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To get back to Scarface: I had the four or five screenwriters at work, and when they had all finished a version of the script, I took all four or five versions of it, picked out the best parts, strung them together myself and wrote in my own interim connecting scenes. We brought in this fine actor from the Jewish theater in New York – Paul Muni. That was his first starring role, and we had Boris Karloff in there too, playing a gangster.

It was a hell of a good film and I was delighted with the results. That is, until I showed it to Will Hays, the Hollywood censorship mogul, and our troubles started. Today people say there should be more censorship because of the violence in movies, but there sure should have been less at the time I made Scarface. Will Hays, with his holier-than-thou attitudes, made speeches about how my film was un-American and how we should present a better image to the world.

Why un-American? It was the story of a gangster.

But in America, according to Will Hays, we didn’t have any gangsters – or if we did, we swept them under the carpet. I went along with them part way, because I knew otherwise I would have a tough time getting distribution. I changed one scene after another, even put in a totally phony ending showing Scarface hanged – the trial, the sanctimonious speech by the judge. They changed the title. They called it The Shame of the Nation. Joe Schenck of United Artists – UA was supposed to release the picture – was giving me a hard time too. He wanted to make a statement to the press just before the premiere in New Orleans that the picture was a social document which would help the police in their fight against crime – and some more bullshit to the effect that the changes were all good ones, and how grateful we were to the various police departments for suggesting them to us. He was afraid I’d open up my mouth about what a lot of crap this was and how the original version was so much better. He wanted the world to forget there’d ever been an original version, and he knew I’d never let them forget.

Then they showed the changed version to the New York censors, and the New York censors rejected it as unacceptable. ‘Hell,’ I said, ‘if I’m going to have an unacceptable film, I might as well have an unacceptable good film’ – and I threw out all the changes and went back to the original version. And that’s the one that finally got distributed.

One other thing was notable about Scarface. In the Hays Office version, the New York Police Commissioner, Mulrooney, wrote the prologue to it, telling how noble everyone on the police force was, and how organized crime didn’t exist in the United States, it was all a myth. I saw a copy of the text before it was used, and I said, ‘This is pap for babies.’ I figured that I had to give it some juice, some fire. So I changed it, saying that the best way to stop crime in the United States was to prohibit the sale of firearms and their distribution interstate. That was included in the commissioner’s speech.

Did you really believe that, or were you making a statement to drum up publicity?

I believed it and I still believe it. I know it’s odd, coming from a man born in Texas where everybody is supposed to walk around with a Colt .45 strapped to his hip, and where, to their shame, there are more murders committed every year than there are in all of England, Scotland and Wales put together.

I believe that if a man can’t get his hand on a gun, he may give you a punch on the nose, but he’s not going to shoot you. I believed this as early as 1931. You know the NRA line: ‘Guns don’t kill people – people kill people’? That makes me sick, because obviously it’s people with guns who kill people. There was a big fuss about gun control when Jack Kennedy was shot, and then Martin Luther King, and then Bobby Kennedy, but nobody was saying it back in 1931 except a few oddballs, and I was one of them. I got this Irish police commissioner to include that statement in his introduction.

But we had other problems. Two of Al Capone’s men dropped in to see Ben Hecht in Hollywood. Somehow they’d got hold of the screenplay and they wanted to know if it was about their boss.

Ben gulped and said no, it wasn’t about Capone. They said, ‘Then why do you call it Scarface? That makes it sound like it’s about Al.’ Capone had a big scar on his face. And of course it was about Capone.

Ben said, ‘Because then people will think it’s about Capone, and we’ll make money.’

Money was something these hoods understood. ‘Okay, we give you permission.’

They asked Hecht who I was, and he said, ‘The sucker who’s putting up the money.’ He told me that story. He thought it was funny. So did I.

The sequel to this came a few years later, around 1933, when I was in Florida. I don’t know if it was the same two guys, but two men came to see me. Capone was in Alcatraz for income tax evasion. He had been to see Cornelius Vanderbilt before then – not the old man, but the son – and made him some sort of proposition about how they could divide up the territory of the whole United States. When these two hoodlums came to see me in Palm Beach that’s essentially what it was all about. They said that big Al was going to get out of Alcatraz one of these days, and he’d followed my career – I guess he got the newspapers in prison, and the picture Scarface naturally had interested him – and he would like to meet me when he got out.

Did they make a specific proposition to you?

They told me, ‘Big Al likes your style.’ I had the impression that what he wanted was some legitimate front, and he thought of me as a young kid with a lot of money who didn’t know his ass from second base, and he could use me.

I said, ‘That’s very interesting, and when Big Al gets out of prison, have him contact me.’ I gave them my telephone number on Romaine Street in Hollywood, which is about as much of a dead end as there is for reaching me. If he’d ever called I wouldn’t have known, because no messages came through for me for anyone who wasn’t on my ‘approved’ list.

In fact, much later on, I told the people at Romaine Street, ‘Anything new that comes up, I don’t want to hear about it. We’ll just discuss subjects that I raise. I have enough ideas for two lifetimes.’

I had a lot of money, more and more all the time, no matter what I spent, and I thought I should be doing things with it, not just letting it earn interest. At one point I seriously considered buying a couple of studios to get myself some real weight out there in Hollywood. The cost made even me hesitate, but I would have gone into it if I had the chance. I did buy about a hundred theaters, the Franklin chain, and I went so far as to make an offer for Paramount and MGM, but those studios turned me down.

There was an idiotic rumor went around at one time there that I had offered to buy not just Paramount and MGM but United Artists, Warner Brothers, Universal, First National, and RKO, which would have made me sole owner of Hollywood. But that was a lot more than I cared to chew, even if I could have bitten it off. I couldn’t have afforded it then. Toolco in 1932 was doing very nicely, but I was in no position to buy out Hollywood. Now, yes. But luckily for them I’m no longer interested in the movie business.