Oliver Stone on Writing Scarface While Living Like Tony Montana
Photographs: Getty Images; Collage: Gabe Conte
On December 9, 1983, Brian De Palma’s Scarface— which reimagined a 1932 Howard Hawks gangster film as a blood-and-neon opera about the rise and fall of Cuban-born Miami cocaine kingpin Tony Montana, played by Al Pacino— opened to decent but unspectacular box office and decidedly mixed reviews. Leonard Maltin hated it. Roger Ebert loved it. According to People magazine’s 1983 report on the New York and L.A. premieres, Cher was a fan– “It was a great example of how the American dream can go to s—,” she told the magazine– but Kurt Vonnegut tapped out after about 30 minutes, around the time one of Tony’s associates gets carved up with a chainsaw.
De Palma’s film has been lodged like a bullet fragment in pop culture’s brainpan ever since. It made Michelle Pfeiffer a star; it inspired real-life drug lords and provided generations of rappers with a mythic framework for grandiose criminality both real and imagined, even though Tony Montana ends up face down in his own fountain; it sold (this is a rough, anecdotal estimate) approximately ten billion dorm posters. It’s a movie inseparable from its cultural and aesthetic context but someone is always trying to reboot or remake it, or retell it as a story about The Penguin; so far an actual Scarface 2 has not materialized, although actors Robert Loggia and Steven Bauer came back to voice their Scarface characters in Scarface: The World Is Yours, a 2006 video game for Playstation 2, Xbox and Windows platforms, in which players could unlock “Rage Mode” and mow down their enemies as an invulnerable Tony Montana.
Film critic Glenn Kenny’s new book The World Is Yours: The Story of Scarface charts the movie’s path from development to cultural ubiquity; like Kenny’s superb Goodfellas history Made Men from a few years back, it’s simultaneously brisk and exhaustive, built in this case around interviews with seemingly every living person involved with the production, except Pacino himself, who’s presumably saved his Scarface memories for his own forthcoming memoir. Pacino still emerges as an indelible and mercurial character, as do the many other players responsible for putting Scarface onscreen.
One of those is the no-less-mercurial producer Martin Bregman. Bregman starts out as a theatrical agent whose early clients include up-and-comers like Barbra Streisand and Woody Allen; he discovers Pacino onstage in a 1968 production of Israel Horovitz’s The Indian Wants the Bronx and becomes his manager. In the late ‘70s Bregman also works with a screenwriter named Oliver Stone, who’s written a script called Platoon about his experience in Vietnam; Stone and Bregman end up developing an adaptation of fellow vet Ron Kovic’s memoir Born on the Fourth of July as a vehicle for Pacino. When that project collapses, so does Bregman’s relationship with Pacino, and they don’t speak for years, until Pacino walks out of a screening of the original 1932 Hawks film and calls Bregman on the phone, saying “Look at Scarface– I think there may be a character there for me to play.”
The following excerpt from Kenny’s book picks up there, as Stone signs on to Scarface and begins researching the cocaine business—a world Stone is already intimately familiar with as a customer. —ALEX PAPPADEMAS
Oliver Stone had to travel a long way before becoming “Oliver Stone,” the prolific, outspoken, provocative Hollywood agitator. The man whose cultural gravitational pull is such that a friend of mine called his book on the man The Oliver Stone Experience was a scion of Wall Street affluence, a soldier in Vietnam, a student at NYU’s film school who worked under Martin Scorsese, and, by the time producer Marty Bregman brought him on the Scarface project, the director of two films.
Horror films, as a matter of fact. The first, Seizure, produced in Canada in 1974, starred Jonathan Frid, then known as the sex-symbol vampire Barnabas Collins on the supernatural network soap opera Dark Shadows, as a writer tormented by figures out of his nightmares come to life. The second, 1981’s The Hand, was a gloss on The Beast with Five Fingers in which Michael Caine’s pathologically jealous writer loses his hand in an auto accident, and believes that hand is still around, with a life of his own, killing anyone who ticks him off. Neither made much impact on release, but both are fascinating artifacts, not least due to the pathologies they treat, pathologies that reflected Stone’s own conflicts at the time.
When I interviewed him in 2022, one of the first things I asked was if, upon meeting Brian De Palma, he sensed an affinity with this director who’d also worked in horror. Not quite, as it turns out.
“Well, Brian had been a very successful horror director. I had not. And that was screwed into my psyche by Bregman, and you can believe that. The Hand, according to him, was ‘a disaster,’ blah, blah, blah. But you can look at The Hand, it’s certainly a psychologically interesting film. But it had not done business. And I was dead in the water, as a director. And Bregman used that, of course. I wanted to direct, badly. I had written and directed and I wanted to continue doing that. But I knew that this was not going to be my film, because I didn’t have the experience to do something this size.
“To the contrary, I learned a lot on the film. I was down on my luck, and I had just done The Hand, and it had been ridiculed. And I was on cocaine. I was doing cocaine, and I was really an addict, without knowing it.”
In a sense, Stone reunited with Bregman because he had to. Stone, Pacino, and Bregman had all fallen out with each other over the collapse of Born on the Fourth of July. As far as Stone was concerned, between that and Bregman’s inability to get Platoon made after teasing him with the possibility, he might as well never work under his aegis again. But in the wake of the failure of The Hand, he was in a state. “I never wanted to work with Marty again, after that. It was just so difficult. It’s what they call ‘masochism,’ to work for Marty. You have to really suffer. I’m sure you can tell that. Ask any other writer, they know what’s in store for them if they go with Marty: endless re-writes. So, I had to go through that process. It’s a process. And out of that process, I said I didn’t want to be with him again.
“And then, my bookie called me up after I had hit bottom again—how many times have I hit bottom? Marty called me and wanted me to do it. I didn’t want to do a Mafia story. No interest. Thank you. And then, he called me back a few weeks later. He said: ‘Lumet has another idea, and here it is—about the cocaine trade.’ That was interesting, and that made it different.”
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On Scarface, Pacino and Bregman were definitely running the show, from where Stone sat. “Once Al said, ‘I’m excited by it,’ then Marty would go to work and he would do his number— which was get the screenplay together for Al,” Stone said. “Because Marty, at that time, was an independent producer. He had tremendous success from Serpico and Dog Day Afternoon. And Marty also had another client, Alan Alda, who was really making a bundle of success—real big money—for Marty. So, that was his financial base. He put together Scarface, really literally, with his own blood. And he was Scarface, in a sense, in the making of that film; he was ruthless in getting it done.”
Not that it represented a particularly tough sell on Bregman’s part, at least initially. “Of course, gangster films are easier to make, in the system. So, he had the cooperation—on that film—of [executive] Ned Tanen and the whole Universal group that had financed Alan Alda. So, they went with him, but it soured quickly because Scarface was a hell of a hard number to pull off—many difficulties and way over budget. I think twice the distance. Six months, as I remember. It was scheduled for three months. That’s outrageous. In those days, too. It’s always been outrageous to go that far over budget, and there was a lot of pissed-off people, including Tanen.
“So, one of the things Marty did was just keep Universal at bay. He was constantly promising them anything—‘God will come and solve these problems’—keeping them at bay, keeping them away from Al. He always used to say Al was a monster and would blow up if you ever confronted him. And he kept that as a weapon, to defend the enterprise. But he had difficulties inside the enterprise because, frankly, it was in a very difficult shape. The thing was, there was not a lot of communications. And the assistant director had to be fired after a certain point, Jerry Ziesmer. That’s the ‘usual sacrificial victim,’ right away.
“The pressure on me was enormous because I didn’t want to cut the film, because I thought it worked as a whole, and I did get pressure, but I don’t remember exactly giving in to it. I think we kind of struggled our way through it. We just doubled the budget, and we doubled the time, and Universal kept betting on Bregman, I think because of Alan Alda’s success and his past success with Pacino. But they were kind of pissed off. I don’t remember it being a very happy film that opened.
“After the film was over, I had a huge fight with Bregman over the cut, and I never talked to him again, for years. I saw him in the ’90s before he died, and we made up. But Marty was a tough character. He was a handsome gangster-type who grew up in the Lower East Side, and loyalty was the most important thing. And if you crossed him, if he felt like you’d been disloyal, he treated you like a gangster. He’d want to kill you. So, the situation was very difficult because he wanted to control the film. He was a control freak.”
Bregman did not look over Stone’s shoulder much while Stone researched and wrote the screenplay, first in collaboration with Lumet. “Sidney was Al’s favorite director,” Stone recalled. “The moment he told Marty he wanted to do Scarface, they went to Sidney. Sidney liked the idea, he liked Al very much, Sidney had been involved with me on Platoon. He’d wanted to make it for ten minutes or something like that, and then he passed. Because he was an older man and he didn’t want to go to that degree of exertion. He was very interested in politics, Sidney. He certainly wanted to keep Scarface in its political atmosphere of that time. With the Mariel boatlift, with the relations between Cuba and the US, and the other side of the equation: the coke war.
“That’s what interested Sidney. Sidney wanted to probe the relationship of the CIA and the DEA to what really was going on in the drug trade and if the United States was involved. And of course, it’s a dirty story. It’s hard to prove. But you know what? It led, ultimately, to the funding of the Contras in Nicaragua, and the Iran/Contra scandal. It led, ultimately, to the Contra hearings and the accusations—which are accurate—of the CIA turning the other eye to the smuggling in Los Angeles. It was a dirty story. In Sidney’s conception the film would explore this, but Bregman did not want to go there.”
In order to write, Stone had to get off the cocaine he’d been using to lift his spirits after the failure of The Hand. This would prove tricky, as his initial research on the cocaine trade would put him in rather close proximity to, well, the cocaine trade. “I did all the research for Scarface on cocaine, in and out of the country. It was quite interesting because I understood that world better than if I had not done it. Al, on the contrary, had never done anything like that. He’d never even done cocaine. So, he didn’t know. Marty took me down to Miami, and he introduced me to a dozen people who were very helpful. And then, I expanded my contacts from there, outward.
“I talked to several police departments, and I tried to get as close to the gangsters as I could; but that wasn’t so easy. I talked to defense lawyers, of course, who were very important to contact. I went to Bimini to actually confront what was the trade, the nightly trade, going into Miami on cigarette boats. And also, prior to that, I’d been to South America, in Peru. I’d been there on another thing that I had been working on, years before, with a very knowledgeable journalist. This was not the El Salvador guy on whom I based my film Salvador; this is another thing completely. I had been in that world, and I’d been ingesting the material. So, I knew a lot in the sense of the feeling of it and the fear of being in that world.” It was from that fear that Stone conceived the film’s notorious chainsaw scene.
“When I was in Bimini, I was found out. I was with my ex-wife and we were pretending to be Hollywood screenwriters, which we were; I was. But they thought, because I knew a lot of people from Miami and I mentioned a name at this late night—we were coked down in the hotel room with three gangsters. Mid-level people, not high-level. They were the ‘shippers.’ They were the people who were doing the work of shipping it on cigarette boats into Miami. There was a hotel in Bimini, it was very famous. These shippers were all staying there and there was a lot of boats every night, shipping out all night. You’d hear the cigarette boats going. It was a trade. And this was the grunt work, the shipping via cigarette boat. But I could tell the scale of it.
“The characters that we grew came from that period. They were people who were killed with chainsaws. And some of these crimes were gruesome. They’d scrawl on the wall of the person they killed, they’d scrawl in blood ‘Chivato’—or something like that—like ‘Traitor.’ Or cut people’s eyeballs out. All kinds of gruesome shit. So sitting in a hotel room and feeling ‘found out’ by a group of them was something I tried to get into the film.
“This was a multibillion-dollar business. Talking to the prosecutors in South Florida—there were three or four different divisions trying to handle it. There was this bureaucratic overlap. It was Fort Lauderdale. It was Miami. It was the US Attorney’s Office. There was Miami Beach. There was Miami. It was a mess. And the cops were all over the place. Different police departments had different rates of success. We talked to all of them. And we got a varied picture of it.
“So, this was serious; and, as you know, it’s the period when Escobar started to get really big, going into the ’90s. And it was a great business to be in because you could get away with it so much. It started to change about the time we were making the movie there. And Miami was very paranoid about us being there. In fact, we lasted—and I don’t know exactly—I’d say close to two weeks we lasted, in Miami, before they threw us out. Because they didn’t want to be associated with that stuff.”
Having gotten uncomfortably close to “that stuff,” Stone decamped to Paris to write. He presumed cocaine would be more difficult to get a hold of in the City of Lights than it had been in these other climes. “It was a hard thing to get off of, yeah. But I knew I had to make a break because it wasn’t working for me and my writing was being hurt. So, I moved to Paris deliberately, after the research was over. I cut off everybody I knew. Getting out of the country to a country where there was not much of it, there—in France, in the winter—it was perfect. And of course, I did have family there, so it was a re-entry to an old world that I knew. And I got off it, and I came back to the States, and I was clean. I was able to do it—that is to say I could socialize on it, but I didn’t need it anymore.
“The thing is: cocaine doesn’t work. That’s clear. And I made it very clear to myself. But I have to say: in the movie, it’s all relative. Tony is basically saying, through the movie: ‘They should legalize this stuff. That’s the only way to beat it. They’re not going to cut it down by outlawing it.’ Like everything else, when the United States goes to war on something—war on drugs—it becomes like a ‘Vietnam.’ It’s a mess. We don’t know how to regulate anything.
“Tony Montana is the ultimate, ultimate free-market proponent. Sort of the Milton Friedman of cocaine economics. And he saw the picture correctly. He saw the hypocrisy. That’s what he hated, the hypocrisy. And then, of course, after so much cocaine usage, he becomes tinted with paranoia and he ends up turning on his friends. But for a while there, it was some great business. If he’d just kept his marbles, he would have been able to go all the way and probably retire as a millionaire and get into hedge funds or something. And by the way, there is a link because when I did my film Wall Street, I was going up to New York, down to Miami, there was a lot of traffic in cocaine coming to New York from there, at that point, about ’85. A lot of people were using cocaine—young people—and they’re making big money. So, there was a lot of that similarity exploding in Wall Street, the environment.”
Back home from Paris, things did not proceed as planned. “Sidney reacted badly to my first draft, which was pretty close to the final draft—it was violent and vulgar, all those things—and it was too much for Sidney. He would have gone somewhere else. But Marty cut him off quickly. It was ruthless. He just said: ‘Goodbye. It’s not going to work.’ So, right away, he went to Brian because I think he was thinking of Brian, in the back of his head, because Brian had already been involved. On some level.” De Palma was amenable to Stone’s approach.
“There are two styles to screenwriting. One is to be like [Stone’s one-time mentor and Lawrence of Arabia screenwriter] Robert Bolt, where you put everything on paper. The other style is more American, where you put it on paper but it’s impressionistic and you direct it, and it becomes—you work on it in the direction. And I’m of both styles. Putting it all on paper is extremely difficult because there’s so many variations on the theme. So, I’ve been both ways. I worked with people like that and I worked with people who are a little looser. Brian’s a little looser. He’s not a stickler in the ways Marty or Al were.” He could take what was impressionistic in Stone’s script and run with it.
Stone stayed close to the production, starting with the casting process. He clashed with Bregman over the conception of Elvira, which Stone saw as an ideal role for Glenn Close. “I could never have directed a film with Marty,” Stone recalled with some amusement. “De Palma was much ‘looser’ than I was at the time, in the sense that he had a little more experience, and he could put up with Marty’s control freak nature. Marty would be in every casting session. He didn’t even have casting sessions with actresses without Brian being there. I saw those. He’d line up fifteen, twenty blondes in the hallway—because he really felt responsible for the Elvira character. He really wanted her to be his ‘dream blonde,’ I guess. And I think he found it in Michelle Pfeiffer. I had a fight with him—I realize, now, how stupid it was—but I was defending Elvira as Glenn Close’s role. And Marty didn’t think she was right, visually. And my point was that Close was a very good actress. Michelle was not as experienced and had to struggle to make things work, and sometimes, I had to change the nature of the role, to make it fit Michelle. But ultimately she was the right choice.”
Once shooting started, Bregman let Pacino do his thing. “Brian had no choice because Al was a force. And Al was tough. Al wouldn’t get going—and I said in my book: ‘I don’t think Al will get going for the first seven takes.’ It was just generally the formula, and I couldn’t believe it because you don’t know how much time that wastes. A day has got so many hours and if you can’t get the first five, six, seven takes, you’re really fucked. You’re not getting many setups every day. And I could see this was coming, and it did go that way. But Brian was not a motivator. He was not. Brian was, as you might say, impersonal maybe.
“Al was outside time. And I can’t tell you I understood his thinking. I understood his brilliance. I understood the things he was doing. And his screenplay ideas were always very—I always listened to him. I never belittled him like—Marty would belittle him and say: ‘Al was out of his mind. Forget it.’ You have to think about it, though. He’s saying that maybe it doesn’t sound right, but there’s something there. You have to think about that. “There was one time, Al went a little bit crazy when he heard Brian’s comment about ‘The actors are taking over this insane asylum’ or something like that. And he did go nuts on that. I think he disappeared for a few hours into his trailer. Jesus. One thing after another. It was a nightmare. I wouldn’t want that on one of my films. It would never happen that way, but it can get out of hand. So, Brian’s seen a lot. Yeah.”
Nevertheless, Stone sometimes found De Palma’s way of working confounding. “I don’t understand Brian. He’s very obtuse. He doesn’t give his emotions away. He certainly had a sardonic sense of humor. Very sardonic, very cynical, it’s funny. He’s very funny. All I can say is he didn’t seem to enjoy himself, at any time, in the movie. Except when he was shooting up something and having a tremendous time. But he didn’t seem to enjoy the process of people. He didn’t seem to like people as much as I would.
“On weekends, usually the director’s available because the film is an ongoing, seven-day-a-week affair, but he would actually, literally, cut off Bregman and would not answer his phone calls. So, here we are. And Bregman says: I can’t reach the motherfucker.’ And Brian’s rented a big house and he had a staff and they’re telling Bregman he can’t be disturbed, he’s asleep. He’d be asleep all weekend. So, he’s a strange guy. But he had a divorce going on.” Indeed he did, from the actress Nancy Allen. Apparently one source of strain was that De Palma would not cast Allen in the Elvira role.
Briefly putting himself in Bregman’s shoes, Stone reflected, “How could you fire De Palma when you’re in the middle of this mess that’s going on? But Marty’s certainly pulling his hair out: ‘What can I do to speed this guy up? I’ll call him on weekends. We’ll have a meeting.’ And he won’t even talk to you on the weekends. You can understand then Marty’s frustration. So, you get to the set Monday morning. You finally see your fucking director, and you can’t really say ‘You’ve got to speed it up.’ You’ve got to talk to them in certain ways. It’s very hard to motivate two people like Brian, who’s into his own world, and Al, who’s into his own world. So, you have these two obstacles. I wouldn’t want to have been the producer on that movie. I would have probably lost all my hair and ended up three hundred pounds or something, eating doughnuts all the whole time. I would have liked to see Scott Rudin fucking make that picture.” (Rudin was a famously prolific theater and film producer known for his prodigious temper; the accusations against him were such that while he’s still alive, he’s taking an indefinite hiatus from work. Apparently in addition to being a shouter, he was a thrower of objects. Hence Stone’s curiosity. What Would Scott Throw?)
De Palma recalls asking Stone to leave the set on more than one occasion. From his perspective today, he’s not unsympathetic to Stone’s situation. The guy wanted to direct, had directed, and was now relegated to the writer’s chair but still hadn’t divested himself of the desire. And time would prove him a director of some distinction. But on the set of Scarface, De Palma had two primary collaborators cum bosses—Pacino and Bregman—and hence was likely to process Stone’s unsolicited suggestions as so much static. But Stone insists he was not banished from the set as such. “He asked me to leave the set maybe three or four times in the course of the shoot. Like for the day, I’d leave for the day. I’d go back to where I was staying, and I’d work. Then Bregman may want me back and Pacino wanted me back. There was no way I was going to leave that set. I was stuck. Frankly, at the end, I was getting tired. It was just too much. Six months is a long time, and especially out of my life at the time. There were other things I wanted to do.”
Nevertheless, Stone had a passionate attachment to the film and worried over the finished product. In Matt Zoller Seitz’s book The Oliver Stone Experience, one of the full-page illustrations is a letter that Stone sent to Bregman during the editing process of Scarface. Dated August 11, 1983, here are two paragraphs:
[…] the film is more important than any single one of us and right now I am convinced there are some major problems, especially in the middle. As a result it just doesn’t work—not on the level you or I expected. In parts it’s downright embarrassing. Unless we fix it now—while we still can—we will be hiding from disaster, not taking it by the horns now. I think still the picture could be good, not great—but good. Right now it’s not even that.
I’ve given my initial impressions to Brian but in the intervening 36 hours I’ve been unable to sleep and have jotted down various other notes I didn’t cover with him so I am sending him a copy of these notes. I am dealing I think only with things that can be fixed, not with things that cannot be changed because they were directed that way. Nor am I going into the many fine things there are in the movie.
Looking back now, Stone allows that he was likely more privy to the shooting and editing processes than a writer arguably ought to have been. In his book he goes into some detail about the differing factions weighing in on how the film ultimately ought to play. He portrays himself as something of a willing pawn of Pacino. He told me, “The reason I saw the cut was only because Al was so alarmed that he brought my attention to it and he wanted me to go. Marty didn’t want me to go. He didn’t want me to see the film, as a lot of people know—it’s the writer! You don’t want the writer to see the bones of the film. Right? Now, I think a writer can bring a lot to the rehearsals and to the film as a whole. Brian had me in the rehearsals, that’s true; but he didn’t have many rehearsals. He was never an actor’s director, that way. He didn’t believe that much in talking things out about characters, or much rehearsal.”
But on the set De Palma rolled with Pacino’s requests for numerous takes. “That's a crazy way to work,” Stone insists. “But you don’t tell the actor what to do. The actor doesn’t tell the director what to do. The producer does what he’s supposed to. It’s a strange system, and I guess in the old days it might’ve worked because they all agreed on the idea that they’d have a thirty-day schedule. But this was not agreed to at all. There was no consensus. I saw the ‘rough cut’ and I went back to Al, and I shared my thinking with him and then, of course, all hell broke loose because that’s what Bregman did not want me to talk to Pacino about.
“So, Brian turned on me. Marty and Brian would not talk to me. They were furious because I had let loose the monster, who, of course, was personified in Al. Marty always put the onus on Al. He always made him into the monster, made him worse than he was. Now, Al could be a monster, but he was also very bright. Al had a great sense of drama and a great sense of what was working and what was not working. So, I think it’s wrong to ignore him. I think he’s very important to the process.
“Anyway, it did improve after I saw it. But I didn’t talk to any of them about it again. Even Al didn’t call me, which was hurtful because I had been loyal to Al. I feel divided because a director and a writer are supposed to be combined. And I’d been in a situation where the writer ends up working for the actor and I know exactly what happened in that sense, because the writer and the actor—when they combine—it becomes a number for the director. So, the director has to be in charge of the writing and directing. He has to have that under his control, and in certain respects he has to be his own producer. It’s an impossible situation. Brian was able to put up with it because of the way he works.”
Stone has made his peace with what Scarface is. “When Brian’s making a gangster film, he wants it to be big. He wants it to be like a Sergio Leone kind of gangster film. He wants it stylistic. He wants big scenes, a lot of suits, a lot of clothes, a lot of costumes, jewelry. I get it. I didn’t perhaps get it as much as I did now. And I like the result. I liked the movie. But you realize at the time I was working off a more realistic palette because I’d been there. And Brian didn’t really have that realism in him. Or interest in it. He wasn’t that interested in it. I would take him to certain places in Miami and show him the atmosphere, and that’s what he loved—he loved the clubs, and all of that. But the realism of the business, how deals were made, how money was counted, all of that, he’s not that interested in it.”
Ultimately, he looks at Scarface as Bregman’s film; when wrapping up our conversation, he said, “Scarface became Bregman’s ‘big one.’ It became his ‘big number.’ It was his film. And he became famous for it. He did other successful films. But I don’t think he ever did anything else that matched it, not even Carlito’s Way.”
Excerpted from The World Is Yours: The Story of Scarface by Glenn Kenny © 2024, used with permission from Hanover Square Press/HarperCollins.
Originally Appeared on GQ
