The film’s producers had intended to shoot almost all of Scarface in Miami.

“I was the first guy [from the production] in Miami, and I was supposed to set up the entire movie there,” says Scarface executive producer Louis Stroller.

But some Miami columnists and politicians were highly critical of the storyline, and the controversies surrounding the filming of Scarface garnered numerous headlines before production started.

“Miami was and still is very well-to-do, and there were a lot of bankers and lawyers, and they didn’t want to point to Miami as a place where all bad Cubans went,” Stroller tells L.A. TACO. “So they put pressure on and pressure on until, finally, the studio called and said, ‘No, we’re not going to make the movie in Florida at all. If we’re going to make this movie, it’s going to come back to L.A.’”

At the end of the day, community leaders were likely feeling the loss of the economic impact that comes from a major studio production. Constituents were also applying the pressure, as a number of local Cuban actors that were supportive of the film showed up at town hall meetings focused on the production.

Eventually, leaders of Miami’s Cuban-American community welcomed back the filmmakers, though they were still not thrilled about the main character being a Mariel criminal.

Stroller says they were permitted to return because the production wasn’t going to shoot any scenes in Miami that were detrimental to the area.

The producers also agreed to include a disclaimer at the end of the film stating that Scarface did not represent the Cuban-American community as a whole.

Over ten days, with bodyguards in tow, De Palma shot mostly exteriors that best captured Miami’s modern, Art Deco, and tropical aesthetics.

Aside from the film’s pressure-cooker car-bomb-gone-awry sequence filmed in New York, and the exterior of Tony’s Miami compound and Alejandro Sosa’s Bolivian estate, which were both shot in Santa Barbara, much of the nearly three-hour film was shot between practical L.A. locations and sets built on-stage at Universal Studios.

Stroller gives a lot of the credit to Scarface’s visual consultant, Ferdinando Scarfiotti, for capturing the look of Miami in L.A.

“He went back to L.A. and scouted all the places and he came up with some wonderful locations,” says Stroller. “He was very inventive.”

Unfortunately, 40 years later there aren’t many folks from the production who can comment with first-hand knowledge on the film’s locations, even Stroller.

“It was a few days ago,” he quips.

De Palma could not be reached for comment for this article.

Scarfiotti, producer Martin Bregman, art director Edward Richardson, cinematographer John Alonzo, and location manager Frank Pierson, who may have had some insight on the film’s locations, have since passed away.

One location manager who worked on the Florida locales declined to comment on the move from Miami to L.A.

Co-producer Peter Saphier told us he wasn’t close enough to the actual filming - he mainly dealt with Bregman, Stroller, and Universal executives - to say why and how the L.A. locations were chosen.

With all that in mind, L.A. TACO took a photographic look at a number of the L.A. spots from one of the most polarizing yet hugely influential gangster pictures ever made.