Why Al Pacino refused to release his “most potent, powerful” work for 17 years
Al Pacino made what he believed to be his best work, and then let it rot.
It feels so counterintuitive, given that most artists talk about this passionate desire to share quickly whenever they make something that feels good. Any creative knows that feeling well, or hopefully does, when there’s a sense, even as you’re creating the thing, that it’s turning out to be something special. Simultaneously, the heart beats faster and there’s a strange sense of calm to it as you know you’re doing good work.
But when it’s done, typically, the artist wants it out in the world. They want it to be shared and appreciated; otherwise, a lot of people would feel it burning a hole in their archive.
Al Pacino seemed to operate in the exact opposite way, though. After creating what he truly saw as a masterpiece in his filmography, he let it be hidden away for over a decade.
I guess if you’re Pacino, you’ve got enough greatness to stay busy with. Especially back in the 1980s, when this project was made, he had other golden films like Scarface and The Godfather movies to be concerned with. But despite the distractions, The Local Stigmatic always stayed deeply important to him as a standout performance.
“The Local Stigmatic is the most potent, powerful thing I’ve done in my life,” he said of the movie. Starring alongside Paul Guilfoyle, the two play friends who are spiralling further and further into violence as they drink at a bar and walk around London. It’s simple but impactful, but to Pacino, it was more than that as he still considers it his finest work.
“That is something that I’m so glad I did. I didn’t even understand at the time why I needed to do it, but I knew there was something pressing to do it,” Pacino said – so then why was he seemingly fine with it going unseen for years?
The movie went through several delays. It was filmed in the late 1980s and then wasn’t seen by anyone until 1990, when it had a showing at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, and that was it. There was never a theatrical release, so it was never in cinemas for the masses to see for some unknown reason.
It only became widely available in 2007 when it was released on DVD as part of The Al Pacino Box Set. Obviously, when people had the physical media, it quickly landed online for people to pirate or streaming services to occasionally pick up, but even that is rare.
It’s a strange blip of a film in his acting credits. It’s barely even a film as it only runs for 54 minutes, yet still, Pacino loves it. “It doesn’t belong to any quarter; it has its own identity,” he said, excusing its strange existence and even stranger release by simply viewing it as a piece of art that can’t be tied down by anything – not year, not era, nothing.
