The WLBOTT Literary Society is currently reading Polostan: Volume One of Bomb Light, by one of our favorite authors, Neal Stephenson. We are currently at 39%.
A wild ride, most of the action so far has taken place in the early 1930s. Our main character is Dawn/Aurora, a teenager who is up to a bit of mischief. She finds herself in a muddy encampment with 20,000 homeless WWI veterans, just down the road from our nation’s capitol.
She meets a soldier (Billy Bach) while doing reconnaissance, and he invites her to see the movie that’s got the nation all abuzz – Scareface.
YES TWO DOZEN read a cable in her pocket as she sat in the cinema next to Billy Bach watching Scarface. This was the most interesting film she had ever seen, for a few reasons. The North Side/South Side division, Italians on the south, Irishmen on the north, was amusingly simplistic compared to Chicago’s actual turf map. But she had to admit it worked in the movie. Scarface was in the habit of looking out his window at a big electric sign, shaped like a globe, emblazoned THE WORLD IS YOURS.
Stephenson, N. (2024). Polostan: Volume One of Bomb Light—A Riveting Historical Epic of International Espionage, Intrigue, a [Kindle Android version]. Retrieved from Amazon.com. Page 86.
To her surprise—and, she suspected, Billy’s—the movie depicted adult relationships between boys and girls in a way that she found uncomfortably direct. It was nothing she had not seen, or at least heard, in the kommunalka. But it was supposed to be different here. Bourgeois morality might be arbitrary superstition. But at least it was rules. If those were being waved off now, it raised the question of what would happen—how she and Billy would look at each other—when the movie ended and the lights came up. But these concerns were minor compared to the movie’s central theme, which was the Thompson submachine gun. Not just as a piece of hardware but as the subject of some men’s obsession, and a catalyst and a symbol for abrupt shifts of power. “Hey, lookit!” Scarface exclaimed while lying on the floor of a restaurant being machine-gunned by furious Irishmen. “They got machine guns you can carry! If I had some of them I can run the whole works in a month!” The film showed a decent respect for the amount of time and manual dexterity needed to load magazines, good illumination and clean, level surfaces being of the essence. Dawn had forgotten the exact sequence of steps needed to ready the weapon for firing and was glad of the cinematic tutorial […] The lights came up and Dawn forced herself to look at Billy, expecting great awkwardness around the boy/girl material. But as they walked to the streetcar stop, it became clear that he had seen an altogether different movie. A movie about cars, and car chases, and running gun battles between cars that were chasing each other.
Stephenson, N. (2024). Polostan: Volume One of Bomb Light—A Riveting Historical Epic of International Espionage, Intrigue, a [Kindle Android version]. Retrieved from Amazon.com. Page 87.
Tommy Gun Tutorial
Stills from Scarface…
The Viewing
Since it was a quiet Sunday morning, with the bunnies feasting on the flowers of the Humulus lupulus vine and the gentle people of the WLBOTT community sleeping, I decided to watch the 1932 version of Scarface.
Q: How cool is the Austin Public Library? A: Very cool.
Scarface: The Nuts and Bolts
Scarface (also known as Scarface: The Shame of the Nation) is a 1932 American pre-Code gangster action film directed by Howard Hawks and produced by Hawks and Howard Hughes. The screenplay, by Ben Hecht, is based loosely on the novel first published in 1930 by Armitage Trail, which was inspired by Al Capone. The film stars Paul Muni as Italian immigrant gangster Antonio “Tony” Camonte who violently rises through the Chicago gangland, with a supporting cast that includes George Raft and Boris Karloff. Camonte’s rise to power dovetails with his relentless pursuit of his boss’s mistress while his sister pursues his best hitman. In an overt tie to the life of Capone, a version of the Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre is depicted. […] Audience reception was positive, but censors banned the film in several cities and states, forcing Hughes to remove it from circulation and store it in his vault. The rights to the film were recovered after Hughes died in the 1970s. Alongside Little Caesar and The Public Enemy (both 1931), Scarface is regarded as one of the most significant and influential gangster films. […] Filming took 3 months, with the cast and crew working 7 days a week. For the most violent scene of the film in the restaurant, Hawks cleared the set to avoid harming extras and had the set fired on by machine guns. The actors acted out the scene in front of a screen with the shooting projected in the back, so as everyone crowded under the tables in the restaurant, the room appeared to be simultaneously under fire. […] J. E. Smyth described Scarface as “one of the most highly censored films in Hollywood history”. Howard Hawks believed the Hays Office had personal vendettas against the movie, while Hughes believed the censorship was due to “ulterior and political motives” of corrupt politicians.
We noticed that the letter “X” appears in various ways throughout the movie: a hospital room number, a beam of light, architectural structures. It has a very Hitchcockian feel to it. It’s always associated with someone about to bite the bullet. But why “X”? Elder G has three theories:
The Literal and Fatal “X Marks the Spot” The most direct, visceral meaning of the “X” is that it acts as a harbinger of death. Howard Hawks and his team structured the film so that every single time a character is about to be murdered, an “X” appears somewhere in the frame. It is a visual cue to the audience that a life is about to be snuffed out.
The De-Valuation of Human Life From a deeper, more philosophical standpoint, the “X” represents cancellation and commodification. In the world of Tony Camonte—and the hyper-capitalist gangster underworld he inhabits—human beings are not individuals; they are just variables in an equation, or items to be crossed off a ledger. When a rival gangster is eliminated, they are simply “X-ed out” to make room for more profit. It underscores the cold, unfeeling, systematic nature of the violence. A man isn’t just killed; he is erased from the territory map.
The Irony of the Religious Cross There is also a sharp, subversive irony to the shape. An “X” is essentially a crucifix turned on its side. In a traditional immigrant community (like Tony’s Italian-American family), the cross is a symbol of protection, faith, and divine law. By tilting that cross into an “X,” Hawks skews it into a symbol of lawlessness, doom, and moral corruption. Divine judgment is replaced by the judgment of the Tommy gun.
The Delicate Subject
We watched Scarface, and were a little confused by Dawn’s (protagonist in Polostan) reaction to the male/female interactions: “To her surprise—and, she suspected, Billy’s—the movie depicted adult relationships between boys and girls in a way that she found uncomfortably direct.”
According to Gemini:
Before the hammer came down (Hays Code), movies were shockingly frank about sex, infidelity, and raw violence. Dawn, having grown up partly in a Soviet kommunalka (a crowded communal apartment where privacy didn’t exist), is used to the unvarnished reality of human relationships. But she expected America to be bound by “bourgeois morality.” Her anxiety when the lights come up is about the breakdown of social structures—if America isn’t actually adhering to its own puritanical rules, then the social landscape is far more unpredictable and dangerous than she thought.
WLBOTT Ministry of Virtue and Vice
Although the movie is currently rated PG, our Ministry of Virtue and Vice perked up its ears when we told them we were blotting about the 1932 Scarface. They went thru the film frame by frame, and produced lists of violations, concerns, and objections.
WLBOTT Ministry of Virtue and Vice: The B Team
The M-V&V made the following mandatory modifications.
Before:
After:
According to the Ministry of Virtue and Vice, Ann Dvorak (who played Tony’s sister Cesca) was “quite the tomato” – lively, vivacious and beautiful.
On the other hand, Poppy (played by Karen Morley), is calculating, opportunistic, cynical, and highly expensive. In the mobster parleance of the period, she might be described as “Classy Dame” / “High-Hat” / A “Cold Fish” / “High Society” / “The Ritz” / A “Chiller”.
The M V&V also required changes to certain plot elements.
Beer?
In Scarface, the main conflict concerns the control of the illegal beer distribution to the speakeasies. Beer? High volume, low profit, right? But we got Elder G to run the numbers for us.
To understand how the syndicates of the Prohibition era—like Al Capone’s Chicago Outfit, which Scarface was directly satirizing—pulled off mass production, you have to look at it less like a traditional criminal racket and more like a triumph of rogue industrial engineering.
They weren’t just brewing a few batches in a basement; they were running a vertically integrated corporate enterprise.
Mass-Producing the Contraband
Producing thousands of barrels of beer a week required massive infrastructure. The syndicates handled this through two primary methods:
1. The Co-Opted Industrial Brewery
This was the most efficient method. When Prohibition went into effect, many legitimate, massive breweries were forced to pivot to making “near-beer” (beer with less than 0.5% alcohol) or industrial malt syrup to survive.
Gangsters simply stepped in with cash, muscle, or political leverage to take them over.
The Operation: They would run the brewery legally during the day, producing harmless malt syrup.
The Shift: At night, they would hook up secret pipelines, bypass the government meters, and brew real, high-point beer. The beer was then rapidly pumped into retrofitted milk trucks or oil tankers to be whisked away to secret bottling plants.
2. The Decentralized “Alley Brewery” Network
If a massive brewery wasn’t available, they used a decentralized franchise model.
The syndicate would rent out ordinary tenements, warehouses, or hidden spaces across different neighborhoods.
They installed massive vats capable of holding hundreds or thousands of gallons.
They hired local workers (often immigrants who desperately needed income) to manage the fermentation.
If federal “dry agents” raided one alley brewery, it was just a minor cost of doing business; the other fifty locations kept running uninterrupted.
The Economics & Profit Margins
The profit margins on bootleg beer were nothing short of astronomical. Because beer is mostly water, grain, and yeast, the raw material cost was negligible. The real “expense” was bribery and distribution.
To put the economics of a 1920s/early 1930s beer syndicate into perspective:
Expense / Revenue Item
Cost in 1920s Dollars
Profit Margin Factor
Cost to Manufacture (per barrel)
~$2.00 to $3.00
Includes raw grains, labor, and utilities.
Protection & Bribery (per barrel)
~$5.00
Paid to local police, politicians, and lookouts.
Total Production Cost
~$7.00 to $8.00
The total baseline cost to get a barrel ready.
Wholesale Price to Speakeasies
~$50.00 to $60.00
What the gang charged the club owners.
Retail Price (by the glass)
~900% Markup
Speakeasies sold a mug for 25¢–50¢, yielding ~$90/barrel.
The Math of a Syndicate
If a gang like Capone’s distributed 10,000 barrels a week (a standard volume for a major outfit at its peak):
Weekly Production Cost: ~$80,000
Weekly Gross Revenue: ~$550,000
Weekly Net Profit:~$470,000 In modern numbers, a major territory leader was clearing the equivalent of millions of dollars every single week in pure profit.
Why the Turf Wars Happened
With margins like that, the business wasn’t driven by product quality—it was entirely driven by market exclusivity.
Unlike modern legal corporate capitalism, where companies compete on price or marketing, the Prohibition syndicates competed through pure territorial monopoly. If a speakeasy owner in the “South Side” territory dared to buy a cheaper barrel of beer from a “North Side” supplier, the South Side gang wouldn’t drop their prices; they would simply bomb the speakeasy or execute the rival delivery driver.
When Tony Camonte in Scarface rolls on the floor shouting about running “the whole works,” he isn’t dreaming of being a master brewer—he’s looking at a financial engine where controlling the territory meant holding an absolute monopoly over an entire population’s vices.
Pre-Code Hollywood
Will H. Hays was recruited by the studios in 1922 to help clean up their “Sin City” image after a series of scandals, especially the Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle manslaughter trial.
Presbyterian elder[1] Will “Buzzkill” Hays
Nils Asther kissing 15-year-old Loretta Young’s foot in a scene from the silent film Laugh, Clown, Laugh (1928), before the introduction of the 1930 code.Wikipedia
[1] Not affiliated with WLBOTT
Hays
William Harrison Hays Sr. (November 5, 1879 – March 7, 1954) was an American politician, and member of the Republican Party.
Hays oversaw the promulgation of the Motion Picture Production Code (informally known as the Hays Code), which spelled out a set of moral guidelines for the self-censorship of content in American cinema.
Hays was involved in the Teapot Dome scandal, and as a true republican lied like a snake, until he was pushed into a corner.
In 1928, after more details of Sinclair’s scheme had emerged, Hays was called to testify again. Hays then told the full story of Sinclair’s contribution, including the donation of $185,000 in Liberty Bonds and the $75,000 cash contribution. He stated that he had not mentioned the bonds in his earlier testimony because the Committee “had not asked about any bonds.”
And again like republicans of today, his concept of “morality” was to score political points.
Hiring Hays to “clean up the pictures” was, at least in part, a public relations ploy and much was made of his conservative credentials, including his roles as a Presbyterian deacon and past chairman of the Republican Party.
Hays married Helen Louise Thomas (1879–1957) on November 18, 1902, with whom he was engaged earlier that year. They ultimately divorced on June 20, 1929
At WLBOTT, we believe in live and let live. Do your thing, embrace your passion, find your people, love your neighbor, do no harm, alleviate suffering, make the world a better place. But what we do have a big problem with are the hypocrites. People who impose stupid rules (often from the barrel of of gun) on others, for their own crass gains. Hypocrites who don’t follow their own rules. Bullies. Check the rule book – hypocrites are what JC had a big problem with.
