Al Pacino Went Broke and Had to Act in Bad Films for Money

Al Pacino writes in his recently-published memoir “Sonny Boy” that he was forced to make dramatic career changes after losing all of his money due to a corrupt accountant who eventually served seven and a half years in prison for running a Ponzi scheme. The accountant mismanaged the Oscar winner’s funds, bringing Pacino’s savings from a staggering $50 million to zero dollars.

According to Pacino, it was in 2011 when he started “to get warnings that my accountant at the time, a guy who had lots of celebrity clients, was not to be trusted.” The actor was already paying “a ridiculous amount of money to rent some big fancy house in Beverly Hills,” and then he took his entire family on a trip to Europe where he flew various guests overseas “on a gorgeous Gulfstream 550” and “rented out a whole floor of the Dorchester hotel in London.”

When Pacino returned to his Hollywood home, he became suspicious after realizing his finances had not dramatically changed despite spending so much on vacation. “And I thought, It’s simple. It’s clear. I just know this. Time stopped. I am fucked,” he writes.

“I was broke. I had $50 million, and then I had nothing. I had property, but I didn’t have any money,” Pacino remembers about finally looking into his finances. “In this business, when you make $10 million dollars for a film, it’s not $10 million. Because after the lawyers, and the agents, and the publicist, and the government, it’s not $10 million, it’s $4.5 million in your pocket. But you’re living above that because you’re high on the hog. And that’s how you lose it. It’s very strange, the way it happens. The more money you make, the less you have.”

“The kind of money I was spending and where it was going was just a crazy montage of loss,” he adds. “The landscaper was getting $400,000 a year and, I don’t exaggerate these things. It just went on and on. Mind you, that was for landscaping at a house I didn’t even live in.”

Pacino was in his 70s when he learned he was broke, adding: “I wasn’t a young buck, and I was not going to be making the kind of money from acting in films that I had made before. The big paydays that I was used to just weren’t coming around anymore. The pendulum had swung, and I found it harder to find parts for myself.”

Before he went broke, Pacino was “was doing films if I thought I related to the part and felt I could bring something.” Examples that fit this career mentality were “Ocean’s 13” and “88 Minutes,” even if the latter title turned out to be “a disaster.” But once Pacino went broke, he had to throw out any regulations for his career and start accepting whatever roles offered up big money. That’s why he agreed to star in Adam Sandler’s notorious “Jack and Jill” and ended his ban against doing commercials. He shot a coffee advertisement with director Barry Levinson, for instance.

“‘Jack and Jill’ was the first film I made after I lost my money. To be honest, I did it because I didn’t have anything else,” Pacino writes. “Adam Sandler wanted me, and they paid me a lot for it. So I went out and did it, and it helped. I love Adam, he was wonderful to work with and has become a dear friend. He also just happens to be a great actor and a hell of a guy.”

Pacino also sold one of his two houses to make money and started charging to conduct seminars and colleges and universities, which he had rarely charged for prior.

“My seminars were another big find for me. In the past, I used to go to colleges all the time and talk to the kids there, just to get out there and perform for them, in a sense. I’d tell them a little bit about my life and have them ask me questions…I didn’t get paid for it. I just did it. Now that I was broke, I thought, ‘Why don’t we follow this up?’ There were more places I could go and do these seminars. Not necessarily universities. I knew there was a wider market for this. So I started traveling around. And I found that they worked. Audiences came because I still had popularity.”

Pacino’s memoir “Sonny Boy” is now available to purchase.