Al Pacino’s “Sonny Boy” memoir is the most refreshing celebrity autobiography I’ve read since Keith Richards’ “Life.”
Pacino just lets loose on everything like lots of girlfriends and romances, his personal finances (always a mess), and his whole approach to acting.
The Oscar, Emmy, and Tony Award winner recounts one of his Broadway failures — acting in David Mamet’s undercooked “China Doll.” Pacino was lost, the play wasn’t really written, and he was going out on stage every night not knowing what would happen.
And then Pacino, one of my personal favorite actors of all time, delivers a startling candid revelation.
He writes:
“So I’m going to tell you a secret. This is the greatest thing that I have found late in my acting life. Teleprompters. You have teleprompters carefully placed on the stage, providing you with the text. Now it takes a while, but if you know the character and you’ve worked through it and you understand what’s inside you coming out, you start to really free up and get this sucker. In the old days, they had a guy under the stage who would shout out lines to the actor if they somehow missed a line—they were actually called prompters. It was an old-fashioned device, even in Shakespeare’s time. I’m sure even then they would get new line changes the night before. Can’t you see it? Some guy onstage up there, saying, “To be, or—” and just stalling till he hears from near the floorboards: “Not to be.” Maybe that’s how that pause got built in.”
He continues:
“So here I am in China Doll, and I had them strategically pop teleprompters all over that stage. Now I realized why Marlon had oak tags with his lines put up all around the sets of his films. This was the first time since The Indian Wants the Bronx when I really didn’t know what I was going to say each night—I would just go out there and see what came to me. Hallelujah, hallelujah, I finally got back there. And I was practically being thrown out to be eaten alive by the press. But I knew I was going somewhere with this part, and after the sixth week and the seventh week and the eighth week, I turned that corner.”
Bravo to Al, who I hope got paid a lot of money from his publisher. “Sonny Boy” is really a page turner!
