Scarface producer Bregman dead

New York: Martin Bregman, the outspoken, notoriously tenacious film producer behind Scarface, Dog Day Afternoon, Serpico and other late-20th-century crime dramas, died on Saturday. He was 92.

The cause was a cerebral haemorrhage, his wife, Cornelia, told the New York television station WNBC. She did not say where he died. "I have opinions, and I express them," Bregman told The New York Times in 1987. "I don't let the director do whatever he wants. I guess that makes me seem like an anomaly."

Some of those directors were formidable. The first film Bregman ever produced was Sidney Lumet's Serpico (1973), the true story of a New York City cop who blew the whistle on police corruption and paid for it dearly. The film was also the beginning of a new kind of relationship with its star, Al Pacino, a former client who was then 33 and fresh from The Godfather. Bregman, Pacino and Lumet followed that with the bank-robbery drama Dog Day Afternoon (1975).

Their next collaboration, on Brian De Palma's Scarface (1983), is the story of a violent Cuban-American drug lord in Miami whose line "Say hello to my little friend" (referring to his sizeable automatic weapon) entered film immortality.

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