A method to his ‘Merchant’

During the run-up to the release of the film version of Shakespeare’s “The Merchant of Venice,” Al Pacino at times said he was sorry that he had not first performed the role of Shylock on stage, where he could have followed his preferred process for developing a character -- starting with his instincts, his impulses, then letting the character take over, as if it had a life of its own. He worked on his Oedipus for seven months that way at the Actors Studio in New York. He worked on another character for three years, at first prowling the stage like a tiger, until one night, when he began performing it from a single spot. Pacino thrives on that sense of danger in the theater, the feeling “you don’t know where it’s going.” So, sure, he wishes he’d done Shylock on stage first, “for like a hundred years.”

But at other appearances to promote “Merchant,” he has made the opposite case. If he had done Shylock in the theater, he would have learned to perform the infamous moneylender’s great speeches -- “Hath not a Jew eyes? ... If you prick us do we not bleed?” -- to the back row, when film requires more subtlety, with a camera in your face. “There’s a theatricality in the character that I might have gotten caught up in,” he reasons. “It might have been hard to let that go.”

It should be no surprise that Pacino has tried the argument both ways. His success as an actor may be based on his intensity, the volcanic emotions he projects, but his favorite game is chess, in which you ponder all the possible moves and their consequences. “I’m a big chess player, yeah,” he says. He’s a muller, a tosser and turner. He didn’t have to stretch much to do the film “Insomnia.”

An early spotlight

Pacino was traumatized the first time he appeared on camera. He was 13 and living with his mother and grandparents in the Bronx when he and Bruce Cohen made it on one of the early TV quiz shows, “Wheel of Fortune.”

That “Wheel” had nothing to do with the later one that made Vanna White famous for turning over letters. The first “Wheel” ran for a year, until Christmas 1953, and sought Good Samaritans, or heroes, as contestants. Young Al was one of the heroes.

He and some friends had gone to play at a construction site along the Bronx River, and “Brucie” decided to swing off a bar sticking out of concrete 40 feet up. “We thought he was crazy,” Pacino says, and the kid was -- he got stuck up there, dangling. Pacino had to grab onto his coat until construction workers could pull him to safety.

On the quiz show, though, Brucie was the hero. After the boys’ story was told, he answered a series of questions and won them both money and their “secret desire,” which was to meet the Yankees, Mickey Mantle et al. When the boys returned home from the show, which was broadcast live, “the whole neighborhood came out,” Pacino recalls.

But what has stayed with him most, a half-century later, is how numb he’d felt on the set and how his knees were knocking as he stood behind a 3-foot-wide curtain. “When they announced my name, I thought I’d be unable to walk,” he says.

The problem, as he sees it, wasn’t the camera -- even by then, barely a teenager, he was a burgeoning actor. The problem was he had to play himself.

His parents had split when he was an infant, and his father, the outgoing one, the salesman -- mainly insurance -- soon headed for the West Coast. His mother, Rose, in contrast, was a sensitive, fragile sort, Pacino says. “She wasn’t Emily Dickinson, she didn’t write poetry, but she retreated from life, my mom did.... She was a bit of a recluse.”

At the time, he no doubt chafed at her overprotectiveness. By 16, he was hanging around Greenwich Village, and by 17 living there full time. Only later did he decide that she had saved his life, that “Yeah, well, she kept me off the streets.... She gave me boundaries.”

But one place she did go -- often with him -- was to the movies. Among his earliest memories is seeing “The Lost Weekend,” the 1945 film in which Ray Milland played a hopeless drunk. Barely 5, Pacino went home and began imitating “all the characters,” particularly Milland’s desperate search for bottles hidden in his apartment. That excited him more as a little boy than the Flash Gordon serials they showed before the film.

Many years later, Pacino got to shoot part of “The Insider” in the same Manhattan bar, P.J. Clarke’s, that had served as the setting for Milland’s “Lost Weekend,” though his mom was not around to see it, or any of his films. She died of a heart attack when he was just 22 and a nobody scrounging pass-the-hat gigs doing comedy bits and scenes from classical plays at Village cafes.

The point is, going back to “Wheel of Fortune,” that quiz show he was on at 13, Pacino is convinced that his terror stemmed from the fact that he didn’t have a role to play. It wasn’t acting, it wasn’t, “Be this person when you come out.”

“Believe me,” he says, “if I had a character, I could have done it.”

Role players

Shylock has provided a challenge for the world’s greatest actors for four centuries, though the role hardly seems like a star vehicle on paper. Shakespeare put the Jewish moneylender in only five scenes of “The Merchant of Venice,” introducing him when the play’s title character, the Christian merchant Antonio, needs money to help a friend woo an heiress. Shylock demands a pound of flesh as his bond, then disappears until it’s time for him to suffer a personal blow -- his daughter runs off with a young Christian -- and to learn that the merchant will not be able to repay the loan. Shylock gets his comeuppance at the play’s climactic trial, when the heiress, Portia -- disguised as a male legal scholar -- declares that while he is entitled to carve out his pound of flesh, he is not entitled to a drop of the Christian’s blood. Facing the death penalty if he makes the merchant bleed, Shylock has to back down, relinquish his assets and agree to convert to Christianity, after which the play continues without him for another act, much of that light-hearted coupling among Portia and three other youths of good fortune.

No one knows whether Shakespeare meant the moneylender to be an object of scorn or a tragic figure worthy of the audience’s sympathy or some combination of those. The steep price “The Jew” demanded for the defaulted loan could be seen as the fiendish act of a devil or a response to years of indignities heaped upon him.

By the 20th century, other than in Nazi Germany, few producers would dream of having a hand-wringing, hook-nosed Shylock, the bloodthirsty boogieman. But even sympathetic takes on Shylock can generate controversy. In 1962, impresario Joseph Papp had to back out of a plan for a national telecast of his Shakespeare in the Park production, featuring George C. Scott, following protests by the New York Board of Rabbis, which was not impressed with his explanation that “Merchant” was “a revelation of human conduct under certain pressures.”

Such reactions may help explain why, for all the films of Shakespeare’s plays, none had been done of “Merchant” since the silent-movie era until writer-director Michael Radford, of “Il Postino” fame, set out to adapt the play for the screen.

One of the producers on the project, Barry Navidi, said recently that no less than Marlon Brando had suggested whom they should cast as Shylock. Another producer, Cary Brokaw, happened to be working with Pacino on Mike Nichol’s adaptation of another play for HBO, Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America,” in which the eight-time Academy Award nominee, and one-time winner, was playing Roy Cohn, the scheming and haunted powerbroker dying of AIDS.

Pacino had seen Laurence Olivier and Dustin Hoffman play Shylock, but the part had never resonated with him. Only when he read Radford’s script did he see what he could do with the role. “You pick a thing and you go with it,” Pacino explains. “My impulse said, ‘Go for being lonely.’ ”

Capturing that has been his specialty from the performance that made him a star, as Michael Corleone. That character evolved from happy-go-lucky college kid to steely mob boss before earning a Shakespearean fate at the end of “Godfather II” -- having murdered his brother and driven off his wife, he’s alone in his fortress by the lake.

Whereas Michael Corleone’s isolation was written into the “Godfather” scripts, Pacino brought the same quality to a series of loner cops, such as Frank Serpico and the blind ex-soldier of “Scent of a Woman,” and a slew of bad guys, up to his recent Roy Cohn. In the best Method tradition, he tries to, as he puts it colloquially, “feel their pain,” and get the audience to do the same.

In making his version of “Merchant,” Radford set out to make that easier with Shylock by taking liberties with Shakespeare’s play, cutting chunks of dialogue and adding what film can bring to the table: powerful images.

In the play, Shylock’s first words are “Three thousand ducats.” He’s talking money from the get-go. He only later mentions how he’s regularly spat on by Antonio and other Christians.

Radford shows this happening first, in an opening sequence designed to illustrate what life was like for some in 16th century Venice. We see books being burned and a mob throwing a Jew off a bridge, the onlookers including the characters who will become the story’s central antagonists, Shylock and Antonio, the merchant played by another intense Oscar winner, Jeremy Irons. As the crowd pushes them together, Shylock is given a new first word, “Antonio,” and they lock eyes, suggesting a connection between the two sad men from different worlds. But that’s just a beat. The merchant spits down in contempt, or resentment -- or who knows what -- and Pacino’s Shylock is left to wipe off the spittle with the cuff of his gabardine coat.

Shakespeare’s iambic pentameter starts up soon after, but images continue to tell just as much: Pacino expertly carving and weighing a piece of goat meat in the market while he and Antonio negotiate the unusual terms of their loan, or wailing while slumped on the street after his daughter has run off. And this Shylock does not vanish after the trial -- we see him one last time, standing outside the closing gates of the Jewish ghetto, exiled from his own people but not part of Christian society either.

It’s Shylock not as the representative of a people or the object of 19th century melodrama, but as a lonely soul.

Pacino believes he inherited his affinity for such characters from his mother. But he also sees that as the human condition beyond her, or him. “I tend to think it’s all of us, yeah,” he says. “In my time on this Earth, that’s what I’ve seen.”

He likes the line of William Blake, who saw in every face he met, “Marks of weakness, marks of woe.”

But Pacino stops himself when he gets too existential, say, pondering how life seems like a dream at times. “It seems to be more apparent to me over the last few years,” he says then, “that I don’t even know what I’m talking about.”

He also says, “I could say a lot more about this character if I played him for six months.”

Life choices

Pacino turns 65 in April. He in earlier days wondered whether, like his mother, he was doomed to prematurely encounter “the great light at the end of the tunnel.” But these days he dismisses the notion as a romantic, Byronic conceit.

He can look to his father, Sal, who is still alive at 82 and could pass for 65. The now retired insurance man is on his fifth wife and enjoys the fruits of being Al Pacino’s father, having appeared in several films after doing a “Silver Foxes” exercise video with Dustin Hoffman’s father and Sylvester Stallone’s mom. Pacino says they don’t see much of each other outside of the holidays.

Pacino has never taken the ‘til-death-do-us-part plunge himself. The media occasionally tries to domesticate him, as when he had twins four years ago with Beverly D’Angelo, but he and the actress split soon after. “It satisfies a certain story element they want,” Pacino says of the tales that have him settling down. He hates when they ask if it’s true he’s been seen with so-and-so. He hates the lying he has to do about his personal life. He doesn’t show his paintings in public, either.

He spends most of his time in Los Angeles now to be close to the twins, a boy and a girl. Over New Year’s, his other child, his daughter with acting teacher Jan Tarrant, came to visit from suburban New York. Julie Pacino is 15 and an all-star softball player, “like the real thing,” amazes Pacino, who was a standout himself in Central Park’s Broadway leagues but feels his age with her. “One day I was throwing balls to her underhand and now I can’t hit her pitches. And she hits every single thing I throw at her.”

He was intrigued by Bob Dylan’s recent interview on “60 Minutes.” They were contemporaries in the Village scene rife with invention, of new ways of doing music and acting alike. Now Dylan was recalling how his early songs seemed to be magically written, but how he couldn’t write lyrics like that anymore. “I can do other things,” he said.

Pacino is not ready to say his own finest work is behind him. But if “Dog Day Afternoon” proves to be the best he can do, he says, what would be wrong with that?

He was intrigued also by a TV biography of Lucille Ball, which noted how the comedian, after her breakup from Desi Arnez, kept “pretty much working for the sake of working.” Pacino sees that as a trap for older actors, especially in films, where you’re stashed away in a camper most of the time, protected by the studio, “out of this world in a lot of ways,” he notes. “And movies are so much a part of this world too. It’s a strange contradiction.”

Yet with several households to support, he finds himself in the spot of many prominent performers, of having to take some jobs for the money. “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” he says. “You start to say, ‘How did that happen?’ ”

But Pacino keeps an open mind about even the most commercial, mass-audience projects, which often have him playing the older guy wielding questionable influence over some up-and-coming male star. He learned long ago that actors are not always the best judges of what roles are good for them. And when he does projects that are labors of love, he finds himself tinkering with them forever.

He’s preparing to finally spring some of those this year, on a DVD designed to show anyone who cares why he got into acting in the first place, long before people called out to him on the street, “Hey, Al!”

Only one of the four segments has been released before, his 1996 documentary, “Looking for Richard,” in which he used any trick he could to get non-cognoscenti to connect with Shakespeare’s “Richard III” -- constantly explaining what’s going on, doing it in small segments and in exotic locales, and using a cast of faces they knew, Kevin Spacey, Winona Ryder and the like. Also on the DVD is “Chinese Coffee,” a play he and the late Jerry Orbach filmed in 1997 about two Village friends who clash after one writes a novel based on their lives.

But the segment that really takes us back to the roots of his career is a film of “The Local Stigmatic,” which he performed off-Broadway in 1969 to meager audiences and boos. Heathcote Williams’ play is about a pair of Cockney toughs who flatter an older film actor at a gay bar, then taunt and batter him on the street, resentful of his fame.

The production lasted for a week only because Jon Voight, fresh off “Midnight Cowboy,” donated $1,000 to the production. But it earned the then 29-year-old Pacino yet another provocative notice in the New York Times, whose Clive Barnes noted that it was the third play in which the actor portrayed an “ice cold and savage” character. “While it is not certain that Al Pacino is getting typecast,” he wrote, “I would not wish to meet him on a dimly lit side street.”

Pacino shot the film of the play during the one lull in his movie career, when he took himself “out of the loop” for four years after 1985’s ill-fated Colonial saga “Revolution.” He was thus in his mid-40s when he made “Stigmatic,” but still light on his feet playing the young tough, getting in his victim’s face, then dancing back and flashing that smile that can be seductive one moment, menacing the next.

His DVD is tied together by an hourlong conversation he has at the Actors Studio in New York, self-mockingly titled “Babbleonia,” in which he does more than babble about differences between stage and film acting.

One way to bring the sense of danger to film acting, he believes, is to “take the censor out of you -- let impulses take over and let the director be the censor.” That’s what he did, most notably, in 1983’s “Scarface,” when Brian De Palma encouraged him to go operatically large as Cuban gangster Tony Montana.

Pacino recalls then going to Sardi’s after the film’s New York premiere, “and I walked in and it was really quiet and Liza Minnelli was sitting there, and she hadn’t seen the picture, but all the other people had. She just leaned over to me and she said, ‘What did you do to these people?’ I thought, ‘Uh-oh.’ ”

Though he’d been so restrained as Michael Corleone, Pacino began hearing after “Scarface” that he was an over-the-top actor, a scenery chewer. But it’s strange how things play out. Two decades later, rap stars cite “Scarface” as the model for their own artistic exaggeration. Pacino says it has become his most frequently mentioned film -- forget “The Godfather” -- “anywhere in the world.”

The strategy

So there he was again, turning over the possibilities in his head. It was mid-December, “Merchant” had not opened yet and the reviews were not out either. But the whole idea of opening at the end of the year, in only four theaters, was to follow the Harvey Weinstein formula for serious, tough-sell films: You get a little press buzz, pick up some award nominations, then promote the hell out of both when you open wider, as the Sony Classic Pictures “Merchant” will do. The hitch was the Hollywood Foreign Press Assn. had just announced its Golden Globe nominations, and “Merchant” did not get a mention.

Pacino understood the challenge with a Shakespeare movie. At the start of his documentary on “Richard III,” he roamed Central Park to see how many people knew about that play, and the answer was “nobody.” Roman Polanski filmed a sensational “Macbeth” in 1971, and who saw it? “Nobody.”

Now he wondered whether “Merchant” was “in the air.” He usually could just feel these things. How could they give the thing some momentum before it was too late?”

It was the obvious answer that had Pacino fretting.

There were many things to worry about in the world: life/death, love/loneliness, underacting/overacting. But what had him going was: To TV or not to TV?

“Since I have access to get on TV, the question is, ‘Do I go and do it, to start and pump it up?’ ”

If he was the producer, he knew what he’d say, “Al, I want you on every single talk show on this side of whatever,” and all he’d have to do was tell a funny story or two and show a clip of him raising his knife to the bare chest of Jeremy Irons, and the audience would go “Ooooh” and cheer, simple as that.

But he dreaded doing those shows. They were “Wheel of Fortune” all over, where they sit you down to talk about yourself.

Plus, he’d almost never done them during his first two decades as a star, so “what would it say if I started to do it now?” Pacino asked. “I don’t know.”

Maybe he could tell them about all the crazy things he did before he made it as an actor, being an usher and getting fired and being a superintendent in a New York apartment building for $14 a week. That got him through one winter -- that and being inebriated. He could tell about how he put his head shot on his door with Band-Aids, and under it he wrote one word, “Super.” Maybe that would do the trick.

By last week he had the answer. He had settled down too. “William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice” had opened, and the reviews were in. Richard Roeper of “Ebert & Roeper” called it “one of the best adaptations of Shakespeare I’ve ever seen.” This newspaper said he gave “a mesmerizing, sympathetic yet warts-and-all characterization.” OK, a couple of critics were stuck on saying he chewed up the scenery. The flick took in an average of $18,300 at its four theaters in its first weekend, more per-screen than De Niro’s “Meet the Fockers,” though that one was playing on a few more, like 3,524.

“I’ll probably go out and do some work on it, some coverage,” Pacino said, which meant he would do Letterman, or Leno, when the film went wider.

He was pondering another anecdote, about the time he went on a talk show in Paris to promote “Heat” and they gave him earphones to understand the French, but he was mesmerized by the ebullient host and never paid attention to the translation and then they wound up in the cooking corner, where he had to tell the fellow he didn’t drink wine anymore.

“That would be entertaining, I think. I’m mulling that.”