(Credit: Alamy)
In the 2010s, Al Pacino found himself in a tough spot. After a lengthy career as one of the greatest leading men in Hollywood, he had amassed a vast fortune and had his pick of roles – until he didn’t. You see, his accountant mismanaged his $50million fortune so badly that he had nothing left. The accountant wasn’t just bad at his job, though. He was a genuine criminal who wound up serving seven and a half years in prison for running a Ponzi scheme.
It left Pacino desperate for money, and he became open to accepting roles he otherwise might have passed on. Indeed, one of the films in this period left him so dissatisfied that he sent the director hundreds of e-mails registering his disappointment at the finished product.
When Pacino surveyed the Hollywood landscape after discovering he was broke, he realised the options were somewhat limited for a star like him in the latter part of his career. Sadly, it meant he said yes to the first thing that came his way, and wound up being ridiculed for it for years to come.
“Jack and Jill was the first film I made after I lost my money,” admitted the Godfather star in his memoir Sonny Boy. “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. So I went out and did it, and it helped.”
Widely considered one of the worst films ever made, Jack and Jill saw Sandler play two roles—an advertising executive and his twin sister. Naturally, Sandler dressing in drag to play a “funny” female character wouldn’t fly today, but even at the time, it was lambasted. In fact, to this day, it holds the dubious honour of being the film that won the most Golden Raspberry awards.
Amazingly, though, Jack and Jill isn’t the movie that aggravated Pacino so much that he bombarded the director with irate e-mails. In Sonny Boy, he revealed, “I also did a film called Manglehorn because a lot of people were hawking its director, David Gordon Green.”
These days, Gordon Green is best known for his Halloween reboot trilogy and his attempted resuscitation of the Exorcist franchise. In 2014, though, he was an acclaimed indie director with a few quirky dramas and studio comedies under his belt.
Manglehorn fit nicely in the indie drama category. It follows a reclusive key-maker who is drawn out of his shell by a relationship with a bank employee played by Holly Hunter. Pacino liked the script and was particularly fond of its ending. In fact, this denouement was largely why he agreed to sign up for the project.
The film was shot in Austin, Texas, and Pacino enjoyed working with Gordon Green. Amusingly, though, he admitted his favourite thing about Manglehorn was having dinner with acclaimed filmmaker Terrence Malick, who had lived in Austin since 2011. Unfortunately for Pacino, though, when he watched the film’s final cut, he was horrified by what he saw.
“David Gordon Green was nice to work with,” Pacino said in his book, “but I wrote him about a hundred e-mails after I saw the finished film.” To his dismay, Gordon Green hadn’t just changed the film ending that Pacino loved so much; he excised it from the movie completely. Pacino complained, “The film now ended in a completely different manner. That led to me writing him over and over again about it.”
Ultimately, even a barrage of e-mails from a legend of the game like Pacino wasn’t enough to convince Gordon Green to change his mind. As Pacino admitted, “He didn’t listen. That happens.” However, while the star was sanguine about the whole affair, it’s unlikely he’d be keen to sign up for Gordon Green’s next horror reboot.
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