New York Stories : Al Pacino And The Unanswered Bush Mystery
Sept 26, 2020 18:27:48 GMT
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Post by petrolino on Sept 26, 2020 18:27:48 GMT
Al Pacino was born in East Harlem, New York - also known as Spanish Harlem, or El Barrio - in 1940. Ronnie Spector of the Ronettes was born there in 1943; the group's recording 'Be My Baby' was used in Martin Scorsese's searing portrait of New York hustle, 'Mean Streets' (1973).
Pacino was raised in the south Bronx. Spike Lee says Pacino's schooling was working-class and tough, straight down the line. Lee considers him to have been resolute.
"Al Pacino took up smoking when he was nine years old. By the time he turned fourteen he was drinking heavily. For most of his teen years, a gang of cronies would follow him around the South Bronx neighborhood they called home, and he was nearly expelled from high school for fighting with his teachers. He was also an uncommonly sensitive kid who, unbeknownst to his friends, idolized Paul Newman in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and loved seeing plays with his mother. Legend has it that, during a high school production that called for his character to feel sick, he made himself so nauseous that he almost threw up onstage.
It was Pacino’s good fortune — and ours — to be born at a time when rebelliousness wasn’t regarded as an obstacle to a great acting career but as its key ingredient. In 1966, he was accepted into the Actors Studio in Manhattan, where he studied with Lee Strasberg (often considered the father of American method acting). By the time Pacino arrived, Strasberg had already trained a legion of great performers with his controversial interpretation of the ideas of the Russian theater practitioner Konstantin Stanislavski, emphasizing the need to construct a character from the “inside out,” beginning with the performer’s profoundest emotions and memories. Strasberg’s detractors complained that, in order to master the fiery, hyper-masculine roles in which the Actors Studio trafficked, a method actor would first need to have a traumatic, action-packed childhood. For Pacino, this wasn’t a problem.
Between 1970 -1979, Pacino starred in four films set in contemporary New York City, all of which will be playing at Film Forum in July as part of a month-long series on New York in the 1970s: The Panic In Needle Park, Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon, and Cruising. All four were directed by notable New Hollywood auteurs, drew extensively from nonfiction sources, and revolve around the quintessentially cinematic battle between cops and criminals. In spite of their vast stylistic differences, there are moments when the films, viewed back-to-back, seem like installments in one epic meditation on New York, masculinity, and — implicitly — acting itself, with Pacino modeling, critiquing, and occasionally spoofing the performance style he mastered during his time at the Actors Studio.
Anyone who’s ever moved to New York from a small town — and, of course, plenty of people who haven’t, too — knows that big city life toughens you up. NYC forces its inhabitants to rethink the faces they wear on a crowded street, becoming intimidating enough to discourage canvassers, confused tourists, and those irritating CD salesmen in Times Square. In all four of Pacino’s 1970s New York features, his characters perform the age-old ritual of acting tougher than they really are. In The Panic in Needle Park, his first film as a leading man, Pacino plays Bobby, an addict and dealer who brags that he’ll be running the heroin market soon and steals a cheap TV for no other reason than to impress his girlfriend. He is, in other words, a familiar Neorealist archetype: like Il Matto in La Strada or Ilya in the recent Heaven Knows What, he breezes through his days, disobeying society’s laws with gleeful impunity, only to be yanked suddenly and painfully back to earth.
Panic was the sophomore feature of Jerry Schatzberg, a Vogue photographer turned director; his career has attracted considerable attention in recent years partly because, as with so many talented filmmakers of the era, it more or less ended in the ‘70s. In Panic, there’s a fascinating tension between Schatzberg’s removed, third-person aesthetic, and Pacino’s intense, method approach, resulting in a performance and a portrait of New York City unlike anything else in either man’s filmography."
It was Pacino’s good fortune — and ours — to be born at a time when rebelliousness wasn’t regarded as an obstacle to a great acting career but as its key ingredient. In 1966, he was accepted into the Actors Studio in Manhattan, where he studied with Lee Strasberg (often considered the father of American method acting). By the time Pacino arrived, Strasberg had already trained a legion of great performers with his controversial interpretation of the ideas of the Russian theater practitioner Konstantin Stanislavski, emphasizing the need to construct a character from the “inside out,” beginning with the performer’s profoundest emotions and memories. Strasberg’s detractors complained that, in order to master the fiery, hyper-masculine roles in which the Actors Studio trafficked, a method actor would first need to have a traumatic, action-packed childhood. For Pacino, this wasn’t a problem.
Between 1970 -1979, Pacino starred in four films set in contemporary New York City, all of which will be playing at Film Forum in July as part of a month-long series on New York in the 1970s: The Panic In Needle Park, Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon, and Cruising. All four were directed by notable New Hollywood auteurs, drew extensively from nonfiction sources, and revolve around the quintessentially cinematic battle between cops and criminals. In spite of their vast stylistic differences, there are moments when the films, viewed back-to-back, seem like installments in one epic meditation on New York, masculinity, and — implicitly — acting itself, with Pacino modeling, critiquing, and occasionally spoofing the performance style he mastered during his time at the Actors Studio.
Anyone who’s ever moved to New York from a small town — and, of course, plenty of people who haven’t, too — knows that big city life toughens you up. NYC forces its inhabitants to rethink the faces they wear on a crowded street, becoming intimidating enough to discourage canvassers, confused tourists, and those irritating CD salesmen in Times Square. In all four of Pacino’s 1970s New York features, his characters perform the age-old ritual of acting tougher than they really are. In The Panic in Needle Park, his first film as a leading man, Pacino plays Bobby, an addict and dealer who brags that he’ll be running the heroin market soon and steals a cheap TV for no other reason than to impress his girlfriend. He is, in other words, a familiar Neorealist archetype: like Il Matto in La Strada or Ilya in the recent Heaven Knows What, he breezes through his days, disobeying society’s laws with gleeful impunity, only to be yanked suddenly and painfully back to earth.
Panic was the sophomore feature of Jerry Schatzberg, a Vogue photographer turned director; his career has attracted considerable attention in recent years partly because, as with so many talented filmmakers of the era, it more or less ended in the ‘70s. In Panic, there’s a fascinating tension between Schatzberg’s removed, third-person aesthetic, and Pacino’s intense, method approach, resulting in a performance and a portrait of New York City unlike anything else in either man’s filmography."
- Jackson Arn, 'Outta Order : Al Pacino And 1970s New York City'
Salvatore Pacino, Al Pacino & Rose Pacino
Al Pacino
Bronx missionaries Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five deliver a message ...
"Where else to meet Ronnie Spector, the Sixties girl-group icon, but in the ladies loos? The woman who once boasted the Rolling Stones as her opening act is primping her hair in the mirror, an enormous and fragrant mane bigger than her torso. A telltale pack of Marlboro cigarettes rests on the windowsill.
She’s 70 years old and the sexiest person I’ve ever interviewed, an irrepressible wiggle in her hips, throaty giggles bubbling out of her. There’s so much vivacity to her that it seems impossible that she could have been shut away in one of the most nightmarish marriages in the history of show business as Phil Spector’s wife.
Having divorced, remarried, and endured a 15-year legal battle against her ex-husband over unpaid royalties which she finally won, she’s now as adored for her chutzpah as for her hits. Beyond the Beehive, which has its British premiere in London this weekend, is her life story on stage – a mix of songs and stories from her career – and she seems as thrilled as a teenager to be performing again.
“People are very interested in all my ins and outs and ups and downs and Beatles and Stones,” she says, settling into a sofa in a Manhattan rehearsal studio on a snowy Thursday night. “The first time we went to the UK it meant everything to us because we knew we had made it.”
When the Ronettes landed in London in 1964 with their tight harmonies and even tighter dresses, there was hysteria and the 20-year-old lead singer with the remarkable voice, who was already dating Phil Spector, had Keith Richards and John Lennon chasing after her.
“It was very scary, because I really liked John Lennon and I was saying, ‘Oh my god I’ve got to think about Phil’. John really had a big crush on me. I’ll never forget sitting on the windowsill, looking out on the lights and I said, ‘London is so beautiful’. And he said, ‘you sure are’, because he was looking at me. It made me want to cry, because I really felt such a star then. That moment, I knew I’d made it.
But as she began to realise her potential, so did her possessive boyfriend and he was as horrified as she was elated. Incensed not just by the attention of the Stones and the Beatles, but by the hordes of adoring young men the Ronettes drew wherever they went, after their marriage in 1968, Phil Spector pulled her from the limelight and imprisoned her in his California mansion. The only time Spector allowed her to leave was once a month, “to go get my feminine stuff, if you catch my drift”. If she was gone longer than 20 minutes he’d send a bodyguard."
She’s 70 years old and the sexiest person I’ve ever interviewed, an irrepressible wiggle in her hips, throaty giggles bubbling out of her. There’s so much vivacity to her that it seems impossible that she could have been shut away in one of the most nightmarish marriages in the history of show business as Phil Spector’s wife.
Having divorced, remarried, and endured a 15-year legal battle against her ex-husband over unpaid royalties which she finally won, she’s now as adored for her chutzpah as for her hits. Beyond the Beehive, which has its British premiere in London this weekend, is her life story on stage – a mix of songs and stories from her career – and she seems as thrilled as a teenager to be performing again.
“People are very interested in all my ins and outs and ups and downs and Beatles and Stones,” she says, settling into a sofa in a Manhattan rehearsal studio on a snowy Thursday night. “The first time we went to the UK it meant everything to us because we knew we had made it.”
When the Ronettes landed in London in 1964 with their tight harmonies and even tighter dresses, there was hysteria and the 20-year-old lead singer with the remarkable voice, who was already dating Phil Spector, had Keith Richards and John Lennon chasing after her.
“It was very scary, because I really liked John Lennon and I was saying, ‘Oh my god I’ve got to think about Phil’. John really had a big crush on me. I’ll never forget sitting on the windowsill, looking out on the lights and I said, ‘London is so beautiful’. And he said, ‘you sure are’, because he was looking at me. It made me want to cry, because I really felt such a star then. That moment, I knew I’d made it.
But as she began to realise her potential, so did her possessive boyfriend and he was as horrified as she was elated. Incensed not just by the attention of the Stones and the Beatles, but by the hordes of adoring young men the Ronettes drew wherever they went, after their marriage in 1968, Phil Spector pulled her from the limelight and imprisoned her in his California mansion. The only time Spector allowed her to leave was once a month, “to go get my feminine stuff, if you catch my drift”. If she was gone longer than 20 minutes he’d send a bodyguard."
- Cass C, Harlem World
The Ronettes
Al Pacino | Phil Spector
'Spanish Harlem (Demo)' - Phil Spector
"When I was younger, I’d walk down the street, see an attractive girl and start to follow her. Sometimes I’d catch up with her, we’d look at each other and before long I’d be making out. I hadn’t done that for a few years, because anyone who does that sort of thing has got to be crazy, right? But just recently I spotted this really beautiful girl and I decided to see how far I could get with her. We reached a stop light together, I looked over at her, gave her a big smile and said hello. " ‘Hi ya, Michael!’ she said. It was then that I knew it was all over for me. I slunk off and tried to hide behind a building, but the girl followed me. ‘Come on out, Michael,’ she said. ‘No,’ I answered, ‘it’s all over.’ ‘What do you mean, it’s all over? It’s just begun!’ she said. ‘No, you’re making a big mistake,’ I said. ‘I’m not Michael Corleone –- I’m Fritz Weaver.’"
- Al Pacino speaking in 1973, Los Angeles Times
- Al Pacino speaking in 1973, Los Angeles Times
Al Pacino
Interview with Al Pacino
“I come from the South Bronx — a true descendant of the melting pot. I grew up in a really mixed neighborhood; it was a very integrated life. There were certain tensions that usually had to do with one’s income situation. Being an only child, I had difficulty with competition. I wasn’t allowed out until I went to school at about six; that’s when I started to integrate with other kids. I was very shy. It wasn’t very pleasant going to school at that age and having the feeling that you might get beat up any day. I think a lot of kids suffer from that kind of tension. I didn’t know how to protect myself very well, because I never learned it.”
- Al Pacino speaking in 1979, Playboy
John Cazale & Al Pacino performing in the first run of Israel Horowitz's play 'The Indian Wants The Bronx'
'Breaking Into Heaven' - Stone Roses
In the late 1970s, reports came out that Robert De Niro and Al Pacino had been seen tearing up the streets at night, and that Pacino had woken up in a bush, not knowing where he was or how he got there. These reports remain unconfirmed to this day.
Robert De Niro & Al Pacino
Michelle Pfeiffer & Al Pacino
