detective story magazines during the early 1920s, but died of a heart attack at the age of 28, shortly before the release of Scarface. Hughes hired Fred Pasley, a New York reporter and authority on Capone, as a writer. Hughes asked Ben Hecht, who in 1929 had won the first Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for his silent crime film Underworld, to be head writer. Suspicious of Hughes as an employer, Hecht requested a daily salary of $1,000, to be paid every day at six o'clock. Hecht claimed he would only waste a day's labor if Hughes turned out to be a fraud. Hughes wanted film director Howard Hawks to direct and co-produce. This surprised Hawks, as the two had never been friendly; Hughes had filed a lawsuit against Howard Hawks in July 1930, alleging that Hawks's film The Dawn Patrol had plagiarized his film Hell's Angels. Over a game of golf, Hughes promised to drop the lawsuit (irrelevant as it had already been dismissed by the judge), and by the eighteenth hole, Hawks had become interested in directing the film. He became more convinced when he discovered Hecht would be the head writer. Hecht and Hawks worked together well, intending to portray the Capone character as of the Borgia Family, including the suggestion of incest between the main character and his sister, present in Trail's novel. Writing Hecht wrote the screenplay over eleven days in January 1931, adapted from Trail's novel. Additional writing was provided by Fred Pasley and W.R. Burnett, author of the novel Little Caesar, upon which the film Little Caesar was based. Pasley's contributions included elements of the book Al Capone: Biography of a Self-Made Man; the book contains a barbershop scene with Capone similar to the introduction of Tony Camonte in the film. Pasley was not credited for his work on the screenplay. John Lee Mahin and Seton I. Miller rewrote the script for continuity and dialogue. Because there were five writers, it is difficult to distinguish which components were contributed by which writer; however, the ending of Scarface is similar to Hecht's first gangster film Underworld, in which gangster Bull Weed traps himself in his apartment with his lover and fires at the hordes of police outside, and thus was likely a Hecht contribution. The film version of Scarface bears little resemblance to the novel. Though the film contains the same major characters,