“The pendulum had swung”: the moment Al Pacino realised he had become a slumming icon
Generally speaking, there are usually two reasons why so many veteran actors make so many bad movies in the twilight years of their careers. The first is that they simply want to have fun and take it easy after dedicating decades to their craft, or in the case of Al Pacino, they’re in dire need of the money.
Of course, there’s no shame in a performer deciding to chase the easiest paycheques and phone it in when they’ve already secured their legacy, even if Pacino only started signing on for shitty films because he had to. He may have tried to claim that he was doing it as an experiment to elevate the material, but the truth was much simpler and more financially driven.
It’s easy to spot the distinction, too, looking at where he was and where he ended up. In the 1990s, Pacino earned his Academy Award for Scent of a Woman and spent the decade appearing in titles like Dick Tracy, The Godfather Part III, Glengarry Glen Ross, Heat, The Insider, Carlito’s Way, Donnie Brasco, Any Given Sunday, and The Devil’s Advocate.
He was still choosing the roles that allowed him to do the best work, but fast forward to the 2000s and 2010s, and he was regularly cropping up in steaming turds of celluloid, including Gigli, 88 Minutes, Hangman, Righteous Kill, and Jack and Jill. There was a clear and obvious shift, and financial mismanagement was the driving force.
“I wasn’t a young buck, and I was not going to be making the kind of money from acting in films that I had made before,” he wrote in his memoir, Sonny Boy. “The big paydays that I was used to just weren’t coming around anymore. The pendulum had swung, and I found it harder to find parts for myself.”
That led him directly into Adam Sandler’s embrace, and he was convinced to star in Jack and Jill because “they paid me a lot for it.” Not only that, but Pacino abandoned his rule of never doing commercials because the money on offer was too good to turn down, and he even started charging fees for the seminars and speeches he’d previously done for free out of the kindness of his own heart.
That’s not to say he’s become motivated solely by the zeroes on the cheque when he’s shown himself capable of doing stellar work in film and television in between his increasingly regular bursts of mediocrity, but it’s telling that the only reason Pacino started accepting offers he’d typically refuse and endorsing products he’d probably never heard of is because he was running perilously low on funds.
He secured his spot as one of the all-time greats as far back as the 1970s, so it’s not as if anybody can grudge him for taking things easier and prioritizing commerce over art.
