Al Pacino’s new memoir ‘Sonny Boy’ charts his path to movie stardom

On the set of The Godfather, during the early days of filming, Al Pacino was worried about being fired. Francis Ford Coppola, the relatively inexperienced director under pressure himself from Paramount studio heads, had told Pacino, a then-little-known actor, that he was “not cutting it.”

Soon that pressure would become less intense. Pacino’s strong performance during the filming of a scene in a restaurant involving a double killing rescued him from the studio chopping block. And an off-camera lunch with Hollywood legend Marlon Brando gave Pacino a much-needed morale boost.

Finally, already in his 30s and with a less-than-stunning résumé, the New York City native was on his way.

This turnaround is at the center of Pacino’s new memoir, Sonny Boy, beginning with his impoverished big-city childhood, where he was known as Sonny and ran with wild, dead-end friends, but also was exposed to cinematic wonders by a movie-loving mother, a factory worker. Later, as an unknown hopeful, he would walk New York City streets, practicing Shakespeare.

The memoir takes readers from Pacino’s early career insecurities to sudden stardom with the 1972 release of The Godfather, based on a novel by New York writer Mario Puzo, who co-wrote the screenplay with Coppola. The two worked on the script while staying at the now-demolished Tropicana hotel-casino on the Las Vegas Strip.

Now, at 84, Pacino is the father of three adult children and a baby boy born in June 2023. These life experiences have led to contemplative moments for the celebrated performer, winner of multiple major acting awards.

“There’s something out there that’s bigger than us!” he told The New York Times earlier this year. “You can’t say ‘better,’ because you don’t really know, but something’s out there going on that’s more than we understand.”

A battle with COVID-19, which almost killed him in 2020, added to his big-picture view of life.

“They said my pulse was gone,” Pacino told the Times. “It was so — you’re here, you’re not. I thought: Wow, you don’t even have your memories. You have nothing.”

Pacino’s book presents his memories with the introspection of a widely recognized public figure recalling when anonymity and shabbiness defined his existence.  

That anonymity vanished with fame and accolades. As the book explores that transition, readers are given a behind-the-scenes look at some of the most iconic Hollywood films from the last half-century. This long list includes The Godfather: Part II with Pacino’s character, Marine combat officer Michael Corleone, now leading the crime family and ordering his brother killed for betrayal. Also included is Scarface, featuring Pacino as a Cuban drug lord in South Florida.

Revenge scene saves Pacino’s job

In Sonny Boy, Pacino explains how the transition from emerging performer to famous actor occurred during and after the making of The Godfather. At first, a rumor had been going around on the set that Pacino would be let go. The studio chiefs weren’t happy with him from the start.

“Paramount didn’t want me to play Michael Corleone,” Pacino writes. “They wanted Jack Nicholson. They wanted Robert Redford. They wanted Warren Beatty or Ryan O’Neal.”

According to the rumor mill, Coppola was targeted for dismissal, too. Coppola had fought to cast Pacino in the role over actors with more star power. At one point Pacino saw Coppola weeping on the set because things weren’t going his way.

“The word was that I was going to be fired, and, likely, so was the director,” Pacino writes. “Not that Francis wasn’t cutting it — I wasn’t. But he was the one responsible for me being in the film.”

Pacino had been playing Michael in a low-key manner as someone not “particularly full of charisma.” The thought was that the character’s personality would evolve along with his responsibilities.

“My idea was that this guy comes out of nowhere,” Pacino writes. “That was the power of this characterization. That was the only way this could work: the emergence of this person, the discovery of his capacity and his potential.”

That discovery occurs in a restaurant when Michael retrieves a handgun hidden in a restroom, then uses it at the table to kill Virgil “The Turk” Sollozzo (Al Lettieri) and corrupt police Capt. Mark McCluskey (Sterling Hayden). Michael was avenging the attempted murder of his father, Don Vito Corleone (Brando).

As Pacino explains in the memoir, the actors spent 15 hours in the restaurant one April night shooting that scene. He notes that Lettieri and “the magnificent Sterling Hayden” were supportive of him, another helpful factor in improving his self-confidence.

“They knew I was going through a difficult time, feeling like I had the world on my shoulders, knowing that any day the ax could fall on me,” Pacino writes. “Sterling and Al Lettieri helped keep up my morale; they set a tone and were role models for me. I looked to them as the people who knew what to do, and how to conduct yourself, and they took me in as a fellow actor.”

With that scene in the can, Coppola showed it to Paramount executives. “When they looked at it, something was there,” Pacino writes. “Because of that scene I just performed, they kept me in the film. So I didn’t get fired from The Godfather.”

Messy lunch with Marlon

Hayden and Lettieri weren’t the only actors supportive of Pacino. A lunch with the best-known member of the cast, Brando, also helped restore Pacino’s faith in his acting abilities. During the lunch, Brando’s face and hands were covered in red pasta sauce while the veteran actor gave Pacino some comfort by indicating things would be OK.

The lunch almost didn’t take place. At first Pacino resisted, frightened by “the greatest living actor of our time,” but Coppola insisted.

“I had my lunch with Marlon in a modest room in the hospital where we were filming on Fourteenth Street,” Pacino writes. “He was sitting on one hospital bed, I was sitting on the other. He was asking me questions: Where am I from? How long have I been an actor? And he was eating chicken cacciatore with his hands. His hands were full of red sauce. So was his face. And that’s all I could think about the whole time. Whatever his words were, my conscious mind was fixated by the stain-covered sight in front of me. He was talking — gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble — and I was just mesmerized.”

Finally Brando “spread both his hands across the white hospital bed and smeared the sheets with red sauce, without even thinking about it, and he kept on talking.”

“When our lunch was over,” Pacino writes, “Marlon looked at me with those gentle eyes of his and said, ‘Yeah, kid, you’re gonna be all right.’”

Power of Mob movies

The closeness that these actors exhibited seems emblematic of the film’s theme regarding the importance of family life, a message that hit home with viewers, helping turn the production into a blockbuster. Pacino writes that the “idea of family” gave the movie its impact.

“People identified with the Corleones, saw themselves somehow in them, and found themselves connecting to the characters and their dynamics as brothers and sisters, parents and children,” he writes. “The film had Mario Puzo’s exciting drama and storytelling, the magic of Coppola’s interpretation, and real violence. But in the context of that family, it all became something else.”

The movie also is appealing in other ways, according to Pacino.

“We’re fascinated with these people who are determined not to live within the rules of society, who are finding another way to go,” he writes. “The outlaw is a particularly American kind of character. We grew up pretending to be Jesse James and Billy the Kid. These were folk heroes. They became part of our lore. The history of the Mafia is part of that lore, too.”

In a larger sense, Pacino’s memoir makes it clear that everyone needs help at times. He received it during many stages of his life, including from Coppola and actors on the set.

“So many people are abused in this life,” Pacino writes, “but if you’ve got a Godfather, you’ve got someone you can go to, and they will take care of it.”

Larry Henry is a veteran print and broadcast journalist. He served as press secretary for Nevada Governor Bob Miller and was political editor at the Las Vegas Sun and managing editor at KFSM-TV, the CBS affiliate in Northwest Arkansas. Today, he is a senior reporter for Gambling.com.