The Al Pacino movie he was so ashamed of he donated his entire salary to charity
In 1979, Al Pacino received his fourth ‘Best Actor’ Academy Award nomination of the decade for Norman Jewison’s …And Justice For All. It was the culmination of an incredible ten years that took Pacino from obscurity to the top of Hollywood via a succession of acclaimed pictures like The Godfather, Serpico, and Dog Day Afternoon.
Unfortunately for Pacino, though, he may have flown too close to the sun in the ’70s because he would experience a sharp career decline in the following decade. This downturn arguably started with his part in a 1980 thriller he was so ashamed of that he donated his entire paycheque to charity.
When the screenplay for a dark, menacing thriller came to Pacino in the late ’70s, he must have thought he was on to a winner. After all, the script would bring audiences into a world few had experienced. It followed a detective going undercover in the New York City gay leather bar community to find a serial killer targeting homosexual men on the fringes of society. Pacino felt the screenplay expressed real insight and posed some uncomfortable questions. In truth, though, at that time, Pacino wanted to push the envelope with some of his films, and Cruising fit the bill.
The idea of working with William Friedkin, the celebrated director of The Exorcist and The French Connection, was also appealing to Pacino. To his shock and horror, though, the project soon turned into a nightmare. Pacino and Friedkin didn’t see eye to eye on anything, and the film became a lightning rod for controversy within the gay community. Throughout the summer of 1979, the production of the film was protested by activists who felt it was going to harm the perception of gay men in mainstream society. Indeed, the noise made by protestors was so loud and persistent that the audio needed to be completely re-dubbed in many places.
Pacino was taken aback by the controversy, especially because he didn’t see the film as exploitative while he was making it. After he saw a cut of the film, though, he began to wonder if the protesters were right, and nowadays, he believes he wasn’t as sensitive to their concerns as he could have been.
The worried star adopted a policing of remaining quiet and refusing to conduct press interviews for Cruising, but then the producers came to him with a proposition. They begged him to at least make some small comments – if only to give the impression he hadn’t wholly disowned the picture – and he reluctantly agreed. In his memoir Sonny Boy, Pacino confessed, “They had paid me a lot of money, and I wasn’t going to just abandon them. But I wanted to go somewhere far away from the madness. I’d had enough.”
Ultimately, while Pacino didn’t publicly speak out against the film in the wake of its controversy, he did try to secretly make reparations to the community he now felt he had exploited. He revealed, “I never accepted the paycheque for Cruising. I took the money – and it was a lot – and I put it in an irrevocable trust fund, meaning once I gave it, there was no taking it back.”
This money was disseminated to various charities, and with the interest involved in the trust fund, it kept paying out for two decades. Pacino never received any publicity for his gesture, but that was exactly what he specified. The last thing the regretful star wanted was to turn his attempt to make amends into a publicity stunt.
The remorseful star mused, “I don’t know if it eased my conscience, but at least the money did some good. I just wanted one positive thing to come out of that whole experience.”
In later years, Friedkin has also reflected on the legacy of what he called a tough, hard-edged picture. He told The Wrap in 2013, “This was not the best foot forward for the gay rights movement, but I never intended the film to be critical of gays. I just thought the S&M world would make a good backdrop for a murder mystery, but I did not in any way mean for it to reflect the gay lifestyle.”
