How Al Capone and the Mafia directly influenced the making of…
Al Capone was “Public Enemy No. 1” and the infamous boss of the Chicago Outfit who was maybe accountable for the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre.
He was also a film fan.
A new AMC+ documentary sequence, “Hollywood Crime Story: The Mob Takes Over the Movies,” premiering Thursday, recounts a surreal chapter in the early days of the movement image business when Capone and his Windy City thugs implanted themselves in Los Angeles and acquired directly concerned in a landmark flick about their lives — the unique 1932 “Scarface.”
In the Nineteen Twenties, the rising mob and film biz, with its booze-guzzling and drug-snorting stars, had been changing into more and more intertwined.
Notorious gangster Al Capone turned concerned in the manufacturing of the unique “Scarface.” Everett Collection / Everett Collection
“Hollywood is growing up and being solidified at the same time that organized crime is,” says Claire White, Sr. Director of Education at the Mob Museum in Las Vegas, in the doc.
Both institutions, in their very own manner, originated with immigrants in New York.
But while the mob proliferated in NYC, many Eastern European Jews fled to LA, the place they constructed profitable movie studios. Those moguls included Harry Cohn at Columbia, Jack Warner at Warner Bros., Carl Laemmle at Universal and Adolph Zukor of Paramount.
Hollywood was booming. And out east, it was being eyed with envy. So, in the mid-Nineteen Twenties, Capone, who was born in New York however dominated the roost in Chicago, despatched an affiliate named Johnny Rosselli to California to scope out alternatives for the Outfit.
“Part of Rosselli’s ‘assignment’ in Los Angeles was to cultivate relationships with the film industry hierarchy,” Lee Server, creator of “Handsome Johnny: The Life and Death of Johnny Rosselli: Gentleman Gangster, Hollywood Producer, CIA Assassin,” told Vice.
“He knew everybody, dated movie stars, played golf with studio heads.”
Capone went out to Los Angeles to explore enterprise alternatives. Bettmann Archive
A bootlegger and narcotics pusher, Rosselli was soon palling round with Charlie Chaplin and struck up an in depth friendship with Cohn, the co-founder of Columbia Pictures.
In 1927, Capone visited Tinseltown.
A sort of celeb himself, he was smitten with the starry metropolis. The boss stayed at the Biltmore Hotel under the alias Al Brown and allegedly frolicked at megastar Douglas Fairbanks’ Beverly Hills property Pickfair.
Never one to be inconspicuous, Capone caught out in yellow and pink fits, simply alerting the media and the cops to his apparent presence.
Soon, regulation enforcement kicked the man out.
“Los Angeles has found at least one Middle Westerner whom it does not want for a visitor,” cheekily reported the AP.
Said LA Chief of Police James E. Davis, “We have no room here for Capone or any other visiting gangster.”
Soon, Capone discovered a film was in the works seemingly about his life — “Scarface.”
Capone wasn’t via with California yet, though.
“I’ve found out what to do,” he told reporters. “When I get a little business done in Chicago, I’m going to send a lot of money here and have some real estate man buy me a large house. Then I’ll be a taxpayer and they can’t send me away.”
Capone headed again to Chicago on a practice. Two years later, on Feb. 14, 1929, got here the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre — the mob execution-style killing of seven males that many consider he was behind.
Around this time, Hollywood began embracing gangster motion pictures, such as 1927’s silent “Underworld,” written by Ben Hecht, and 1928’s “The Racket,” directed by Howard Hughes.
With the daybreak of the “talkies” — flicks with sound — Hughes and Hecht would soon team up on an altogether more bold and harmful project: “Scarface.”
The film depicts an event like the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. Courtesy Everett Collection
Scarface was the well-known nickname of Capone because of an outdated injury on the left aspect of his face. Actor Paul Muni was set to play Tony Camonte, a violent, Prohibition-era Chicago mobster. Yet it was clear to anyone in America with a newspaper who the film was truly about.
“Al Capone finds out that Hollywood wants to make ‘Scarface,’ and he’s very concerned,” says White.
“So he places a lot of pressure on the writer [and] on the production team to make sure that ‘Scarface’ isn’t exactly a telling of his story and that it paints this character as suave and elegant.”
The Chicago Outfit despatched representatives to LA to research how they had been being portrayed in the film, which was produced by Hughes and directed by Howard Hawks.
Hecht, who began as a talented Chicago reporter and columnist, personally assured the gangsters that his screenplay wouldn’t be completely based on Capone’s life story. Production started in 1931.
Karen Morley, left, and Paul Muni in “Scarface” in 1932. Courtesy Everett Collection
“Everyone involved from a top level made sure that the Outfit felt that they were in on the making of the film, that they were involved in it,” says critic Christina Newland in the doc. “And that way it made it feel glamorous to them.”
Although “Scarface” was made before the ennactment of the Production Code, a morality regulation e-book filmmakers had been pressured to comply with starting in 1934, censors had been still reluctant to permit the flick’s release round the nation.
So, The Post reported that actor and director Marshall Neilan “arranged a test-showing before a select group of Manhattan intellectuals.”
The story continued, “They merely were amused by the tough-guy, gangster sequences and laughed at the reproduction of Chicago’s St. Valentine’s Massacre.”
From left, George Raft, Vince Barnett and Paul Muni in “Scarface” on Wednesday, July 17, 2019. Everett Collection / Everett Collection
The pinky-out set’s chuckles had been ok for the censors, yet the film went on to freak out mainstream audiences.
“On the first day the picture was shown publicly, the first customer — a woman — fainted, horror-stricken,” The Post reported.
The movie has gone down as a traditional and the mob style turned an indicator of Hollywood. And because of the likes of Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese, it still is one.
“The film business in America would not have been what it became or what it is without the Mafia,” said Newland.
“The opposite is also true. The Mafia very much made its name on its connections to Hollywood and particularly in its depictions on the screen.”
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