#sonnyboy

Note on the text: I used the memoir Sonny Boy as written by Al Pacino and published in 2024 by Penguin Books.

A good autobiography should leave the reader with a sense of who the author is, and this one really does. For as famous as he is, Al Pacino comes off as a relatively shy, uncomfortable person who always felt like he never quite fit in. That he was too much of an artist for the mainstream and too mainstream for everyone else. Throughout his whole life he has always been searching for a way in which he can authentically connect to the world and the people in it and art provided a medium for him to do just that.

What initially attracted this lonely outsider to the art of acting, like it does for many people, was the fact that he could actually do it. That after years of struggling to fit in, and struggling to find something that he could excel in, he finally found something that filled that void. He talks about how when he was thirteen he did a school play called Home Sweet Homicide and how during the opening night performance he suddenly felt the sense of connection, “that sense of belonging” that he had been searching for his whole life (34). Not just between him and his fellows actors and actresses, but between him and the world. Like he had finally found his place in the world, and that he wasn’t a mistake or some weird alien that had been dropped off on the wrong planet.

Ever since he was a kid, he knew he had a unique kind of energy to him but he didn’t know how to harness that energy in a constructive way. He talks about a moment where, as a five year old, he is reenacting the famous scene from The Lost Weekend where Ray Milland’s character, an alcoholic named Don, is frantically searching for alcohol, and being surprised that the adults appeared to find him uproariously funny and he would think “what are they laughing at? This man is fighting for his life!” (11).

Similarly when he talks about his mom’s first suicide attempt, there’s a sense of him having these deep feelings inside of him that he just had no way of processing:

I wasn’t even aware that my mother was having problems until one day when I was six years old. I was getting ready to go out and play in the streets. [I was] sitting [on] a chair in the kitchen while my mother laced up my little shoes and put a sweater on me to keep me warm. I noticed that she was crying, and I wondered what was the matter, but I didn’t understand how to ask her. She was kissing me all over and right before I left the apartment, she gave me a great big hug. It was a bit unusual, but I was eager to get downstairs, and meet up with the other kids, [so] I [didn’t give it another] thought (12).

Even at that age he was feeling things that, in some sense, he didn’t know how to feel. It was only when he became an actor that he was able to find a way to more effectively process and understand what he was feeling, and in doing so it also helped him learn how to use his innate emotional instincts to better connect with people.:

And then one night, on stage, just like that, it happened. The power of expression was revealed to me, in a way that it never had been before. I wasn’t even searching for it. That’s the beauty of these things. I’m opening my mouth and I’m understanding somehow that I can speak. Words are coming out and they’re the words of Strindberg, but I’m saying them as though they’re mine. The world is mine and my feelings are mine, and they’re going beyond the South Bronx. I [had] left the familiar. I became a part of something larger. I found that there was more to me, a feeling that I belonged to a whole world and not just to one place. I’m thinking to myself, what is this? It feels as though I’m lifting right off the ground. It’s right there and I can reach out and touch it. This is out there and this is now what I know is possible. All of a sudden, in that moment, I was universal (69).

Pacino had spent his whole life, in some sense, trying to feel like he was a part of something bigger than himself and art gave him that gift. I think the reason that he struggled so much in his relationships is that he was bound only to one person, and a contemporary at that, and that’s why was constantly jumping from relationship to relationship and never got married. I also think that the reason he could connect to his kids so easily stems from the fact that they are his legacy- they are the future that is beyond his future.

Art is like that too. It’s not as constrained by time and space as we are, and so a person who is participating in that art can more directly experience the feeling of being a part of something that is larger than he is. Also the fact that filmmaking is an intensely collaborative process means that it can amplify that feeling a hundredfold. Just look at the way he describes how this climactic scene in Dog Day Afternoon happened:

The most powerful moment in the whole film was a spontaneous invention. In one scene, as I’m going out [onto] the street, [director Sidney] Lumet’s assistant director, Burtt Harris whispered in my ear “say ‘Attica’”. I said “what do you mean?” He says “say ‘Attica’, say ‘Attica’”. He was talking about an upstate New York prison that just a few months ago had been the scene of a riot that was brutally put down by the governor, the prison, and the police. So I got out onto the street [and] all of a sudden I say “Remember Attica?” And the people started going fucking crazy. And I thought to myself, that’s what film can be. Go out there, go for it. Something may happen. And that’s what Burtt Harris knew. And of course we went with it and there it is. It’s Attica. Bravo, Burtt Harris! (190).

Look at how happy he is to just feel like he’s a part of something bigger, even if he wasn’t the main lynchpin that made everything work. He has no problem crediting other people for what they do, he just wants to be a part of the process.

At one point Pacino says that writing his autobiography has revealed more about who he is to himself than he had originally anticipated, and that his conclusion is that he is a kind of anarchist who is constantly trying to break his boundaries down so that way he connect more fully and authentically to people around him. Which is, in essence, what he feels acting has given him the ability to do. Even as he enters into his eighties, he is still looking for ways in which he can both share himself with the world and find ways in which the world can continue to affect him. Community and connection are as much on his mind now as it was before.