Godfather star Al Pacino has been named the greatest film star of all time, in a poll of British movie fans for Channel 4.

The Italian-American actor was picked just ahead of his contemporary Robert De Niro.

The highest placed British star in the top 100 list was Anthony Hopkins at number seven, ahead of eighth placed Sean Connery.

More than 25,000 votes were cast in the Channel 4 poll, with Scottish star Ewan McGregor the youngest actor in the top 10 at the age of 32.

No female stars made the top 10, with Breakfast at Tiffanys star Audrey Hepburn at number thirteen.

Channel 4′s Top 20

1. Al Pacino
2. Robert De Niro
3. Tom Hanks
4. Kevin Spacey
5. Harrison Ford
6. Jack Nicholson
7. Anthony Hopkins
8. Sean Connery
9. Ewan McGregor
10. Cary Grant
11. Samuel L. Jackson
12. James Stewart
13. Audrey Hepburn
14. Steve McQueen
15. Brad Pitt
16. Paul Newman
17. Mel Gibson
18. Clint Eastwood
19. Robin Williams
20. Sigourney Weaver

Sigourney Weaver, best known for her roles in the Alien movies, at number 20 is the second-highest placed woman in the poll.

The world’s biggest contemporary film stars dominate the poll, with Saving Private Ryan star Tom Hanks and American Beauty star Kevin Spacey at number three and four.

Recent Oscar winner Catherine Zeta Jones failed to make the list but her husband Michael Douglas came in at number 100.

Hong Kong actor Jackie Chan, star of Rush Hour, voted in at number 41, is the highest-placed Asian star.

At 92 in the poll Amitabh Bachchan is the only Bollywood star to make the top 100.

BBC Online, “Pacino Named Greatest Film Star”, May 5, 2003

The World is Yours! Scarface, the epic film that transcends generations and appeals to contemporary and urban audiences alike is now coming for the first time to game consoles worldwide. In a complex world filled with excess and greed, players can take the role of Tony Montana, one of the most ruthless gangsters ever depicted on film. Highly acclaimed feature screenwriter, David McKenna, has written an original event-driven storyline that leads the player through a sordid and violent underworld. Scarface will create a gameplay environment that authentically recreates the historical time period of the film, touching on politics, news items and events of the day.

Hip-hop stars have made Al Pacino‘s gangster revival a cult classic, writes Bernard Weinraub.

Twenty-five years ago, Al Pacino was walking down Sunset Boulevard with some friends when he passed a cinema showing Scarface, the 1932 classic directed by Howard Hawks and written by Ben Hecht about the rise and fall of a Chicago gangster, played by Paul Muni. Pacino promptly purchased a ticket.

“I had been wanting to see it since ’74, when I had done a workshop production of Arturo Ui,” said Pacino, referring to Bertolt Brecht’s Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, a thinly veiled fable about Hitler’s rise to power set in the world of Chicago gangsters.

Pacino said Brecht had been fascinated with American gangster films, especially Scarface. “The film just stopped me in my tracks,” Pacino said. “All I wanted to do was imitate Paul Muni. His acting went beyond the boundaries of naturalism into another kind of expression. It was almost abstract what he did. It was almost uplifting.”

At the same time, the producer Martin Bregman, a friend who had produced Pacino films including Dog Day Afternoon and Serpico, saw Scarface on television and decided to make a large-scale, contemporary version.

Out of this collaboration – with Oliver Stone writing the screenplay and Brian De Palma as director – the film was released in 1983 to mostly terrible reviews, lacklustre business and studio indifference. By any measure the film, a sprawling 170 minutes with almost operatic violence and over-the-top acting, should have disappeared.

It didn’t. Scarface developed a cult following among younger audiences, notably hip-hop stars and college students, and it is already an underground classic. A remastered print was released at the weekend in 10 American cities. More significantly, on Tuesday in the US Universal Studios Home Video will release the film on DVD with a documentary (Def Jam Presents: Origins of a Hip-Hop Classic) that includes interviews with Sean Combs, Snoop Dog, Eve and the rapper Scarface. They talk about the relevance of the film to their lives.

Combs has seen the film 63 times. “You watch it for the lessons,” he says.

Snoop Dog says: “It’s one of the most important movies of all time.”

The rapper Scarface, who took his name from the film, says of the Pacino character: “This cat is just like me.”

In the film – one reviewer called it “a wretched, fascinating car wreck of a movie” – Pacino plays Tony Montana, a Cuban refugee and small-time punk whose ferocious climb to the top of Miami’s cocaine-laden underworld ends in his own deadly addiction and paranoia. Supporting roles include Michelle Pfeiffer as his silky mistress, Steven Bauer as his best friend and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio as the sister for whom he has an incestuous fixation.

Vincent Canby, then film critic for The New York Times, was one of the few reviewers who enjoyed the film. He wrote that the updated Scarface was “the most stylish and provocative – and maybe the most vicious – serious film about the American underworld since Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather”.

At times, the film’s violence and spectacle – as well as the acting – seem so overstated that they verge on parody. “I’m sort of out there,” Pacino acknowledged with a laugh. But he also said that, despite most of the bad reviews and tepid business in the film’s first weeks, he knew the movie was special.

“You make a lot of pictures, and you realise some don’t have it,” he said. “I knew there was a pulse to this picture; I knew it was beating. And then I kept getting residuals from the movie, kept getting cheques. And wherever I was filming in Europe, people would come up to me and say, ‘Hey, Tony Montana’.

“In Israel, the Israelis came up to me and wanted to talk about Scarface. The Palestinians wanted to talk about Scarface. It is an operatic movie. That was the idea of Brian De Palma. He wanted to go that way.”

De Palma took over the direction of the film after Sidney Lumet dropped out over script disagreements. (It was Lumet’s idea to make the Pacino character a Cuban refugee.) The film cost about $US25 million ($A36.9 million) to make; today it would cost about three times that.

De Palma said he believed that the movie stirred younger audiences, especially those in the hip-hop world, because many of them had grown up in poor neighbourhoods and had become rich overnight.

“The hip-hop community was seeing all around them what was happening in the film – that cocaine makes you feel all powerful, and you surround yourself with entourages and palaces and outrageous clothes and women, and you lose all touch with reality; you become numb,” De Palma said. “Ultimately, you divorce yourself from the people you knew in the past. You ultimately explode; you perish because of your own excess.”

Lines of dialogue from the film – many of them unprintable – are now famous in the hip-hop world and are constantly repeated on the internet. These include Tony Montana’s credo: “In this country, you gotta make the money first. Then when you get the money, you get the power. Then when you get the power, then you get the woman.”

Bregman, the producer, said the movie was initially given an “X” rating – meaning no one under 17 could be admitted – because of its language. That would have made it difficult to release on a large scale. But he appealed to the ratings board, bringing along some police officers specialising in narcotics, who said that the movie carried an anti-drug message. It was given an “R” rating, meaning anyone under 17 must be accompanied by a parent or guardian.

“It’s not just the hip-hop community – white college students have Scarface parties,” Bregman said.

“The film just keeps going. It’s bizarre and amazing.”

-New York Times

The Al Pacino film classic “Scarface” is about to be reinvented for the 21st century according to The Hollywood Reporter. The USA Network is developing an updated four hour mini-series version that restages the gangster classic with a black cast in inner-city Los Angeles during the crack epidemic of the 1980s.

Production could begin as early as this Fall for a 2005 debut and “The Shield” Producer Charles “Chic” Eglee is developing the project. Rather than a direct remake with a simple setting change, they are “creating a new cast loosely based on most of the primary characters instead of literally revisiting them”.

Meanwhile David E. Kelley’s long running “The Practice” is finally coming to a close after eight seasons according to USA Today & Mediasharx. The massive cast shake-up last year hasn’t been a huge success in the ratings for ABC, but it has done good enough that the network has come up with another idea.

Rather than flatly ending the series, Kelley and ABC are planning to take several of the characters over to a whole new series to debut in the Fall which will center around the world of civil law in a big new Boston law firm.

The firm will be introduced in the last four episodes of “The Practice” when Alan Shore (James Spader) is fired and files a wrongful-termination lawsuit against Young, Frutt & Berluti with the firm (run by William Shatner) defending him – in the end he joins them. Its expected cast members Jessica Capshaw and Rhona Mitra will also be a part of the new show.

Thanks to ‘Marcus’ & ‘SWERJ’.

The 1983 movie Scarface starred Al Pacino as Tony Montana, a ruthless Cuban immigrant killing his way to the top of Miami’s cocaine-crazy underworld. (The film was loosely inspired by the 1932 film Scarface: The Shame of a Nation, which starred Paul Muni as blood-crazed gangster Tony Camonte. That film, in turn, was loosely inspired by the life of real-life mobster Al Capone, who was nicknamed Scarface.) The 1983 film, directed by Brian DePalma and written by Oliver Stone, was a modest hit when first released. However, it gained cult status in the 1990s and early 2000s thanks to its popularity with hip-hop stars and other young movie fans. This second generation of fans seemed captivated by the movie’s rags-to-riches theme, along with Pacino’s over-the-top performance and the film’s absurd levels of violence and tough talk. The film was re-released with much fanfare in 2003.

Extra credit: Pacino’s famous line about his machine gun, “Say ‘ello to my little friend,” has become a pop culture catch phrase… So has another line from the film, “I always tell the truth, even when I lie”… ‘Scarface’ was later taken as a stage name by rapper Brian Jordan (formerly known as Akshun)… Stone reportedly named Tony Montana as an homage to football star Joe Montana.

Other movie gangsters include Duke Mantee (played by Humphrey Bogart in The Petrified Forest, 1936), Cody Jarrett (played by James Cagney in White Heat, 1949), Verbal Kint (played by Kevin Spacey in The Usual Suspects, 1995) and Don Vito Corleone (played by Marlon Brando in The Godfather, 1972).

An excellent remake, starring Al Pacino, of Scarface, the Shame of the Nation (1932). This story structure has 53 stages and is best understood by watching the film simultaneously. Using story structure templates like these helps the screenwriter to quickly expand an idea into a step outline and treatment and then rapidly reach a words-on-paper first draft from there.

Incredibly moralistic but executed in a thoroughly enjoyable and realistic way. A great way to plot the story of a hero’s turn to the dark side and then attempt to return from it. Main archetypes include the (anti) Hero, Achilles Heel, Demon King, Dark Mentor, Loyal Ally, Threshold Guardian cum Shape Shifter, Mother and Goddess.

Stage 1: The intro explains the context of the story – visuals and narrative summarising the expulsion of Cuban criminals by Fidel from Cuba. This is in contrast to, for instance Star Wars, where the context is only given in narrative in the famous roll on.

Stage 2: We powerfully meet Tony Montana as immigration officials are interrogating him. We learn a little of his character and back-story.

Stage 3: We meet Manny, his Loyal Ally who is one symbol of the (anti) hero’s strength. Their relationship, relative status and dynamic is introduced.

Stage 4: We meet them in their Ordinary World – prisoners, refugees, in jail, surrounded by criminals and low life. They fit perfectly into this world and are itching to get out of it.

Stage 5: Manny acts as the Herald and brings the Call to Adventure – they are able to escape their Ordinary World on condition that they pass a trial (killing the communist Rebenga).

Stage 8: Omar acts as a Threshold Guardian and attempts to divert the hero from the Ordeal, but he will not be diverted. Omar sets a condition: to pass the test of the First Threshold and sends them into the Belly of the Whale of the First Threshold (retrieve the cocaine from the Colombians).

Stage 14: This is a complex and seminal stage of the story. Hero et al are tempted by the Goddess (Pfeiffer) into the World of the Ordeal, symbolised by the Babylon Club. Here the rewards of embarking on the Ordeal are apparent. The Hero acts like a bull in a china shop – symbolising his ineptitude in this world, at this moment. The relationship between the Hero and Dark Mentor is expanded upon. The Goddess (the Sword) is the prize to be gained once he has undergone the Ordeal. There is much more to this stage.

Stage 21: The Hero meets the Demon King (Sosa) in his lair and they agree to journey together. A Threshold Guardian (Omar) is removed.

Stage 29: The Final Downfall is set up with Gina and Manny romancing in the car.

Stage 34: The Rewards of having successfully undergone the Ordeal are displayed. The Goddess symbolises the reward – the Hero has earned her.

Stage 40: The Goddess (Hero’s strength) leaves him. Hero et al do not have the “appetite for the adventure” any longer.

Scarface is a 1983 motion picture starring Al Pacino about Tony Montana, a fictional Cuban refugee who comes to Florida in 1980 as a result of the Mariel Boatlift. Kicked out of Cuba for being an assassin, Tony becomes a gangster against the backdrop of the 1980s cocaine boom; the movie chronicles his meteoric rise to the top of Miami’s criminal underworld and subsequent downfall. The film is loosely based on the 1932 pseudo-Al Capone biopic, Scarface.

In 1980, young Cuban hitman Tony Montana, the son of a Cuban woman and an American man, is kicked out of his country during the infamous Mariel boatlift, in which Cuban president Fidel Castro exiled thousands of his deadliest prisoners to Florida. There, Tony and several of his old prison friends, including his partner-in-crime, Manny, find themselves being held in a detention camp beneath a highway while the U.S. government attempts to figure out what to do with the fugitives. Luck comes for them when they are hired by a Miami drug lord, Frank Lopez, to murder a former Castro loyalist who has since fallen from favor. In exchange for carrying out the assassination, Lopez promises to obtain US immigration green cards for Manny, Tony, and another associate named Angel. They eagerly agree and stab the man to death during a detention camp riot.

They go to work washing dishes at a Cuban food stand in Miami and, in the midst of daydreaming about being cocaine dealers, are approached by Lopez henchman Omar Suarez to unload a boatload of marijuana. Tony thinks his offer is insulting, so the pair are then offered $5,000 to complete a drug deal with a Colombian couple. The deal goes sour. Tony and one of his crew, Angel, are ambushed by the Colombians, who want to steal the buy money and keep the drugs for themselves. Tony is forced to watch while Angel is dismembered limb by limb with a chainsaw. Just as Tony is about to suffer the same fate, Manny bursts in to save him, killing one of the Colombians. Tony chases the other one outside and kills him in the middle of a crowded South Beach street. It’s Tony’s lucky day. Not only does he survive the slaughterhouse hotel room, he now has possession of the cocaine and the buy money he was to use for its purchase. He turns both the cash and the “yeyo” cocaine over to Lopez, who, seeing that Tony has a knack for completing the dirty work, immediately hires Tony and Manny as enforcers in his criminal hierarchy. Tony thus begins his meteoric rise up through the ranks of the Miami cocaine underworld in bloody fashion. He re-establishes contact with his sister, Gina, who eventually begins seeing Manny against Tony’s wishes.

While accompaning Omar to Bolivia, Tony begins to show his defiance to Lopez’s authority when he nearly makes a deal with Bolivian drug lord Alejandro Sosa. The full-blown conflict between Lopez and Tony over this matter results in Lopez’s attempted assassination of Tony; however, it fails and in rapid fashion Tony kills Lopez and his other heirs in a coup, taking over Lopez’s business and girlfriend, Elvira, for his wife. In control of most of Miami’s cocaine ring, his deal with Sosa allows “Montana, Co.” to expand across the nation and bring in millions of dollars monthly. Tony buys “the world” as he stated earlier to Manny, getting a huge new mansion, new cars, new security, new clothes, and so on. However, his addiction to his own product, his questionable love for Gina, and his careless neglect of Lopez’s earlier advice of “playing straight” ensure that his period on top is short-lived. His criticism of his wife’s addiction rather than trying to help her clean up results in the destruction of his marriage. His overbearing protection of Gina results in his murder of Manny when it is revealed the two secretly got married.

While exchanging $1+ million in cash into checks, Miami police inform him it was a sting operation, resulting in his arrest and future trial for tax evasion. No matter how much money Tony throws in the face of his lawyer and the justice system, he can’t buy his way out of the inevitable. Sosa and several other Bolivian elites come to Tony and offer to help him out through their connections in Washington D.C. In exchange, Tony must help them rid themselves of their own problem, a Latin-American journalist who is planning to expose to the American public the extent of corruption in Bolivia, which includes Sosa and his comrades. While on the assassination mission to set and detonate a car bomb, Tony gets cold feet when the journalist’s wife and two little girls enter the car with him. After Tony refuses to allow the detonation of the car bomb and kills Sosa’s aide, Sosa promises to get back at Tony. While Tony is high on cocaine at his mansion and not watching his security cameras one night, Sosa’s army arrives and breaks into Tony’s mansion. Tony’s security and his famous M16 rifle with a M203 Grenade Launcher attachment are no match for the Sosan Army.

In the end, Tony’s own power destroys himself, his sister, his friend, and his marriage, just as his mother predicted (“Why do you have to destroy everything you touch?”). Tony became a victim of his own lust for power and the famous saying “Those who have power only want more.”

Scarface was directed by Brian De Palma, and written by now famed director Oliver Stone while the latter battled a cocaine addiction. Stone consulted the Miami police and the Drug Enforcement Agency while writing the film, incorporating many true crimes into the film (one set of crime scene photos Stone was shown depicted a man who had been dismembered with a chainsaw and stuffed into an aluminum trashcan).

The film was originally to be filmed in Miami but it received criticism from the Cuban community, which objected to their representation in the film as murderous drug dealers. Leaders in the Cuban community wanted Stone and the movie’s producers to include scenes which would show Anti-Castro activity in Miami as part of the movie’s plot. After protracted negotiations over the script, the producers ultimately refused to give in to their demands, saying that the film was about cocaine and not the politics of Castro’s Cuba. As a result, the exception being obvious exterior shots, the movie was filmed in and around Los Angeles.

When the film was submitted to the MPAA, it was rated X for the graphic language and violence. DePalma would re-edit the film two additional times, toning down the violence but still getting an X-rating from the MPAA. After the film was rejected for a third time, DePalma, when he appealed the MPAA’s decision, convinced the MPAA with help from a panel of various real life police officers and narcotics officers, who told the MPAA that the violence in DePalma’s films was an accurate portrayal of real life drug dealers and that the film should be released with its violence intact so as to show and educate to viewer towards how violent the drug trade was. After a vote of 18 to 2, the MPAA agreed to give the third cut of the film an R-rating. But DePalma, who felt that there were no real differences between the two “clean” cuts he put together and the original director’s cut version, arranged to have his original “X” cut released to theaters with an R-rating.