Al Pacino

“Thank God I’ve missed my big chance”

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A couple weeks ago, I made the mistake of looking up a clip from The Godfather on YouTube.

Since then, YouTube has been serving me up a steady diet of Al Pacino interviews, which I of course have allowed myself to be “force-fed.” At least I found out the following curious anecdote:

During the shooting of a scene in the Godfather, Pacino was supposed to jump into a moving car. But he missed the car and almost broke his ankle.

Pacino said later he was shocked by the feeling of relief that passed over him.

“Thank you God,” he said as he lay on the ground. “You’re gonna get me out of this film.”

Pacino had felt like an underling on set, unwanted and unfit for the role of Michael Corleone.

“This injury could be my release from that prison,” Pacino said later.

Of course, that’s not how it ended up. The director, Francis Ford Coppola, liked Pacino too well. That, plus a bunch of corticosteroid injections, meant Pacino stayed in the movie.

In that way, the career of Al Pacino – from young theater actor, talented, unknown, but hopeful, to massive Hollywood star and international celeb, jaded, paranoid, and alcoholic — mirrored the progression of Michael Corleone in the Godfather — from the modest, good, patriotic son with plans of a respectable career, to ruthless head of the Corleone mob family, addicted to control and power, even at the cost of everything in his family and inside himself.

Before I get you too depressed, I wanna make it clear:

This email is not about the vanity of pursuing any kind of achievement or success in life.

Over the next few days, I’m promoting Tom Grundy’s Subtraction Method training.

Tom’s story is that he quit his high-powered London banking job in order to seek enlightenment. Enlightenment found, Tom ended up going back to the bank.

Curious, right?

The first time around at the bank was miserable, says Tom. The second time around has been enjoyable, stress-free, and even fulfilling.

What made the difference is what Tom calls the Subtraction Method.

The Subtraction Method is not about the kind of minimalism that involves living in a hut in the backwoods of Montana, shooting and skinning rabbits and melting snow for drinking water.

Rather, it’s about a different kind of minimalism, one that has to do with ideas and attitudes.

The end result can be that you achieve all the external success you think you want now, and you do it on such terms that you’re not eaten out from inside like Michael Corleone or Al Pacino.

Or the end result can be you don’t achieve the external success you think you want now, and you find out that that’s perfectly fine, because what you thought you wanted is not what you actually want.

Here is where I start waving my hands and waffling and mumbling a little too much. Because the Subtraction Method is not my area of expertise. Rather it’s Tom’s area of expertise.

That’s why I’d like to invite you to sign up to his training. The training is free. It’s happening next Wednesday, Nov 6, at 8pm CET/2pm EST/11am PST. I’ll be there. If you’d like to be there as well, you can register to get in at the link below:

https://bejakovic.com/subtraction

“START, EVERY TIME, WITH THIS INVIOLABLE RULE:”

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Last night, I had a few extra hours left at home before my flight to warmer climes.

So there I was, sitting in the kitchen, talking with my mom. Suddenly, she looked at the clock. Her eyes lit up.

“Do you want to watch Scent of a Woman?” she asked.

It’s her favorite movie, or one of them. A 90s Hollywood melodrama about a blinded army colonel, played by Al Pacino, who really enjoys women and yelling at the top of his voice.

If you’ve never seen the movie, I’m about to spoil it for you:

The entire two-and-a-half hours is the colonel’s last grand tour around New York City before he attempts to kill himself. Disabled life isn’t worth living, he believes.

Of course, the colonel doesn’t succeed in killing himself.

There’s a climactic scene in a fancy hotel room in which the colonel’s chaperone, an earnest 17-year-old boy, wrestles, cajoles, and begs the colonel for his gun and his life.

“Give me one reason not to kill myself,” Al Pacino yells at his usual 11, while shoving the gun in the boy’s face.

“I’ll give you two,” says the chaperone, tears running down his face. “You can dance the tango and drive a Ferrari better than anyone I’ve ever seen.”

The colonel exhales. His shoulders slump. He turns around. “I’m gonna need a drink,” he says. And he starts disassembling his gun.

I hope you’ve been sufficiently emotionally aroused. Because now I’d like to sell you a piece of writing advice by film director and playwright David Mamet (Glengarry Glen Ross, Wag The Dog, Hannibal).

At one point, Mamet wrote up a short guide for a few writers working under him. Like Al Pacino, Mamet also enjoys yelling, at least in print, so he wrote his advice mostly in caps:

“START, EVERY TIME, WITH THIS INVIOLABLE RULE: THE SCENE MUST BE DRAMATIC. it must start because the hero HAS A PROBLEM, AND IT MUST CULMINATE WITH THE HERO FINDING HIM OR HERSELF EITHER THWARTED OR EDUCATED THAT ANOTHER WAY EXISTS.”

Going back to Scent of a Woman, you can see how neatly the hotel scene fits this rule:

The colonel has a problem. He’s lost his self-respect and he believes he cannot enjoy life any more. But he finds himself thwarted in his desire to end his misery. And he is educated that, in spite of his disability, life is still worth living.

So there you go. A simple way to write melodrama, which is really all you should be doing when you write sales copy. Just follow Mamet’s rule.

…

Yes?

What, you want more?

Solid copywriting advice is no longer enough for you?

Jeez. All right. Let me try impressing you with another quote. This one comes from a miserable German philosopher, Arthur Schopenhauer:

“Pedantry also is a form of folly. It arises from a man’s having little confidence in his own understanding, and therefore not liking to leave things to its discretion, to recognize directly what is right in the particular case. Accordingly, he puts his understanding entirely under the guardianship of his reason. Therefore, the pedant, with his general maxims, almost always misses the mark in life, shows himself to be foolish, absurd, and incompetent.”

The point being, you can write serviceable melodrama by following rules, like the one that Mamet lays down. But you’re not likely to ever write something really great. Or even to produce a breakthrough piece of sales copy.

That’s not to say that rules don’t have their place. But maybe Mamet was wrong.

Maybe you shouldn’t start START, EVERY TIME, WITH THIS INVIOLABLE RULE.

Maybe you should just END BY CHECKING YOUR LIST OF RULES, to make sure you HAVEN’T WRITTEN ANYTHING IRRETRIEVABLY STUPID WHILE TRUSTING YOUR INSTINCTS.

Ok, enough shouting. Here’s a quiet message instead:

Every day, I write about marketing and copywriting. Often I include movie illustrations for the points I’m making. If this kind of thing makes your eyes light up, consider signing up for my email newsletter here.