Today’s selection–from Sonny Boy by Al Pacino. Al Pacino was an unknown actor when he was cast as Michael Corleone.
“When I finished making The Godfather, I was broke. Not that I had ever had any money, but now I owed money. My manager and agents got their cuts of my salary while I had to live on support from Jill Clayburgh. Me and Jill were at home in our apartment one day when there was a knock on the door. I opened it to find a guy who handed me an envelope containing a notice of service. And I thought, What is this? While I was waiting to be hired for The Godfather, MGM had cast me to be in another gangster picture, a Mafia comedy called The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight, and now they were coming after me. It was like I was some sort of gambler and the bookies were going to get me. I had to hire lawyers to help get me out of that contract. Soon I was fifteen grand in debt to the lawyers too.
“I couldn’t pay to keep up the fight with MGM, so I asked the head of their studio to meet me at the Pulitzer Fountain outside the Plaza Hotel on Fifty-Ninth Street and Fifth Avenue. It was a hectic location, full of crazies and cool people on their lunch, grown men in hats and suits running to their jobs, women pushing children in strollers. We sat on the edge of the fountain. I was not as strong as Vito or Michael Corleone, and their bargaining skills had not rubbed off on me. I pleaded with him. I said, ‘You’re killing me. I don’t have any money, and I have to keep paying for lawyers because you keep suing me.’ It felt so punitive. ‘Why do you want to do that to me?’ I asked. ‘I didn’t do anything to you. What can we do to figure this out?”’
“He said, ‘If you’ve got a book or a script you’d like to make, could you send it to us first?’
“‘What else?’ I asked.
“He said, ‘That’s it.’
“I said, ‘Okay, deal.’ I was flying inside. Men in suits scared me. I never knew what they were talking about—my attitude was always, ‘Take it, take it.’ I just didn’t have the know-how to negotiate with them, and I had to learn to be smart in this arena.
“Before The Godfather had its premiere in New York, I had seen it only once, a few months earlier, when Francis had shown me an unfinished cut. At the end of that screening, I gave Francis notes on my performance, and he looked at me with an expression of quasi-disgust. Of course when I’m looking at an unfinished film, I can’t help seeing things that I might do differently. But you’d think I would understand that it was not my place to say this to the director of the film, who had just spent the last year of his life dangling from the edge of a cliff by his fingernails to get it made. I was insensitive: he had the grace to show it to me and I came in worried about my performance and not the great film he had made. 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 brought Jill, my grandmother, my aunt, and my cousin Mark, who was like my brother. It was like attending the christening of a ship, so stilted and strangely formal. All that was missing was someone breaking a bottle of champagne across the bow. I only remember standing on a platform with my costars, being asked questions by the press that I couldn’t answer. Then we got in our seats, but I didn’t watch the movie. I didn’t want to see the finished product. As soon as the lights went out, I went out.
“You see, I had all kinds of feelings about myself in relation to film. I could never watch myself on-screen while other people were watching me. It was a bit disconcerting and it made me shy, almost embarrassed. As a younger actor, I guess I needed attention and didn’t want it at the same time. It’s a bit of a paradox, I know, so I tried to avoid putting myself in that situation. Mercifully, I have changed. It’s like how I learned to get over my fear of flying—I just stopped caring. There’s a speech in Hamlet that comes to mind:
“Not a whit, we defy augury; there’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ’tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come: the readiness is all. Since no man knows aught of what he leaves, what is’t to leave betimes?
“I left the theater and went around the corner to a bar on FortyFourth Street with Al Ruddy and a couple of other people who had worked on the film. I spent the whole night drinking, just getting soused. That was the perfect word for it—soused—when you can’t drink anymore and you keep drinking anyway. It’s shocking that I remember anything else from that night, but what I do remember is that when I got back to the St. Regis Hotel for the after-party, I caught a glimpse of Ali McGraw, and I thought to myself, That simply is the most beautiful person I’ve ever seen in my life. It is startling that there are people who have that kind of skin. It was mythical.
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. Over the years, of course, I’d catch a part of it here or there on TV, and once you’re watching it, it’s hard to turn it off.
“But then I recently watched The Godfather at a screening for its fiftieth anniversary at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood, where a restored print was beautifully projected, with crisp, perfect sound. The whole experience was so uplifting. There’s not a scene in the film where there aren’t two or three things going on. There’s not a dull moment in it, it’s constantly telling a story. There was so much that I was struck by. Take the scene where Don Vito gets out of the hospital, after having been shot. Marlon is in his bed, and they have the kids’ get-well-soon cards all over him. And Robert Duvall and Jimmy Caan and a few other guys have gathered around the bed. Marlon is going to ask, what happened to Michael, his youngest son and his hope for legitimacy? They tell him Michael killed Sollozzo and had to flee to Sicily. The angle at which the scene is shot is so brilliant. There’s a look of such dejection on Brando’s face when he turns his head and waves his hand to indicate he’s heard enough. Dick Smith did such an amazing job with Marlon’s makeup that you can actually see marks on Brando’s face; you can see he has been through so much and you can feel the momentous mountain that has been climbed. It was so thought out and meticulous, these details get under your skin. They structured that shot in such a way that tells you everything you need to know. The film is full of moments like that.
“But back in 1972, the effect that the film’s release had on me was immediate. It happened at light speed. Everything changed. 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.’ Another time, I went into a grocery store to get a container of coffee to go while Charlie waited for me outside on the sidewalk. And a woman approached him and asked, ‘ls 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.’
“The film had not been out that long, so I continued to go about my normal daily life as if nothing had changed. One day I was standing at a curb, waiting for the light to change, and this pretty redhead was standing there with me. I looked at her. She looked at me. I said, ‘Hi.’ She said, ‘Hi, Michael.’ And I just went, Whoa. Oh my God. I am not safe. Anonymity, sweet pea, the light of my life, my survival tool—that’s gone now. You don’t appreciate it till you lose it.”