Italian Mafia movie,” Stone tells Matt Zoller Seitz in the book The Oliver Stone Experience. Bregman had attempted to produce Stone’s Born on the Fourth of July screenplay for Pacino, so there was a relationship in place, but Stone was initially uninterested in Scarface. There’s a remake here.’” Whichever story is true, Bregman next reached out to Oliver Stone (then best known as the screenwriter of Midnight Express) about penning the script. “I said, ‘I think we could do this thing. “I went and saw that film and called Marty Bregman after,” he said at a Q&A in 2011. However, in recent interviews, Pacino has claimed he got the idea after a revival screening of the original movie at the Tiffany Theater in Los Angeles. He instantly thought of Pacino for the leading role, the story goes, and engaged Lumet to again direct. A chance late-night TV viewing of the original 1932 Scarface - Howard Hawks’s tale of bootlegging Chicago gangsters, inspired by the exploits of Al Capone - got Bregman’s wheels turning. Reporting from around the time of Scarface’s 1983 release pegged it as a pet project of Martin Bregman, the talent agent who transitioned into producing with Serpico and Dog Day Afternoon, both developed for his client Al Pacino with director Sidney Lumet. The origins of the project vary, depending on who you’re asking (and when). But its themes and preoccupations, the way it gets at the rot deep in the core of the American Dream, continue to reverberate. The resulting film, a baroque bacchanal of splattering blood, voluminous blow, and unapologetic scenery-chewing, was decidedly of its moment its fashion, its synthesizer score, and its coked-dusted “everything to excess” aesthetic practically plaster “EARLY ’80s” into every frame. It’s certainly a case of a motion picture’s half-life far exceeding its initial expectations - which were no doubt colored by a flurry of bad press and reports of a production veering wildly out of control. “When Scarface first came out, it was extremely controversial, as you can imagine. “This wasn’t the way it started,” Al Pacino chuckled, during the sold-out post-screening Q&A for the 35th anniversary screening of Scarface at the Tribeca Film Festival last night. ![]()
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