News

Scarface in Miami

Twenty-five years ago this month, the gangster epic caused a local stir.

By Francisco Alvarado  ,  Frank Houston ,  Tamara Lush ,  and  Amy Guthrie

News

The Day Scarface Came to Town

Twenty-five years ago, politics derailed De Palma's Miami plans.

BY FRANK HOUSTON

Brian De Palma's Scarface might hold a record for the movie with the most fucks per minute. The gangster epic, parts of which were shot in Miami Beach 25 years ago this month, includes 223 variants of the word fuck, according to the DVD release. That's an average of 1.3 per minute.

Scarface defined excessive. In addition to Al Pacino's wretched Cuban accent, the machine-gun-happy flick sprayed 2,048 shots across its 170 minutes — or a bullet every five seconds.

A few of those blasts were captured in snapshots by Bill Cooke, who in April 1983 was employed as a valet at a condo building in Miami Beach. He was working the day shift one Saturday when he heard from a co-worker that cameras would be rolling on Ocean Drive.

Click here to see some of Bill Cooke's Scarface pictures

"I hurried down and parked a block away," Cooke recalls. Nikon in hand, he headed to a spot filled with spectators, across the street from the Beacon Hotel. "I'd been on a couple of movie sets before, and when you are uninvited, you really have no clue about what's going to take place."

Over and over again, Cooke recalls, an armed Pacino chased another actor into the street, shot him, andbolted in a beat-up Chevy.

In fact much of the production crew had already ditched town. It turned out the politics surrounding the filming were even more extreme than Scarface's violence. Months before De Palma yelled "Action!" on the Beach, screenwriter Oliver Stone's story of Tony Montana — a Marielito turned coke smuggler — had rankled the Cuban exile community.

"The basic message of the movie seems to be drugs, killing, and criminal activities. That does not represent the majority of hard-working and law-abiding Cubans," Miami Dade College president Eduardo Padron, who was then head of the Spanish-American League Against Discrimination, told the Miami Herald in August 1982. Then-Miami city Commissioner Demetrio Perez Jr. threatened to deny film permits unless Montana was recast as a Communist agent who infiltrated the United States at Castro's behest.

"We are not doing a film about Cubans in Miami. We're doing a picture about one gangster," producer Martin Bregman told the Herald. "The movie has more crooked Jews than crooked Cubans." Bregman, who helped with Serpico and Dog Day Afternoon, promised to "make an idiot" out of Perez. Later he declared the movie would be shot elsewhere.

"He was a very stupid man," Bregman says of Perez in a telephone interview from his New York office. "And I told him that."

Despite the intervention of then-Florida Gov. Bob Graham, the $15 million production decamped to Los Angeles. Bregman estimates that, at most, 20 percent of the film was made in Miami. "We had intended to shoot the whole film there," he adds. Bregman says he was visited by Cuban-Americans from Union City, New Jersey, who "were convinced this film was being financed by Fidel Castro. It was beyond silly."

Cooke, who went on to a career in photojournalism, also fell victim to the politics of the day. Though a Herald photo editor had told him the paper would publish his pictures that Sunday, none appeared. "The higherups had killed the photo," Cooke says. "It seems that Sunday was the third anniversary of the Mariel boatlift."

Culture

Rapper's Mom's Delight

Ace Hood, local rapper made good, is grounded.

BY AMY GUTHRIE

Blondy McColister Williams, age 48, is a familiar figure at Deerfield Beach High School, where she has done everything from working as a security guard to driving a school bus to coaching the girl's softball team.

A hearty, bluff, good-natured woman, she is most notable nowadays for being the mom of 19-year-old break-out rap artist Antoine McColister — a.k.a. Ace Hood — whose first single, "Cash Flow," featuring T-Pain and Rick Ross, has been hitting South Florida airwaves in a big way.

Riptide cornered Williams the other day to ask her what it was like bringing up a future rap sensation.

"He's been doing it ever since he was in middle school. I'd get calls saying he was interrupting classes, freestylin'," Williams remembers. "I'd be like, 'Turn that music down!' He'd be like, 'I'm gonna be a millionaire.' I'd say, 'Look, you have to go to college.' He'd say, 'Mom, I'm gonna keep pursuing my dream.' I said, 'Antoine, you can be a rapper and get an education.' He just kept going to the clubs, he kept proceeding, until he got to this point."

His persistence has paid off for Williams too. With Antoine's help, she's house hunting in and around Parkland, and on Valentine's Day she was treated to a Louis Vuitton purse stuffed with $5,000 in $100 bills. "I'm like, 'Oh my God, oh my God," she says.

But Antoine's largesse doesn't mean she won't still mom him — especially when it comes to obscene lyrics.

"I was like, 'God, please keep it clean.' Once I heard 'Cash Flow' on the radio, I was like, okay, good, good. There wasn't lots of profanity in there." Then she heard the swearing on the club version of the single and said to herself: "I hope it don't get no worse than that — I'll choke him!"

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