Sonny Boy: A Memoir

by Al Pacino

Sometimes she gave me dog biscuits and I ate those too.

of course he did 😭

The first time I kissed a girl it was down there in those alleys. I didn’t know what I was doing, but I thought something spectacular had happened. I thought I lost my virginity. Sadly not.

But I was fearful that maybe I was so good that the Virgin Mary would come down and make me a saint. I said no, I don’t want to be a saint. I actually got scared by that, and that’s the truth, so I never went back for my confirmation. That, and because the nuns beat you for no reason.

this is killing me omfg

I guess I must have been okay at it, because a guy came up to me after one performance and said, “Hey, kid, you’re the next Marlon Brando!” I looked at him and said, “Who’s Marlon Brando?”

At the end of the year, our junior high class held an assembly to vote on various student prizes, and I was chosen Most Likely to Succeed. I was disappointed because I wanted to be Most Handsome.

One day as we turned a corner I saw Paul Newman, the movie star, go past us, and I thought to myself, Wow, he’s a real person. He actually walks and has friends he talks to when there are no cameras around.

I understood immediately why Charlie was telling me this story. It stuck with me for a long time. Life’s on the wire, man. That’s my acting, my life. When I work, I’m on the wire. When I’m going for it. When I’m taking chances. I want to take chances. I want to fly and fail. I want to bang into something when I do it, because it’s how I know I’m alive. It’s what’s kept me alive. It’s like I would say years later, when I would have other aspiring actors ask me from time to time, “How come you made it and I didn’t? I always wanted to.” I would tell them, “You wanted to. I had to.”

Television was too distant; books were more intimate, like having friends and enjoying their company. I would be reading A Moveable Feast and thinking, I don’t want to finish the pages, I like it here too much.

The theater had a candy counter with a four-way mirror. I would stand in front of it and marvel at the angles of my face, angles I never saw before in my life. Who is this guy I’m looking at in that mirror? I wondered. I saw my profile. I saw myself in three quarters. I saw myself head-on, and I thought, How could I be an actor with a face like this?

I had been exiled by a dictator director, so I was just grateful he didn’t shoot me. This guy was giving me a pep talk about what to do? I thought, You know what I’m doing? I’m going home and I’m never coming back. That was the end of that one.

so real for that

In a sense your preparation for any part is always the same. You have to organize yourself in such a way that allows you to bring yourself to the role. You have to get to know someone else within yourself. And I guess there are a lot of me’s in me.

So I went out in front of the audience, having read the most withering criticism of my young career, and I made my entrance laughing. A good chuckle helps sometimes. I stopped reading reviews after that one, but it stuck with me. I still remember how it stung. Another thought I had was very simple: This guy just must not like me. That does happen and that’s the nature of the beast.

The difference between movie acting and stage acting was like being on that high wire. In movie acting, the wire is on the floor—you can always come back and try something again. Stage acting is up thirty feet in the air. And if you don’t make it, you fall. That’s the difference in the adrenaline that it takes to be a theater actor.

You have to understand, I was never asked to audition for Panic; I was offered the part. Now, if they were suddenly expecting me to audition to get it, I wouldn’t want them giving me a final checkout at a cold reading of a play I was completely unfamiliar with. I thought, That’s no way to treat a lady.

My interpretation of Michael was like planting a garden; it would take a certain amount of time in the story for the flowers to grow. How am I supposed to bring across my ideas about him in this scene? I couldn’t bring him to life in this scene because nobody could.

My whole plan for Michael was to show that this kid was unaware of things and wasn’t coming on with a personality that was particularly full of charisma. My idea was that this guy comes out of nowhere. That was the power of this characterization. That was the only way this could work: the emergence of this person, the discovery of his capacity and his potential.

Even then, he only becomes Michael when he looks at Enzo the baker, who he’s instructed to stand with him outside the hospital and pretend that he has a gun, and sees that Enzo’s hand is shaking and his isn’t. By the end of the film, I hoped that I would have created an enigma.

girl u did... u did..

They were trying to lift me up, asking me: Was my ankle broken? Could I walk? I didn’t know. I lay there thinking, this is a miracle. Oh God, you’re saving me. I don’t have to do this picture anymore.

😭

What was he going to do with the chicken? I hoped he wasn’t going to tell me to throw it in the garbage for him. He disposed of it somehow without getting up. He looked at me in a quizzical way, as if to ask, what are you thinking about? I was wondering, what is he going to do with his hands? Should I get him a napkin? Before I could, he spread both his hands across the white hospital bed and smeared the sheets with red sauce, without even thinking about it, and he kept on talking. And I thought, Is that how movie stars act? You can do anything.

???!?! this is killing meeee 😭

I wish you could have seen the look on his face when I said back to him, “I’m sorry, Francis, but I don’t know how to drive.” How would a kid from the South Bronx know how to drive a car when he’d been taking the subway all his life? I wouldn’t get my first driver’s license until I was thirty-four.

real asf

Sometimes you’re a little unconscious as a young actor. You have other things on your mind, and all forms of grace and etiquette go out the window due to your vain impulses and stupid ego. I’ve seen it in others, I must say. I hope I’m not still that way, but the jury’s out on that one.

I went to The Godfather premiere at the Loew’s State Theatre in Times Square wearing a bow tie the size of my head.

I almost went my whole life without ever seeing The Godfather in its entirety. I don’t know why. Maybe I felt that because I was in it, I wouldn’t be a good audience for it.

A few weeks after it came out, I was walking on the street and a middle-aged woman came up to me and kissed my hand and called me “Godfather.”

And a woman approached him and asked, “Is that Al Pacino?” He said to her, “Yeah.” She said, “Oh, really? He’s Al Pacino?” He said to her, “Well, somebody’s gotta be.”

There are few things more boring than a famous person complaining about fame, so I won’t belabor it, though I’m tempted.

Years pass and opinions change, which is why it’s kind of ridiculous to have an opinion.

After The Godfather, they would have let me play anything. They offered me the role of Han Solo in Star Wars. So there I am, reading Star Wars. I gave it to Charlie. I said, “Charlie, I can’t make anything out of this.” He calls me back. “Neither can I.” So I didn’t do it.

Over time, I turned down Ingmar Bergman. I turned down Bernardo Bertolucci. Fellini. Pontecorvo. Can you imagine saying no to these people? More than anything in my heart, I wanted to work with them. I didn’t turn them down—I just couldn’t be in the movies they were making because I didn’t relate to the part.

insane

I thought, I’m not getting on any horses. They’re too big.

PLSSS

One night, somewhere in our cross-country journey, I got so drunk that I could not find my way home. A woman said to me, “Oh, I’ll drive you home.” And without a second thought, I got into her car with her. But as we drove, even in my daze, I could recognize that she was not taking me back to where I was staying. I said to her, “What is going on here?” And she said straight out, “I’m kidnapping you.”

?? 😭

I said, “No, you’re not. I’m getting out.” She said, “No, no,” and she kept driving. I opened the door as if to jump out of the car. I was a little drunk, but I was ready to leap from a moving car if I had to. This ain’t happening to me, man. And she closed the door and took me home. I guess this could have been in Colorado. I don’t know their habits out there.

The reviews said—and I don’t read reviews, but they always get back to you—“Pacino sets Shakespeare back 50 years in this country.” I wondered why they didn’t say a hundred years.

And as I slumped in my chair, I put out my hand for her to kiss it. God only knows what I was thinking. Why would I ever do that? Please tell me, what’s wrong with me?

Just as we were opening Richard III in Boston at the Church of the Covenant, I learned I had gotten an Academy Award nomination for my performance in The Godfather. It was my first, and for all I knew maybe the only one I’d ever receive.

It’s always pleasurable to be acknowledged for your work. It doesn’t make you mad. Show me someone who says, “I got an Oscar nomination—fuck them, they don’t know what they’re doing.”

I’ve only recently learned that the perception in the industry was that I snubbed the Oscars—that I didn’t attend the ceremony because I was nominated for The Godfather as a supporting actor and not as a leading man. That somehow I felt slighted because I thought I deserved to be nominated in the same category as Marlon. Can you imagine that was a rumor that exploded at the time, and I only found out about it recently, all these years later?

bc why do i still hear people say this now.. insane

I feel I should go up to Forest Lawn Memorial Park, where a lot of the Hollywood old-timers are lying in peace, run around the cemetery, and start yapping aloud to the gravestones, “Hey, man, I wanted to be there! I was just afraid!”

Assumptions spread, then those assumptions turn into opinions and those opinions turn into stone and you can’t ever penetrate or change them. That’s a mouthful, but I do believe that’s what’s going on most of the time in our world. Fabrications and rumors turn into facts.

Peter Maas had written a biography of Serpico, and I was given a film treatment to look at that had been made from his book. Let me tell you, it read like this: He does this. Then he does that. Then he goes here. Then he goes there. Like the book I’m writing now. You read it and you say, well, yes? It’s like saying, Hamlet comes home. Then he sees his father. Then he goes to his mother. Yeah, nice. So it didn’t interest me. I needed more than that.

So now I had to go to California. I was very unhappy.

im sensing a strong repeated theme of california hatred here

And he starts—kind of, in a way—criticizing me. He said, “Your work in things, I don’t know. I have a problem with it sometimes. I do things a little different.” As if to say, hey, kid, you’re not so great. And I’m thinking, this guy’s insulting me. I don’t even know him. And he wants the job? He wants to work with me? But directors have insulted me throughout my life.

There the six of us looked like little Lego people standing in the center of all this opulence.

He pulled in front of the restaurant and got out of the car with the key in the ignition and the engine still running. As soon as he did, I jumped in the front seat and took off with the car. But I only drove around the corner so I could spy on him as he came out of the restaurant and watch his silent bafflement as he tried to figure out whether his car and the star of the film had just been stolen.

She was a tall girl with a wild black dress and—it was the particular era—six-inch heels.

omfg short king win

I had friends back in New York who watched the show on TV, who said that my hair was the only part of me they could see. They said, Al, what the fuck was on your head?

He had a shocked look on his face like, what are you doing here? I thought to myself, Well, I am an actor and I got nominated, that’s why I’m here, not to clean up. I can do that later, after I lose. So why is he looking at me like this? That was fifty years ago, and I couldn’t understand it. But since I’ve come to realize how Hollywood had judged me when they thought I was giving them the cold shoulder after I got my first Oscar nomination, I get it now.

I thought, This can’t happen. I cannot win in this room. I’m nominated against Robert Redford, Jack Nicholson, Marlon Brando, and Jack Lemmon. I had no speech because I was so sure I wasn’t going to win. I was more positive about that than anything.

SHOULD HAVE 💔💔💔 an all time snub to this day

I’ve lived a life where terrible things like that have happened to me. It’s actually possible that they’ll announce my name. They’re very vengeful, these Academy people. They’ll probably give you the award just to fuck with you.

God knows my portrayal of Michael in that film may be one of the better performances I’ve given in my life.