“It was a heartbreaker”: the Oscar-winning classic almost destroyed by Al Pacino’s cold feet
There can’t be many things worse for a filmmaker than developing, writing, and entering pre-production on a movie, only for their hand-picked star to say they’ve changed their mind and they don’t want to do it anymore, like when Al Pacino got cold feet and almost permanently torpedoed an eventual classic.
At the time, the actor was on one of the hottest streaks that anyone had ever been on, performance-wise, and any picture that secured Pacino for the lead role was instantly viewed as an awards season contender. When it was made without him, it still was; it just took a decade and a half longer than expected.
The star’s remarkable run in the 1970s saw him earn four consecutive Academy Award nominations for The Godfather, Serpico, The Godfather Part II, and Dog Day Afternoon. The same year as that fourth and final nod in a row, 1976, he met with Ron Kovic to discuss turning the latter’s memoir, Born on the Fourth of July, into a feature.
Pacino’s manager, Martin Bregman, acquired the rights to the book and tasked Oliver Stone to crack the script, and his stock was quickly rising after he won a ‘Best Adapted Screenplay’ Academy Award for Midnight Express in 1979. That’s as far as the original iteration got, though, with the leading man abandoning ship, leaving Stone to make a promise to Kovic that it would happen one day.
“Al got cold feet and went on to do …And Justice for All,” Stone recalled to the Los Angeles Times. “Ron became crazed. Marty was in for $1million of his own. I just gave up at the thought that a studio wouldn’t make a $6million film, not a lot for one starring Al Pacino, because they considered it too tough, too realistic. It was a heartbreaker for everyone involved.”
The filmmaker had insisted to Kovic that when he’d built up the goodwill to have his pick of the projects, he’d return to Born on the Fourth of July. After winning a ‘Best Director’ Oscar for Platoon, which also won ‘Best Picture’, he showed himself to be a man of his word, but there was still the small matter of Tom Cruise.
He needed to win over Kovic, who initially doubted that he had it in him to successfully pull off such a dramatic, nuanced portrayal, but once he earned the subject’s approval, he dived headfirst into the role, spent a year in preparation, and gave what was then the best performance of his entire career, notching a ‘Best Actor’ nod that Stone is adamant he should have won.
Would Pacino have won an Oscar had he played the lead in Born on the Fourth of July, or at least been nominated? Almost certainly, since he was virtually unstoppable in the ’70s. Would he have done a better job than Cruise? That’s up for debate, but as mentioned, few actors have ever been better than Pacino was during the decade.
Stone and Kovic got there eventually, and the former won a second ‘Best Director’ prize for his perseverance, with the picture enduring as one of the best anti-war movies ever made, even if took a lot longer to reach the screen than anyone would have liked.
