Al Pacino Credits Hip Hop with Taking Scarface Mainstream

Al Pacino recalls the Hip Hop community embracing, "Scarface," and pushing it into the mainstream...

From Indie Wire

When Brian De Palma’s reinvention of Howard Hawks’ classic gangster picture “Scarface” was first released in 1983, critics skewered it for its overt violence, drug use, and profanity, as well as its stereotyping of Cubans. The film wasn’t exactly a flop, earning $66 million against its roughly $30 million budget, but it wasn’t a runaway success either and many in Hollywood questioned Al Pacino‘s choice to participate in such a shallow and grotesque project such as this. Pacino shared in his recently published memoir, “Sonny Boy,” as well as on the “WTF Podcast with Marc Maron,” that he was “surprised it had that reaction” and that it took the Black community incorporating “Scarface” into their image and their music for the film to receive the acclaim and acknowledgement it deserved.

“Hip-hop just got it, they understood it, they embraced it — the rappers,” Pacino said on the “WTF Podcast.” “And then the next thing you know, VHS is going out and more people are seeing it, plus we’re on the records — these rappers — and then it just carried. And it kept going.”