Al Pacino reveals he went broke after earning a low salary to star in the iconic film The Godfather
In the mid 1980s, Al Pacino was dating Diane Keaton when he discovered that he was broke.
The Godfather had been a huge critical and commercial success, but it wasn’t a big payday for Pacino, who reportedly was only paid $US35,000 ($52,000) on the film.
“When I finished making The Godfather, I was broke, not that I had ever had any money, but now I owed money,” he writes in his newly released memoir Sonny Boy.
“My manager and agents got their cuts of my salary while I had to live on support from [actress] Jill Clayburgh”
He made more with 1974’s The Godfather II and much more with 1983’s Scarface, but he hadn’t been smart with his money.
He also wasn’t working that much, making only five films throughout the 1980s.
“I had about ninety grand in the bank and that was it,” the 84-year-old actor writes. “I had a lifestyle to boot. I had my home in the country, which I didn’t want to give up. I was spending and not earning; I was putting out but I wasn’t bringing in.”
He continues, “I could say I got taken advantage of. I could blame my accountants. I could blame [my manager] Mary Bregman, who had put me into some sort of tax shelter that went south. I could blame myself, but then I’d have to take responsibility for my own actions.”
The star went to his entertainment lawyer with Keaton to discuss his paltry finances when the actress suddenly exploded and yelled at Pacino’s lawyer: “Do you know who he is?”
When the lawyer began to answer, the actress jumped in again.
“Yeah, you’re going to tell me, ‘Oh, he’s an artist. no. He. Is. An idiot,” she thundered.
“He’s an ignoramus,” she continued. “When it comes to this, you’ve got to take care of him.”
Pacino writes that Keaton was right.
“I didn’t understand how money worked,” he admits, “any more than I understood how a career worked. It was a language I just didn’t speak.”
Keaton encouraged Pacino to start acting in movies again and his first project was Sea of Love.
The 1989 cop thriller co-starring Ellen Barkin was critically acclaimed and a huge hit. It was also Pacino’s first movie since 1985’s Revolution.
Pacino confesses that he didn’t make that much money from the film because he had no “appropriate back end … They knew I had been out of commission for four years, so they didn’t have to cut that sweet a deal.”
The Bronx-born actor was soon offered to reprise the role of Michael Corleone in The Godfather: Part III, and although he had struggled with reprising the character for the first sequel, he had no such hesitation for the third instalment.
“The choice could not have been easier,” he writes. “I was broke. Francis [Ford Coppola, the director] was broke. We both needed the bread.”
The Godfather Part III came out in 1990 and was widely panned.
By 2001, Pacino found himself living in LA to be closer to his twins, Anton and Olivia, now 23, whom he shares with ex-Beverly D’Angelo.
(He has two other children: Julie, 34, with acting coach Jan Tarrant and Roman, who was born in June 2023, with Noor Alfallah).
However his lifestyle “was costing me a fortune.”
He writes, “My staff was getting bigger, and I was taking care of two homes, my apartments, and an office, and supporting the households of my children. I was spending three or four hundred thousand dollars a month, which is a lot of moolah.”
By 2011, Pacino began to harbour suspicions about his accountant. The actor had splurged on a family trip to Europe, which included flights on a Gulfstream 550, a whole floor of the Dorchester Hotel and a trip to Legoland in Denmark.
Back home in LA, Pacino discovered he had more money than before which struck him as odd.
“I knew something was wrong,” he admitted before finding out that the accountant was indeed crooked. He claims that he was eventually found guilty of running a Ponzi scheme and served time in prison.
But soon Pacino was again broke.
“I had fifty million dollars, and then I had nothing,” he writes. “I had property but I didn’t have any money … The kind of money I was spending and where it was going was just a crazy montage of loss.”
The Serpico star lists some of his expenses: paying for sixteen cars, twenty-three cell phones and a landscaper who was getting “$400,000 a year, and mind you, that was for landscaping at a house I didn’t even live in.”
Pacino writes that he had little knowledge of where all the money was going.
“I wasn’t even signing my own checks [sic] — the accountant signed them and I just let them go by. I wasn’t looking and he didn’t tell me how much I had or where it was going, and I wasn’t keeping track of who got what. It was all about: Let’s keep this dumb actor going, and I was keeping track of who got what. It was all about: Let’s keep this dumb actor happy, just keep him working, and will reap.”
By then Pacino was in his 70s and “the big paydays that I was used to just weren’t coming around anymore.”
So he began to budget and work more.
He sold one of his houses, did commercials for Australian television and began touring with a seminar.
Pacino confesses that some of his later projects were done purely for the cash and weren’t “very good.”
“Jack and Jill was the first movie I made after I lost my money. To be honest, I did it because I didn’t have anything else. Adam Sandler wanted me, and they paid me a lot for it … I love Adam, he was wonderful to work with and has become a dear friend.
“I also ended up doing some really bad films that will go unmentioned, just for the cast, when my funds got low enough. And I sort of knew they were bad, but I convinced myself I could somehow get them up to being mediocre.”
Now that he’s older, the Oscar winner admits that he “has to think very seriously about my estate now. That means I have to get advice from people who are way smarter than me.”
Pacino writes that Scarface was his most lucrative role, and it continues to pay him.
“To this day it’s still the biggest film I ever did. The residuals still support me,” he writes. “I can live on it, I mean, I could, if I lived like a normal person.”
