Scarface Nation: The Ultimate Gangster Movie and How It Changed America
288
Scarface Nation: The Ultimate Gangster Movie and How It Changed America
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Overview
"Don't get high on your own supply."
Brian de Palma's brash, bloody version of Scarface was trashed by critics when it came out twenty-five years ago and didn't do well at the box office, but has become a spectacular fan favorite and enduring pop culture classic since.
"Never underestimate the greed of the other guy."
What makes millions of people obsess over this movie? Why has Al Pacino's Tony Montana become the drug kingpin whose pugnacity and philosophy are revered in boardrooms and bedrooms across America? Who were the people that made the movie, influencing hip-hop style and swagger to this day?
"The world is yours."
Scarface Nation is Ken Tucker's homage to all things Scarface—from the stars that acted in it to the influence it's had on all of us, from facts, figures and stories about the making of the movie to a witty and comprehensive look at Scarface's traces in today's pop and political culture.
"Say hello to my li'l fren!"
You know you love the line. You know you've seen the movie more than once. Now dive into the ultimate book of Scarface—mounded as high as the pile of cocaine on Tony's desk with delicious details and stimulating observations.
"You know what capitalism is? F--- you!"
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781429993296 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | St. Martin's Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 11/11/2008 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 288 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
KEN TUCKER is Editor-at-Large for Entertainment Weekly and the magazine's TV critic. He has won two National Magazine Awards, two ASCAP Deems Taylor music awards, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism. He is also a regular weekly interviewer for NPR's "Fresh Air with Terry Gross." He lives in Pennsylvania.
Ken Tucker is the pop culture critic for New York Magazine and formerly Entertainment Weekly's Critic-At-Large, where he won two National Magazine Awards. He also does weekly reviews on NPR's Fresh Air with Terry Gross. His reviews have been published in The New York Times, Esquire, Rolling Stone, Vogue, and the Los Angeles Times, among others. The winner of the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Awards for 2003 and 2004, he was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism for his work at the Philadelphia Inquirer. He lives in Berwyn, Pennsylvania.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Scarface Lives Among Us
MAJOR IMMIGRANT SMUGGLING RING IS BROKEN IN PHOENIX, POLICE SAY
The New York Times February 15, 2008 By Randal C. Archibold
PHOENIX — In a case highlighting this city's prominent role in the smuggling of illegal immigrants across the border, the authorities conducted a series of raids on Thursday, arresting what they said were the leaders of a ring that helped transport hundreds of people to way stations in Phoenix....
The authorities made 20 arrests, including those of two Cubans accused of directing the operation. ... Oddities abounded along the way....
"We often see 'Scarface' or 'Godfather' posters," said Lt. Vince Piano of the Phoenix Police Department, a lead investigator. "That's the mentality."
MAN SHOWS "SCARFACE" T-SHIRT AND DEMANDS CHECK AT BANK
By The Associated Press March 28, 2007
MICHIGAN CITY, Ind. — A 24-year-old Michigan City man entered the City Savings Bank just before noon Tuesday and asked to see the manager, the police report said. Brian Nelson, vice president of consumer lending at the northwestern Indiana bank, brought him into his office and the man demanded a check for $10,000, Nelson told Michigan City police. The man ... lifted up his T-shirt, which was inside out, to display an image from Scarface. It showed Pacino's character, Tony Montana, brandishing a gun and the words "Straight to Hell," the report said. The man at the bank told Nelson "You see what I mean."
OUT WITH OLD, IN WITH THE TEEN TOUCH
Simple tips to turn kids' rooms into dream spots By Casey Capachi Contra Costa Times Teen Correspondent Article Launched: 06/15/2007
"Every self-respecting guy needs a Scarface poster in his room," says senior Robert Carrington from Acalanes High School. "If you put up that giant black-and-white Scarface poster, some of the manliness is sure to rub off."
"SCARFACE" POSTER NEAR 37 POUNDS OF COKE, DETECTIVE SAYS
Posted by Birmingham News staff, Birmingham, Alabama, July 26, 2007 3:08 PM
A poster from the movie Scarface adorned a hallway wall near a closet where Birmingham police found more than 37 pounds of cocaine inside a tote bag, testimony in a Jefferson County drug trial showed today The poster depicts Al Pacino, who starred in the 1983 movie, in front of a large amount of cocaine. In addition to the 17 kilograms of cocaine in the hall closet, police also found nearly a halfkilogram more of cocaine and pills of the illegal drug Ecstasy, according to testimony today in the trial of Derrick Phillip Ervin.
Suburban and Wayne Times, March 3, 2006
"Radnor, PA: A man was robbed while walking on Conestoga Road near County Line Avenue on Jan. 27 around midnight. Four black men ... accosted the victim, punching him in the head several times and taking a white leather coat with 'Scarface' written on it valued at $1,500 and a cell phone valued at $200."
"SCARFACE MANSION" TO BECOME CLINIC
Tom Kington in Rome Monday, July 9, 2007 The Guardian
Gangsters the world over have long looked up to Tony Montana, the fictional Cuban drug dealer in the 1983 film Scarface, who dies in a hail of bullets in his kitsch, neo-classical Miami villa.
One Naples mobster, Walter Schiavone, was so enamoured of the character played by Al Pacino he built a [$3 million] replica of the villa.
But instead of meeting the glorious fate of his hero, Schiavone was arrested on murder charges in 1999 while trying to escape over his garden wall.
The brother of the boss of the feared Casalesi clan, Schiavone commissioned his villa by handing a video of Scarface to a local architect and telling him to build what he saw.
Hollywood Reporter, July 2006
"NBA star Shaquille O'Neill celebrated his 34th birthday with a Scarface-themed party in Miami. The venue was decked out like a 1980s Scarface set, complete with Elvira Hancock look-alikes, a "The World Is Yours" statue, and a tiger. Shaq wore Scarface's signature white suit and black shirt, and Steven Bauer, who plays Manny Ribera in the movie, even put in an appearance."
As soon as I started work on this book, I was immediately inundated, impressed with, and sometimes overwhelmed by the way Scarface has continued its ceaseless commercial intrusions into the marketplace, its nonstop permeation into all media, the way it continues to influence a new generation of pop-culture creators.
Consider the following current phenomena:
Scarface as Video Game
Scarface: The World Is Yours (Vivendi/Sierra) was first released for the Xbox in late 2006, and even more sucessfully in the Wii format in 2007, featuring a what-if-Tony-didn't-die scenario conceived by screenwriter Dave McKenna, who wrote the Edward Norton feature film American History X. "I wrote forty hours' worth of dialogue [for the video game]," McKenna told me. "Because you have to write for every possible situation that the gamer moves Tony into: If he walks into this room, he talks to his lawyer; if he walks outside, he talks to a babe at the pool. It's basically how many different ways can I invent to have him tell people to fuck off." Although Al Pacino declined to record new dialogue, a surreally diverse voice cast includes Bauer and a posse that didn't appear in the movie: James Woods, Wilmer Valderrama, Bai Ling, Tommy Lee, Desperate Housewives ghost-voice Brenda Strong, and the semi-reunion of the head-trip comedy duo Cheech (Marin) and (Tommy) Chong (they recorded their parts separately). The video game — which has sold more than two million copies — takes place in a post-Scarface landscape where Tony has survived his movie-finale shoot-out and must rebuild his empire, attacking Sosa and other villains and obstacles which even include the tigers Tony stocked his estate with. Manny and Gina are dead, their ashes kept in urns that the game-player can find in a remote room and buy for safekeeping. Scarface: The World Is Yours features a "Blind-Rage Mode," which when set compels Tony Montana to spray machine-gun bullets indiscriminately, at anyone or anything he encounters, and has a "Fuck You button" that when pressed causes Tony to utter obscenities. (Scarface in the gaming world is nothing new; one of the genre's most popular games, 2002's Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, was heavily based on Scarface plotlines. The game's protagonist, Richard Diaz, has an opulent mansion, and the climactic battle that takes place in it at the game's end, is very similar to those in Scarface. (There is a hidden apartment room with blood on the bathroom walls and a chain saw.)
Scarface Telephone
Scarface wouldn't be vibrant without a ringtone: From scarfacemobile .com, you can download wallpaper images and ringtones with Scarface theme music or cleaned-up versions of the most famous lines from the film. The Scarface franchise is licensed from Universal via Starwave Mobile, owned by the Walt Disney Company, which results in the nice irony that "Say hello to my little friend" could possibly refer to Mickey Mouse or Donald Duck. By mid-2007, more than two million downloads had been reported — more than 1 percent of all mobile consumption revenue — with more lines and scenes from the movie planned for release. These include "Scarface Casino," which is described by the company as "a casual game" inspired by poker and card games where players strategize against one another, and "Scarface: MPR (Money Power. Respect.)," a "more immersive game that's task-driven." (I think that's tidy corporate-speak for: "Kill the cocainecartel guards, seize the product.")
A Starwave Mobile executive was quoted in the Hollywood Reporter in May 2007 as saying that Scarface is "such an iconic brand that it can reach pretty broadly and continues to inspire us. Thinking broadly about how to drive that story line to new story lines, and thinking about the content as part of a new entertainment platform, has made it successful."
It's Not TV, It's HBO-Scarface
It makes sense that a TV show such as The Sopranos would have its Scarface moment ... and it did, in fact, in its very first, pilot episode: Christopher, always the fledgling screenwriter, bleats to Tony, passionately urging a bloody showdown with a rival mobster: "This is Scarface, final scene, fuckin' bazookas under each arm, say-hello-to-mylittle-friend time!"
* Indeed, anything-goes pay-cable HBO is a logical locus for Scarface humor: On Larry David's Curb Your Enthusiasm, a rapper calling himself Krazee-Eyez Killa (played by Chris Williams) gives David a tour of his mansion, saying he fantasizes about having a big-screen plasma TV on his bedroom ceiling in order to "play Scarface 24/7."
* On the same cable network's Entourage, an ongoing subplot introduced during the series' second season involved pretty-boy moviestar Vince Chase hoping to do a little indie film called Medellin in which the young actor would portray drug lord Pablo Escobar: "This movie is gonna be, like, the new Scarface," says Vince Chase; he then does an imitation of Pacino snorting coke off a desk. A few episodes later, Vince's agent Ari Gold crows of Medellin, "This could be your Scarface!" By the third season, Entourage was working old Scarface cast members themselves into the show: a May 2007 episode featured Harris Yulin (the film's corrupt cop Mel Bernstein) as the aging producer of Medellin who decides Jeremy Piven's Ari is too much of a pain to deal with, and shuts the project down. (Yet, neither this producer nor Ari takes a bullet to the gut as Mel did from Tony)
* Finally, Scarface looms unexpectedly in HBO's The Wire, the great urban drama of the new century, a pitiless, wrenching, often stingingly funny look at the effects of the drug trade on poor black neighborhoods in Baltimore. There, in the show's fifth and greatest year, which launched in 2006, the terrifyingly cold-blooded young drug dealer Snoop (the awe-inspiring Felicia Pearson, in her first professional acting role), wears a Scarface jacket in one episode. One can't help but view it as emblematic of her ruthless determination to nullify her opponents and competition in the drug trade. Al Pacino's face on Snoop's clothing is a debonair, nonchalant act of homage by this young woman: not by Simon and his fellow scenarists, who have no use for Scarface's baroque excess — who, in fact, by their muted style of storytelling and the sophistication of their moral layering, probably view De Palma's work as melodramatic, if not crude — but who nonetheless on some level have been forced by Scarface's cultural pervasiveness to recognize that even some of the young fictional characters they have created would inevitably find the movie's street code embedded in Scarface DNA.
Cartoon Scarface
The Simpsons, South Park, and The Family Guy have all Scarfaced:
* In the sixth-season episode of The Simpsons called "Lisa's Rival," Homer assumes a Cuban accent to speak of one of his favorite topics — donuts and their allure: "First you get the sugar, then you get the powder, then you get the women."
* In the ninth season of South Park, the squat bully Cartman addresses a school assembly dressed in a white Scarface disco suit and addresses the students as "cock-a-roaches." "You need people like me," says the 'toon series' prime "bad guy," "so you can point your fingers ... Well, say good-night to the bad guy!" Cartman concludes; the auditorium curtain is hastily closed.
* On YouTube.com, you can see a section of The Family Guy recut so that its precocious baby, Stewie, becomes Scarface: http://youtube.com/watch?v=BPH9BIGby LM.
Harry Potter as Scarface
On numerous Internet sites, you'll find Harry Potter fan-fiction that makes a connection between gangster and fantasy hero: The lightning bolt that creases young Harry's face earns him a fan's fond nickname: Scarface. Of course, Harry Potter is the mannerly Tony Montana, not so much rebellious underdog as magical scamp, yet he is still a persecuted youth who slowly, steadily, discovers his enormous power.
Scarface Country
Most people know at least something about Scarface's hip-hop influence. But there's a different-genre music-video that's striking: Johnny Cash's recording of Nine Inch Nails's "Hurt," set to a well-edited, slowly paced sequence of wordless scenes from Scarface, in black-and-white, drained of color: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WasMSZZ Ct-w.
Tagged on YouTube as "Johnny Cash Meets Scarface," it shows Montana in his final stages of cocaine stupor, as Cash sings in the solemn croak of his own final years, "I focus on the pain/The only thing that's real." While scenes of Montana shooting Manny and Gina play as if they're memories Tony is having shortly before picking up his machine gun one final time, Cash sings, "What have I become ... Everyone I know goes away in the end ..." and during the last blazing shoot-out, Cash's voice rings like a death knell as Tony is torn by bullets: "My empire of dirt/I will let you down/I will make you hurt." It's spookily effective.
Scarface the Merchandiser
The Internet offers a cornucopia of Scarface merchandise. Aside from the obvious — posters, T-shirts, coffee mugs, key chains that when pressed say, "Say hello to my little friend!" — there are items such as Scarface dartboards, poker chips, flip-flop sandals, and a set of shower curtains that sold for over $300 on eBay. Among the more pricey items of clothing are short-sleeved, Hawaiian-style shirts into which the word "Scarface" is woven into the shirttail, and the character's initials, T.M., are discreetly embroidered on the sleeves. As The New York Times reported in a 2005 trend piece, "[Tony Montana's] initials grace the buttons, too: no detail spared. The orange buttons glow in the dark like sinister fireflies, real attention-getters at nightclubs."
I visited a Greenwich Village store selling these shins — "one hundred percent polyester!" crowed the owner. These fancy loose-hanging, Hawaiian-style shirts sell for between $60 to $80, and include versions with Scarface reclining in the tub with a cigar, or brandishing an Uzi. I admit it: I passed. Now, an Izod shirt with a little Tony-head instead of an alligator — that's something I might invest in.
* Want to be Scarface in October? There's a 549.95-retailing Halloween costume consisting of a white disco-era suit, a red wide-collar shirt, and a machine gun. (The package notes that the gat is "not available in some states": One supposes you then trick-or-treat saying, "Say hello to my leettle thumb-and-forefinger pointing!")
* There are, of course, posters galore, but the most unusual one is a hand-drawn, pointillist portrait of Pacino/Scarface shooting a big automatic rifle in full going-to-glory grimace: When you move in closely, you see that the picture was formed by writing out the entire script of the movie — every word of it — in a tiny hand, in black and red ink. Los Angeles Pop Art, the company that manufactures the poster, refers to this method as "micrography" — "tiny writing to render the illusion of an image," says the company Web site. Well, there's nothing illusory about it: you can read Scarface with one's face pressed to the poster, or stand back to look at the Pacino in extremis photo-image.
Scarface in Prime Time
On TV, Scarface references range from the most generic to the most specific, assuming a knowledge of the movie's details. The NBC sitcom My Name Is Earl, whose premise is built around a list of sins for which Earl must atone, found a way to imply a Scarface-favorite fourletter word without uttering it. One of Earl's sons tells the show's hero that his ex-wife, Joy, calls his piece of paper "the 'idiot list.'" "But," says the little boy, "she puts another word in front of it. But I don't know what it means — the guy in Scarface says it a lot ..."
On a September 2006 episode of Law & Order: Criminal Intent, Chris Noth's Det. Mike Logan explains to a colleague the definition of a "police surgeon" as they examine a doctor's murdered body: "He stitches up cops when they don't want to look like Scarface."
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Scarface Nation"
by .
Copyright © 2008 Ken Tucker.
Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Title Page,
Introduction,
PART I,
1 - Scarface Lives Among Us,
2 - The Movie,
3 - Making a Scarface,
4 - Four Creators,
5 - Scarface Music,
PART II,
6 - The Origins: Howard Hawks's Scarface,
7 - The Origins: Armitage Trail's Scarface,
8 - Alterna-Scarfaces: Movies,TV Shows, Novels, and Comic Books,
9 - President Scarface,
10 - Scarface: It's Money, It's Women, It's Power,
11 - A Meaning of Scarface,
Also by Ken Tucker,
Appendix,
Notes,
Acknowledgments,
Index,
Notes,
Copyright Page,