EVEN ON A filmography as loaded with belters as David Koepp’s, one of the finest screenwriters in Hollywood, 1993 stands out by a country mile. Largely because of Jurassic Park, but it’s also the year of Carlito’s Way, the gangster film that reunited director Brian De Palma and star Al Pacino, ten years after Scarface. Initially shunned upon release, critically and commercially, the last 30 years have seen its reputation restored, and it’s now seen as an overlooked classic.
“I actually wrote this before Jurassic Park,” says Koepp. Then a writer contracted to Universal, he was asked by producer Martin Bregman, with whom he had just worked on The Shadow, to take a look at adapting two books by actual-New-York-judge-turned-author Edwin Torres, titled Carlito’s Way and After Hours, with an eye to having Al Pacino star in the resulting single movie.
“I had a look at the books, and I just thought, ‘This is fantastic,’” recalls Koepp. “This is a 1930s Warner Bros. gangster movie: I want to do that.” The novels tell the rise and fall of Puerto Rican-born New York gangster Carlito Brigante, but although the film bears the title of Torres’ first book, Koepp was drawn to the second, where the character — having been released from jail, rehabilitated, rejuvenated, and ready to go straight — would be closer to Pacino’s age at the time (early fifties). “A lot of stuff is from Carlito’s Way in terms of characters and background, but the spine of the movie is from After Hours,” confirms Koepp. Including Carlito’s ultimate fate. In After Hours, Carlito’s attempts to escape from New York with his pregnant girlfriend, Gail (played in the film by Penelope Ann Miller), are cut short when a gangster called Benny Blanco (John Leguizamo), still bristling from an earlier perceived slight, kills him (with a hand grenade, which Koepp changed to a gun after his first draft). The last chapter of After Hours is told from Carlito’s point of view as he bleeds out. The language Torres used (“Somebody’s pulling me close to the ground. I can sense, but I can’t see…”) was so evocative that Koepp knew that he not only wanted to lean into extensive voiceover (usually a screenwriting no-no), but also start the movie with Carlito’s death. “And so it turns out that it’s a voice from the grave, or near-grave,” he says. “I wanted to say, ‘Hey, look, this guy is gonna get shot, and he’s gonna die.’ And I wanted this idea that over the course of the film you get to like him and you start to think, ‘Well, he’ll make it somehow.’ And then, of course, he doesn’t, and it should have a tragic inevitability to it.”
Shady dealings afoot for Carlito (Al Pacino) and his very persuasive friend and lawyer David Kleinfeld (Sean Penn).