Al Capone was “Public Enemy No. 1” and the notorious boss of the Chicago Outfit who was perhaps responsible for the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. 

He was also a movie fan.

A new AMC+ documentary series, “Hollywood Crime Story: The Mob Takes Over the Movies,” premiering Thursday, recounts a surreal chapter in the early days of the motion picture industry when Capone and his Windy City thugs implanted themselves in Los Angeles and got directly involved in a landmark flick about their lives — the original 1932 “Scarface.”

In the 1920s, the emerging mob and movie biz, with its booze-guzzling and drug-snorting stars, were becoming increasingly intertwined.

“Hollywood is growing up and being solidified at the same time that organized crime is,” says Claire White, Sr. Director of Education at the Mob Museum in Las Vegas, in the doc. 

Both establishments, in their own way, originated with immigrants in New York. 

But while the mob proliferated in NYC, many Eastern European Jews fled to LA, where they built lucrative film studios. Those moguls included Harry Cohn at Columbia, Jack Warner at Warner Bros., Carl Laemmle at Universal and Adolph Zukor of Paramount.

Hollywood was booming. And out east, it was being eyed with envy. So, in the mid-1920s, Capone, who was born in New York but ruled the roost in Chicago, sent an associate named Johnny Rosselli to California to scope out opportunities for the Outfit. 

“Part of Rosselli’s ‘assignment’ in Los Angeles was to cultivate relationships with the film industry hierarchy,” Lee Server, author of “Handsome Johnny: The Life and Death of Johnny Rosselli: Gentleman Gangster, Hollywood Producer, CIA Assassin,” told Vice. 

“He knew everybody, dated movie stars, played golf with studio heads.” 

A bootlegger and narcotics pusher, Rosselli was soon palling around with Charlie Chaplin and struck up a close friendship with Cohn, the co-founder of Columbia Pictures.

In 1927, Capone visited Tinseltown.

A kind of celeb himself, he was smitten with the starry city. The boss stayed at the Biltmore Hotel under the alias Al Brown and allegedly spent time at megastar Douglas Fairbanks’ Beverly Hills estate Pickfair. 

Never one to be inconspicuous, Capone stuck out in yellow and pink suits, easily alerting the media and the cops to his obvious presence.

Soon, law enforcement kicked the guy out.

“Los Angeles has found at least one Middle Westerner whom it does not want for a visitor,” cheekily reported the AP.

Said LA Chief of Police James E. Davis, “We have no room here for Capone or any other visiting gangster.”

Capone wasn’t through with California yet, though.

“I’ve found out what to do,” he told reporters. “When I get a little business done in Chicago, I’m going to send a lot of money here and have some real estate man buy me a large house. Then I’ll be a taxpayer and they can’t send me away.”

Capone headed back to Chicago on a train. Two years later, on Feb. 14, 1929, came the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre — the mob execution-style killing of seven men that many believe he was behind.

Around this time, Hollywood started embracing gangster movies, such as 1927’s silent “Underworld,” written by Ben Hecht, and 1928’s “The Racket,” directed by Howard Hughes.

With the dawn of the “talkies” — flicks with sound — Hughes and Hecht would soon team up on an altogether more ambitious and dangerous project: “Scarface.” 

Scarface was the well-known nickname of Capone because of an old injury on the left side of his face. Actor Paul Muni was set to play Tony Camonte, a violent, Prohibition-era Chicago mobster. Yet it was clear to anybody in America with a newspaper who the movie was actually about.

“Al Capone finds out that Hollywood wants to make ‘Scarface,’ and he’s very concerned,” says White. 

“So he places a lot of pressure on the writer [and] on the production team to make sure that ‘Scarface’ isn’t exactly a telling of his story and that it paints this character as suave and elegant.”

The Chicago Outfit sent representatives to LA to investigate how they were being portrayed in the movie, which was produced by Hughes and directed by Howard Hawks. 

Hecht, who started as a skilled Chicago reporter and columnist, personally guaranteed the gangsters that his screenplay would not be totally based on Capone’s life story. Production began in 1931. 

“Everyone involved from a top level made sure that the Outfit felt that they were in on the making of the film, that they were involved in it,” says critic Christina Newland in the doc. “And that way it made it feel glamorous to them.” 

Although “Scarface” was made before the ennactment of the Production Code, a morality law book filmmakers were forced to follow beginning in 1934, censors were still reluctant to allow the flick’s release around the country. 

So, The Post reported that actor and director Marshall Neilan “arranged a test-showing before a select group of Manhattan intellectuals.”

The story continued, “They merely were amused by the tough-guy, gangster sequences and laughed at the reproduction of Chicago’s St. Valentine’s Massacre.”

The pinky-out set’s chuckles were good enough for the censors, yet the movie went on to freak out mainstream audiences.

“On the first day the picture was shown publicly, the first customer — a woman — fainted, horror-stricken,” The Post reported.

The film has gone down as a classic and the mob genre became a hallmark of Hollywood. And thanks to the likes of Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese, it still is one. 

“The film business in America would not have been what it became or what it is without the Mafia,” said Newland. 

“The opposite is also true. The Mafia very much made its name on its connections to Hollywood and particularly in its depictions on the screen.”