DE PALMA HAD A VISION FOR THE OPENING TITLES THAT, ALAS, DID NOT WORK OUT
Tim Greiving's terrific liner notes in the booklet of La-La Land Records' expanded Scarface soundtrack, David Ray, who co-edited Scarface with Jerry Greenberg, says that due to time constraints and a fixed release date, most of the film was edited without any music yet, not even temp tracks. The one exception was the opening title sequence, for which they had Giorgio Moroder's opening theme music. Greiving writes:
In the main title, the melody of Tony’s theme kicks in with an up-tempo disco beat over footage of Cubans arriving by boat (an interesting juxtaposition to the dejected faces of real refugees). This was the only sequence the editors were able to cut to, but only because De Palma’s original vision was jettisoned at the last minute. “There was a title sequence crisis,” says Ray. “Brian had in his head that the title sequence should be a series of newsreel clips, which would eventually freeze, go to high contrast black-and-white, and the white parts would morph into mounds of cocaine, which would blow away and reveal the text of the title. And that was a huge thing to do. I think he had it in his mind you could shoot that live, and we did tests, and they were terrible. I think the only way to do this convincingly would be to animate it, which was a big deal.” Instead, Greenberg suggested just intercutting the film’s title cards with the existing newsreel footage, which Ray hastily did as the clock was ticking. “The music was already locked, so the length was locked in. But that was the only time that we had music.”
