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Al Pacino on becoming Al Pacino
On a bright day overlooking Beverly Hills, Al Pacino recalls a warning from years ago, from his therapist: “He said, ‘Don’t go to L.A., Al!'”
But here is, and even now, at 84, he’s still adjusting to that Hollywood life.
“You have to learn how famous you are,” he said.
Has he? “What, now? I’m trying!” he laughed. “What do you want from me? I actually put a tie on to see you. That’s what famous guys do!”
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He’s more than “famous.” He’s Al Pacino, with nine Oscar nominations, seven straight without a win, until “Scent of a Woman.” Plus, two Emmys, two Tonys, a Kennedy Center Honor, and a life achievement award from the American Film Institute. He’s been a leading man in the movies, and a character actor, for nearly 55 years.
“I’m an old fella, you know?” he laughed. “When I have my hair now and I go out and someone takes a picture of me, all you see is, like, a white hydrant! A white fire hydrant! I don’t feel I’m gray yet. I don’t want to be gray. I’m that guy in the book cover.”
That guy on the book cover is finally telling his own story. It’s in his new memoir, “Sonny Boy.” That’s what his mom, Rose, called him.
Penguin Press
They lived with Al’s grandparents in a three-room walk-up in the South Bronx. Rose kept her Sonny Boy in when his friends tempted him with the streets.
Pacino recalled that when his buddies would call for him to go out, on a school night, “She said, ‘No, no.’ And I was so upset. So angry at her. I think she was part of what saved my life, and kept me off drugs. I couldn’t go out. I went to school.”
If his mother saved his life, another woman changed it. “Blanche Rothstein, who was my eighth grade teacher, actually came to my apartment, and she sat down and talked to my grandmother,” he said. “What she said, I don’t know, but I think it finally came down to, ‘You should encourage this boy to do what he’s doing, the acting. You have to. He is made to do this.'”
Good reviews came very early – at 13, after a school show, a stranger came up to him and said, ‘You’re the next Marlon Brando.” Al’s response? “Who’s Marlon Brando?”
At 16, Pacino dropped out of school to immerse himself in the New York theater scene. To survive, he took any job: messenger, janitor, switchboard operator, twice an usher, twice fired.
Pacino said, “I was in this Carnegie Hall place …”
“This ‘Carnegie Hall place’?” asked Mankiewicz. “It’s Carnegie Hall!”
“It’s … Carnegie Hall. I had this tuxedo on and they liked – you know, I was relatively good-looking. So, there were these people coming in, and I’m supposed to seat them.”
“It’s the job of an usher, Al.”
“It is the job an usher!” Pacino laughed. “Finally. But I didn’t last doing that. I just didn’t have the heart to do it. I said, ‘Sit anywhere you want.’ I mean, you got a better seat if you’re up further than when you’re down. And then there was a fist fight. And on the spot, I was gone.”
Thankfully, Pacino had the stage, where he made a name for himself, and got the attention of a young director, Francis Ford Coppola, who saw him as Michael Corleone in “The Godfather.”
Though Coppola wanted him, Pacino pointed out, “Nobody else did!”
He got the part, but studio execs pushed to fire him. We watched a scene that Pacino thought, even hoped, would be his last on the film – Michael’s escape from Louis’ Restaurant after fatally shooting Sollozzo and Captain McCluskey. Running outside, he jumps onto the getaway car but misses and falls.
Pacino believed he’d busted his ankle. His thought? “Thank you, God. I’m gonna get out of this film!”
That’s right: Al Pacino was relieved. He thought he was so badly injured, he could get out of “The Godfather.” Thankfully, his ankle healed, and the kid stayed in the picture.
A string of hits followed, including “Serpico” and “Dog Day Afternoon,” where an ad lib became a classic cinematic moment:
“This great AD, assistant director, comes running up to me as I’m about to go out and says, ‘Say Attica.’ I said, ‘What?’ He said, ‘Say Attica. Say Attica.’ And the crowd just went into spasm and they all – they knew it. They were right in it.”
All the attention, all the success didn’t sit well with Pacino. He coped by drinking. “Alcohol is a depressant – like, literally it brings you down,” he said.
Mankiewicz asked, “And how’d your life change when you stopped?”
“Well, it got a little worse for a while,” Pacino laughed. “It really was terrible. But then, eventually, thank God, it got there.”
In his memoir, he’s candid about his struggles with alcoholism. He also reveals that he nearly died from COVID. “Out of this world,” he said. “I mean, I was here and then I wasn’t. The nurse said my pulse stopped. Now, I don’t think my pulse stopped.”
“But it doesn’t really matter whether technically you were close to death or not. You felt it,” said Mankiewicz.
“I did. I really did,” Pacino said. “It was so real. And I didn’t see any light. I didn’t see anything at all. There’s a speech in ‘Hamlet’ where he says, ‘To be or not to be.’ You know? And then when he talks about leaving the Earth when you die, and he says, ‘No more. No more.’ How about that?”
These days, there’s plenty more for Al Pacino. He’s as busy as ever. “I like sitting on the couch. But I keep working,” he said. “I’ve got six films. Smaller roles, of course. And they haven’t come out yet.”
And, despite that advice from his therapist, he’s living in L.A. But he is not, he assures us, an “L.A. guy.”
“No. I don’t think so,” he laughed. “I still speak English. In L.A., they speak Hollywood!”
Truth is, this is where they make movies. A fitting place for a guy who remains what he’s always been: an actor, still experiencing the same buzz he felt 60 years ago on an Off-Broadway stage in New York, which he described as a recognition that “I’m never gonna do anything else but this. I have found it. I don’t care what happens to me, whether I succeed, not succeed, didn’t matter. I had this.”
Mankiewicz said, “You write that, like, ‘Maybe I’ll be able to eat or I won’t eat. Maybe I’ll have money or I won’t have money. Maybe I’ll become famous. Maybe I won’t. Doesn’t matter.'”
“Didn’t matter,” said Pacino. “That’s the freedom. This was where I belonged.”
WEB EXTRA: Watch an extended interview with Al Pacino
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Story produced by Gabriel Falcon. Editor: Steven Tyler.
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Man arrested at checkpoint near Trump rally in Coachella Valley for allegedly possessing illegal firearms
Deputies assigned to former President Donald Trump’s rally in the Coachella Valley arrested a Las Vegas man Saturday at a checkpoint for allegedly having a loaded firearm, a shotgun, and a high-capacity magazine.
The suspect, identified by deputies as 49-year-old Vem Miller, was pulled over in a black SUV at the intersection of Avenue 52 and Celebration Drive.
Deputies said in a news release that the suspect was “illegally in possession of a shotgun, a loaded handgun, and a high-capacity magazine.”
(credit: FREDERIC J. BROWN/AFP via Getty Images)
Miller was taken into custody without incident, according to deputies. Following the arrest, he was booked at the John J. Benoit Detention Center on charges of possession of a loaded firearm and possession of a high-capacity magazine.
Authorities confirmed that this incident did not compromise Trump’s safety or the safety of the rally attendees.
The investigation remains ongoing, and anyone with additional information is urged to contact Deputy Coronado at the Palm Desert Sheriff’s Station at (760) 836–1600.
Saturday’s incident follows two assassination attempts on Trump in the past three months. In July, a gunman opened fire during Trump’s rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, injuring Trump when a bullet grazed his ear and killing a rallygoer. Secret Service snipers shot and killed the gunman. And earlier this month, the Secret Service arrested a man with an AK-47-style weapon at Trump’s Florida golf course who was 300-500 yards from the former president. The man, Ryan Wesley Routh, has been charged with attempted assassination of a political figure in addition to firearms charges.
The next full moon is due to appear this week in night skies all over the world. When it emerges, the phenomenon will hold a couple of notable titles.
First, it’s the Hunter’s Moon, a centuries-old name for the full moon immediately following the autumnal equinox and the September Harvest Moon that rises with it, which signals an acceleration in the hunting season. Some Native American tribes referred to the celestial event by different monikers — like the Blood Moon, Travel Moon or Dying Grass Moon, according to the Maine Farmer’s Almanac — but each was used to mark a similar milestone shift in the year.
The upcoming full moon is also a supermoon, where the moon appears brighter and larger to skywatchers on Earth because of its proximity to the planet, and this one is slated to be the most dazzling of the year so far.
Why does the moon appear brighter during a supermoon?
Like Earth’s orbit around the Sun, the moon’s around Earth is elliptical, meaning oval-shaped. This means the space rock is positioned at various distances from the planet depending on the time of the month and where it’s located along that orbital path. The distances range from about 226,000 miles and 251,000 miles, according to NASA.
George Walker IV / AP
When the moon is hovering around one of those closer distances during a full moon, it becomes a supermoon.
Supermoons only happen three or four times a year, since the moon’s closeness to Earth rarely coincides with monthly full moons. They aren’t identical, either. Astronomers generally consider a full moon to be “super” if the moon’s position in orbit is at least 90% of the distance from its farthest point to Earth in the ellipses to its closest. The absolute closest point is called perigee.
When does the next full moon take place?
The Hunter’s Moon this week will be the third of four consecutive supermoons, NASA said. It falls on Thursday, Oct. 17, and comes on the heels of the moon reaching perigee one day earlier. Because of that, the supermoon is expected to be the biggest and brightest of its kind in 2024, albeit, by a very small margin.
The moon will reach its nearest point to Earth at around 9 p.m. Eastern Time on Wednesday evening, with a full moon due to materialize less than 12 hours later, at around 7:30 a.m. in the same time zone. It will occur late Wednesday night for places west of the International Date Line and early Friday morning for places from New Zealand eastward.
People should be able to see the moon appearing full for three or so days around that time, from Tuesday night until Friday morning. Astronomers say the supermoon will be most striking right after sunset and advise looking just above the horizon for the best chances at visibility.
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Rep. Maxwell Frost says Congress should return “as soon as possible” to replenish disaster relief funds
Rep. Maxwell Frost, Democrat of Florida, said Sunday that Congress should return “as soon as possible” to replenish disaster relief funds and not wait until Nov. 12 when Congress is scheduled to reconvene.
“Why wait until Nov. 12? We don’t know what’s going to be happening in terms of natural disasters or storms,” Frost said Sunday on “Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan.” “I think it’s important that an agency like FEMA have even — not just what they need, but even more than what they need to ensure that they have the resources necessary, of course, to help with the current operation.”
In late September, Congress passed a short-term spending bill that authorized FEMA to utilize the agency’s fiscal year 2025 resources sooner, drawing $20 billion from its disaster relief fund. However, the stopgap spending bill did not include billions of additional dollars that the White House Office of Management and Budget had requested for already existing recovery efforts.
Hurricane Helene made landfall on Sept. 26 in Florida’s Big Bend region before causing devastating floods in Tennessee and North Carolina. Less than two weeks later, powerful Hurricane Milton slammed into Florida’s Siesta Key.
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FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell said Wednesday that the agency is currently able to “support all of the needs of everyone that was impacted by Helene and Milton,” but that the agency expects to need additional funds in the future.
President Biden on Thursday called on lawmakers to “move as rapidly as they can” on emergency funding, particularly for Small Business Administration disaster money, which is running precariously low. However, the president said he hasn’t spoken with House Speaker Mike Johnson or asked him to bring Congress sooner. Mr. Biden on Sunday announced $600 million in aid for areas affected by Hurricanes Milton and Helene while he was touring the damaged St. Petersburg region in Florida.
So far, congressional leaders have not called for lawmakers to return to Washington before Nov. 12 to address additional disaster funding.
A group of bipartisan senators signed a letter urging Senate leaders to bring lawmakers back into session, saying, “this may even require Congress to come back in October to ensure we have enough time to enact legislation before the end of this calendar year.” House lawmakers also sent a letter to Speaker Mike Johnson requesting that the House reconvene to allocate further disaster relief aid.
Johnson said Sunday on “Face the Nation” that FEMA has the necessary funding to last until Congress’ return to Washington in November.
“It can wait… because remember, Congress appropriated $20 billion additional to FEMA so that they would have the necessary resources to address immediate needs,” Johnson said. “It would be premature to call everyone back now, because these storms are so large in their scope and magnitude, it’s going to take a little bit of time to make those calculations.”
Frost argued Sunday that Congress should proactively provide more disaster funding and not wait until after more damage is caused by this year’s disastrous hurricane season.
“The thing we have to understand is, yes, FEMA has the resources necessary to deal with the current situation, but like was mentioned in the previous segment, NOAA is predicting, and we’ve seen, that this is one of the worst hurricane seasons we’ve seen.” Frost said. “We’re not done with this hurricane season, it doesn’t end, really, till the end of November… why leave it up to chance when we can ensure that FEMA has the resources it needs?”
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas also joined “Face the Nation” on Sunday, pressuring Congress to react accordingly to the unprecedented hurricane season.
“We need Congress to act swiftly to fund FEMA and specifically its Disaster Relief Fund, because hurricane season is not over, and also seasons are less and less important now, given the effects of climate change and the increasing gravity and frequency of extreme weather events.”
Man arrested at checkpoint near Trump rally in Coachella Valley for allegedly possessing illegal firearms
The Hunter’s Moon this week will be a supermoon — the brightest in 2024
Rep. Maxwell Frost says Congress should return “as soon as possible” to replenish disaster relief funds
Man arrested at checkpoint near Trump rally in Coachella Valley for allegedly possessing illegal firearms
The Hunter’s Moon this week will be a supermoon — the brightest in 2024