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1. Who plays Tony Montana?
Al Pacino
Pacino saw the 1932 Scarface at a revival and asked producer Martin Bregman to remake it, which is how it all started. In the final shootout he grabbed the barrel of a gun that had just been fired and burned his hand badly enough to stop the shoot.
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2. Who directed Scarface?
Brian De Palma
Sidney Lumet was attached first, and his idea was to move the story from Prohibition Chicago to the 1980 cocaine trade, but he fell out with the script and left. De Palma, fresh from Blow Out, took over and reunited with Pacino later for Carlito's Way.
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3. Who wrote the screenplay?
Oliver Stone
Stone wrote it while kicking a cocaine habit of his own, moving to Paris to get clear of the drug after researching the trade with prosecutors and narcotics police. He already had a screenplay Oscar for Midnight Express; Mamet wrote The Untouchables.
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4. From which country does Tony arrive in the United States?
Cuba
The opening titles explain the Mariel boatlift of 1980, when Castro let tens of thousands leave and emptied some of his jails into the boats. Tony is interrogated on arrival, lies about his past and lands in the Freedomtown camp under the expressway.
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5. Which city is the main setting?
Miami
Most of it was actually shot in Los Angeles, because Miami's Cuban community objected to the portrayal and the production left after a couple of weeks there. Tony's mansion is a real estate in Montecito, near Santa Barbara, a long way from Biscayne Bay.
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6. What is Tony's closest friend's name?
Manny Ribera
Steven Bauer plays him, the one Cuban-born actor among the leads, and later turned up as Don Eladio in Breaking Bad. Manny's weakness for women is a running joke until he secretly marries Tony's sister, and Tony shoots him before hearing him out.
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7. What weapon does Tony introduce as his 'little friend' in the finale?
An M16 with a grenade launcher
The gun is an M16 fitted with an M203 grenade launcher, and Tony fires the grenade through his office door before charging out onto the landing. The line 'Say hello to my little friend' is one of several from the finale that rap records have sampled endlessly.
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8. Who plays Elvira Hancock?
Michelle Pfeiffer
Pfeiffer's main credit was Grease 2, and Pacino and the producers wanted someone else, but De Palma kept pushing. Elvira is the boss's girlfriend before she is Tony's, and the shoot ran so long Pfeiffer has said she lived on tomato soup and cigarettes.
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9. What is Tony's sister called?
Gina
Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio plays her in her first film, and was Oscar-nominated three years later for The Color of Money. Tony's possessiveness about Gina shades into something uglier, and she confronts him with a gun just before the hitmen pour in.
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10. What is the name of the Miami nightclub where much of the action takes place?
The Babylon Club
The Babylon is where Tony sizes up the cocaine money, where crooked detective Mel Bernstein squeezes him, and where two gunmen nearly kill him. Giorgio Moroder wrote the synth score and the club songs; the Mutiny was a real Coconut Grove hangout for dealers.
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11. Who is the established crime boss Tony first works for in Miami?
Frank Lopez
Robert Loggia plays Frank, a car dealer fronting a cocaine operation, who hands Tony two lessons: never underestimate the other guy's greed, and never get high on your own supply. Tony ignores both, and shoots Frank after the botched hit at the Babylon.
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12. What do Tony and Manny do to earn their green cards?
Kill a former Castro official in the refugee camp
Emilio Rebenga was a Castro man who, the story goes, tortured the brother of a Miami boss, and Tony knifes him during a camp riot. The job gets Tony, Manny, Angel and Chi-Chi out of Freedomtown and into washing dishes at a food stand, which Tony hates.
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13. What is the name of Tony's powerful Bolivian supplier?
Alejandro Sosa
Paul Shenar plays Sosa, and Tony first meets him on a trip Frank sends him on, where Omar ends up hanging from a helicopter. The alliance breaks when Tony refuses to let a car bomb kill a journalist's children, and Sosa's gunmen come for him.
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14. What phrase appears as a symbol of Tony's ambition?
The World Is Yours
Tony sees the phrase on a blimp after a night out with Elvira, and later puts it on the statue in his mansion's fountain, where he dies. It is lifted from the 1932 film, in which the same words glowed on a travel agency sign outside Tony Camonte's window.
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15. What rating did the ratings board first give Scarface, forcing an appeal?
X
The board gave it an X three times, mostly for the violence and the chainsaw scene in particular, and De Palma got an R only by taking it to appeal. He later admitted he released the first cut anyway, since nobody on the board could tell the difference.
