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Nearly fifty years ago, when Al Pacino was at the start of his career, Marlon Brando gave him two pieces of advice: don't go to court and don't move to Los Angeles. At seventy-four, Pacino has managed to avoid the courts but not Beverly Hills, where he has taken up reluctant residence, for more than a decade, in order to share custody of his now thirteen-year-old twins, Anton and Olivia, with their mother, the actress Beverly D'Angelo. (Pacino, who has never married, also has a twenty-four-year-old daughter, Julie Marie, an aspiring writer and filmmaker.) Every half hour or so, an open-topped tour bus crawls its way along the wide, manicured boulevard where Pacino holes up for most of the year, with a cargo of rubbernecking out-of-towners, cameras at the ready. Inevitably, they stop in front of his rented house, which, like the actor, is elegantly dishevelled. Green canvas has been woven through the bars of the long iron fence to hide the place from street level; low-hanging Indian laurel trees seal off any visible signs of life from above. Nonetheless, the buses stop, the guides burble, and the tourists crane for a sign of the actor or his children. On my second day with Pacino, I happened to be parked in front of his house as a tour bus rolled up. The guide leaned down. "You were here yesterday," he said. "You know Al?" I nodded. Above me, camera shutters clattered.
At that moment, Pacino was reclining in a deck chair at the far end of a wide lawn behind the house, doing business on a cell phone. Beyond him was a fenced-off swimming pool, and beyond that was what he calls "the bunker" (as in "I hunker in the bunker"), a drab beige outbuilding, where he sometimes goes to incubate his roles. Pacino was dressed for the bright day in his usual sombre getup: black jacket, shirt, slacks, and shoes, with a long gray cravat loosely knotted at the chest. He keeps a well-pressed assortment of these dark camouflage outfits on a wardrobe rack in the alcove off his living room, alongside his infrequently used barbells and a folded-up running machine. His comfortable house, with its absence of texture, is remarkable for its indifference to externals: no paintings, no designer furniture or fripperies. Pacino's focus, the house makes clear, is resolutely inward.
As an actor, Pacino has always been unafraid to do what he needs to in order to be in the moment; he trusts his instincts and explodes with whatever feelings come up. Performing, for him, is not so much a profession as a destiny. "This is what I'm meant to do," he told me. "It's the cog in my life. With this, everything suddenly coheres. And I understand myself in that way." Pacino has given complex shape to some of his era's most memorable creations: Michael Corleone, the college boy turned Mafioso, in "The Godfather" trilogy (1972-90); Frank Serpico, the police whistle-blower, in "Serpico" (1973); Tony Montana, the Cuban drug lord, in "Scarface" (1983); the hapless thief Teach, in "American Buffalo" (1983); Sonny Wortzik, the would-be bank robber, in "Dog Day Afternoon" (1975); the gangster Big Boy Caprice, in "Dick Tracy" (1990); Ricky Roma, the smooth-talking salesman, in "Glengarry Glen Ross" (1992); and Roy Cohn, the closeted lawyer, in the HBO version of Tony Kushner's "Angels in America" (2003)—to name just a few of the more than a hundred roles he has taken onscreen and onstage. In recent years, he has painted brilliant, eerie film portraits of such obsessives as the euthanasia activist Jack Kevorkian, in Barry Levinson's HBO movie "You Don't Know Jack," and the eponymous swami of rock and roll, in David Mamet's HBO film "Phil Spector." Pacino regrets that many of his Hollywood movies of the past decade ("Righteous Kill," "The Son of No One," "88 Minutes," "Jack and Jill") have been business chores, taken on for primarily financial reasons. "If you don't have that alacrity of spirit, then you have to check yourself—because where's the pony in all this horseshit?" he said. "I worked for United Parcels once, and I don't want to have that feeling with my own craft—that it's just a job."
Because of the protean nature of his attack, Pacino has often been compared to Brando, another truth-seeking force of nature. When Pacino was thirteen and performing in a school play, an adaptation of "Home Sweet Homicide," he already identified so strongly with his role that when his character was supposed to get sick onstage he became nauseated. ("Somebody came up and said to my mother, 'Here's the next Brando.' I said, 'Who's Brando?' " Pacino recalled.) But between Brando and Pacino there is this crucial difference: Brando, who, over time, became reclusive and indifferent to acting, disappeared into his gift; Pacino has survived his—and is still working to refine it. "I believe I have not reached my stride, which is why I persist," he told me in an e-mail. "The day I turn to you and say, 'John, what I just did in this role was a real winner,' I hope you'll have the courage and decency to throw a wreath around my head, and then so very quietly and compassionately shoot me."
Pacino has three films awaiting release in the next year: Barry Levinson's "The Humbling," in which he plays an aging actor who has lost his magic; David Gordon Green's "Manglehorn," a film about an eccentric small-town locksmith; and Dan Fogelman's "Danny Collins," an amiable redemptive fable about a slick pop star who wants to turn his art and his lush life around. At seventy-four, Pacino sometimes asks himself, "When am I just gonna sit back and smell the golf balls?" But, with two new movies waiting in the wings (Martin Scorsese's "The Irishman," about the man who supposedly killed Jimmy Hoffa, and a Brian De Palma bio-pic about Joe Paterno), and a David Mamet play, "China Doll," in the works for Broadway in 2015, the answer is not soon.
Most of Pacino's house has been ceded to his kids. The den is a sort of Camp Pacino, overflowing with toys: a pinball machine, a drum kit, electric guitars, dolls, a mound of games, balls, rackets, and swimming gear crammed into baskets against the back wall. A low table holds a sprawling Lego construction in progress. Outside, a punching bag hangs incongruously beside the patio barbecue. (It's there for Pacino's son; when I asked Pacino if he used it, he said, "Like Oscar Wilde, whenever I get the urge to exercise I lie down until it passes.") Pacino usually spends weekends with the twins, because "their mother knows I'm a slacker at the homework."
At one point, Olivia came in to ask a favor:
Olivia: Daddy, I really want to see the boy next door. He usually comes over by the weekend.
Pacino: Does he really? But I don't even know what his name is. What's his name?
Olivia: I forgot. It's been so long since I've seen him.
Pacino: Do you want to go over and say— What do you want me to do? Me? I'm the— What am I, the go-between?
Olivia: No. Just see if Jared [Pacino's weekend assistant] can call.
Pacino: But Jared's not here. He could do it tomorrow, when he comes in. Do you want Mike [Pacino's regular assistant] to do it now? Mike will do it.
Olivia: I don't think Mike knows anybody there.
Pacino: Jared knows someone there? Ask Mike if he could just find out.
Pacino's father left him and his mother when he was two, and he carries the shadow of that abandonment with him. "It's the missing link, so to speak," he said. "Having children has helped a lot. I consciously knew that I didn't want to be like my dad. I wanted to be there. I have three children. I'm responsible to them. I'm a part of their life. When I'm not, it's upsetting to me and to them. So that's part of the gestalt. And I get a lot from it. It takes you out of yourself. When I do a movie, and I come back, I'm stunned for the first twenty minutes. These people are asking me to do things for them? Huh? I'm not being waited on? Wait a minute. Uh-oh, it's about them! That action satisfies. I like it."
He pointed out a watercolor beside the fireplace. "My son painted this when he was four. 'New York in the Fall,' " he said, then steered me back into the living room and deposited me on a sofa to watch "Wilde Salomé," a docudrama he directed, starred in, and largely bankrolled, which premières this month. The film represents Pacino's eight-year attempt to "inhale" Oscar Wilde by chronicling the mounting of a 2006 Los Angeles production of Wilde's 1891 tragedy, in which he was Herod to Jessica Chastain's Salomé. ("Wilde Salomé" will be released in tandem with a film of the play itself.) Pacino first encountered "Salomé" in London in 1989, without realizing that it was written by Wilde. "Who wrote this? I'd like to know this person," he recalled thinking. "I just felt a connection. A kindred spirit. I think it was a mischievousness, a subversiveness." Pacino relates to Wilde as an outsider. "I feel like an outsider who got on the inside, so I'm inside out, if you know what I mean. Or outside in," he said.
Like "Looking for Richard," Pacino's 1996 movie about Shakespeare's "Richard III," "Wilde Salomé" is a dramatic mosaic that jumps from historical facts to performance to interview to enactment. Pacino is the director yelling at the crew to hurry up; he's the lubricious Herod eying his gorgeous daughter; he's the interviewer prodding Tom Stoppard, Tony Kushner, Gore Vidal, and Bono to talk about Wilde; he's the professor offering tidbits of Wildeana; and he's the anthropologist trudging through the desert with kaffiyeh and camel. At one point, Pacino, with a carnation and a floppy handkerchief in his jacket pocket, even pops up as Wilde himself.
Part of Pacino's fervor for Wilde comes from a desire to claim the writer's intelligence and eloquence. "I'm quite timid when it comes to challenging the status quo," he said. "Oscar had the brains to back it up." Pacino, whose formal education ended in tenth grade, grappled for years with a sense of intellectual inadequacy. Early in his career, after a breakthrough performance in Israel Horovitz's 1968 play "The Indian Wants the Bronx," Pacino appeared on "The Merv Griffin Show," and, in front of a television audience of millions, he froze. "He just couldn't do it," Horovitz recalled. "He felt he had nothing to say. He was humiliated by his own presence. He wasn't the character he was playing—he was Al." Pacino's devotion to acting is, in a way, a defense against that self-doubt. Having a script to work from gives him, he said, a kind of license. "I can talk, I can speak, I have something to say," he explained. "You don't need a college education. All the things that you were inhibited to talk about and understand—they can come out in the play. The language of great writing frees you of yourself."
Most actors of Pacino's stature—Brando, Jack Lemmon, Dustin Hoffman, Robert De Niro—began in theatre and rarely returned. Pacino, however, craves the derring-do of working in front of a live audience, an activity he compares to tightrope walking. Stage acting, he likes to say, quoting the aerialist Karl Wallenda, is life "on the wire—the rest is just waiting." Onstage, in the zone, he told me, "you're up in the sky with the theatre gods—love it, love it, love it." As a list of some of Pacino's more esoteric stage work demonstrates—Eugene O'Neill's "Hughie," Bertolt Brecht's "The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui," Shakespeare's "Richard III" and "The Merchant of Venice"—the theatre is where he goes to challenge himself and to think. "There are more demands put on you when it is on the stage," he said.
To Pacino, there is no such thing as a fourth wall. "The audience is another character in the play," he said. "They become part of the event. If they sneeze or talk back to the stage, you make it part of what you're doing." Once, when he was performing "The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel," the first play in David Rabe's Vietnam trilogy, in Boston, in 1972, Pacino made a strong connection with a pair of penetrating eyes in the audience. "I remember feeling a focus I never experienced before—intense, so riveting that I directed my performance to that space," he said. "I found at curtain call for the first time that I needed to find out who belonged to those eyes. So, as we were bowing, I looked over to the space where I believed the look was coming from and there it was, two seeing-eye dogs still looking at me. They must have found the curtain call as engaging as the performance."
Acting, according to Pacino, is about "getting into a state that brings about freedom and expression and the unconscious." Mamet compares Pacino's excavations of his characters to the way Louis Armstrong played jazz: "He's incapable of doing it the same way twice." While Pacino was shooting his last scene for the movie "Devil's Advocate" (1997), in which he played Satan, for instance, he suddenly broke off from the script to launch into a rendition of "It Happened in Monterey." "It's just absolutely out there, surreal and brilliant," the actress Helen Mirren, whose husband, Taylor Hackford, directed the film, said. In the final movie, Pacino lip-synchs to Frank Sinatra's version of the song; according to Mirren, the studio had to pay "a huge sum for the rights, but it was worth it."
Pacino sometimes develops his characters by observing others. When he was working on his performance in "The Indian Wants the Bronx," he would walk for hours with Horovitz. "What he was doing was finding a character in life," Horovitz told me. "He'd spot a guy on the street and go, 'Wait, wait, wait!' We'd follow the person for hours, just to observe the walk, the posture. And the costume was important, too. He had to find the costume, rehearse in the costume, live in the costume."
"Some actors play characters. Al Pacino becomes them," Lee Strasberg, the longtime director of the Actors Studio, said. "He assumes their identity so completely that he continues to live a role long after a play or movie is over." Once, when Pacino was playing Richard III in Boston, Jacqueline Kennedy came backstage to greet him. "I didn't even get up," he said. "I was so into it that night that I continued to be the King. I can almost not forgive myself for that."
When preparing for a role, Pacino has a tendency to circle the airport before arriving at his destination. "I'm a slow learner," he said. "I don't believe in memorizing lines. That's not how I come upon a role. My thing is eventually coming to the words, making the words part of you, so that they're an extension of your emotional state." Pacino's "nibbling away at a character," according to Barry Levinson, is a subtle process. After the first few readings of the script for "You Don't Know Jack," Levinson recalls wondering "when Kevorkian will show up." "I remember we were in wardrobe. Al had his hair done, and his suit. We were talking and, all of a sudden, I could sense that Kevorkian was coming alive," he said, adding, "Once he latches on, then he's off to the races." At the finale of "You Don't Know Jack," after Kevorkian has unsuccessfully defended himself in court, the judge looks at him and asks if he wants to take the stand. Pacino doesn't answer at first. "It takes literally a minute," Levinson said. "He's trying to decide if the defense rests. It's a brilliant moment. No words—it's a look, a glance, small things that really inform the character."
Over the years, there have been rumblings about Pacino's overacting. He can certainly roar; he can pound the furniture; he can go big with the facial expressions; he has made some dud movies. But the drama, for Pacino, is almost always inherent in the character he's hoping to convey. His portrayal of the blind Lieutenant Colonel Frank Slade in "Scent of a Woman" (1992), for instance, was considered hammy by some, but, in Pacino's thinking, the character was a lunatic—a suicidal, narcissistic man who drew attention to himself through his affectation of swagger—and he played him that way. "I paint the way I see it, and some of the colors are a little broader and a little bolder than others," he said, adding, "Sometimes you take it to the limit, sometimes you may go a little overboard, but that's all part of a vision. I say, go with the glow. If an effort is being made to produce something that has appetite and passion and isn't done just to get the golden cup, it isn't a fucking waste. Yes, there are flaws, but in them are things you'll remember."
Pacino protects his talent by leaving it alone, which accounts for his vaunted moodiness. **"**There are various superstitions connected with reaching his center, and he doesn't want to discuss them ever," Mike Nichols, who directed Pacino in "Angels in America," said. "He's consulting somewhere else. And the somewhere else does not have to do with words." Pacino almost never talks shop. When he was at the Actors Studio, in the late sixties, whenever Strasberg gave him notes, he said, "I would actually count numbers in my head not to hear what he was saying. I didn't want to know. I thought it would fuck up what I was doing, where I was going with my own ideas."
Even Pacino's speech patterns, which forge a kind of evasive switchback trail up a mountain of thought, serve as a defense against too much parsing of his interior. "Al is dedicated, passionately, to inarticulateness," Nichols said, pointing out that in conversation Pacino has no "chitchat." Playing dead in social situations is his instinctive strategy. "He was so sensitive that he was insensitive to his surroundings," Diane Keaton, with whom Pacino had an on-again-off-again relationship in the seventies and eighties, wrote in her memoir "Then Again." "Sometimes I swear Al must have been raised by wolves. There were normal things he had no acquaintance with, like the whole idea of enjoying a meal in the company of others. He was more at home eating alone standing up. He did not relate to tables or the conversations people had at them."
Pacino refers to acting as "close to magic." To invoke that spell, he observes many rituals, which sometimes include shaking hands with everyone on a film set before shooting a scene, and heading off for a walk before going onstage. "The calm before the storm—only sometimes the calm becomes the storm," he explained. In 2012, when he was appearing in Mamet's "Glengarry Glen Ross" on Broadway, Pacino was skulking around midtown in a hooded coat when a parking attendant accosted him. " 'You! Get out! What are you doing here?' " Pacino recalled him shouting. He added, "Oh, it felt so good."
While working on his first production of "Richard III," in 1973, at the Church of the Covenant, in Boston, Pacino and his assistant developed a pre-show routine for launching him into the role of the anarchic, manipulative "lump of foul deformity" who would be king. Pacino's dressing room was the church rectory. "She'd peek through the door and say, 'Half hour,' then, 'Fifteen minutes.' She'd come back again and say, 'Five minutes.' I would say, 'Fuck off,' each time," Pacino told me. "She'd say, 'The audience is out there waiting for you.' And I'd say, 'Fuck off!' She'd say, 'I'm coming to get you.' She'd grab at me, and she'd throw me out of the dressing room. I guess it was the right spirit, because it worked. They called me out six times after I bowed." After the show, he added, "I would bawl my eyes out. I roused so many things in myself."
Pacino's allegiance to the stage, his compulsion to connect with a live audience, is due, perhaps, to a need to re-create his relationship with the person he calls his first and "indeed my best audience," his mother, Rose. To be seen and to be accepted was the promise behind his early performances. The theatrical interaction gives him, he said, "a sense of being at home, together again."
Pacino's father, Salvatore, was eighteen when Alfredo was born, in East Harlem, in 1940, and twenty when he left. He paid a few memorable visits, twice going to see his son perform in high-school plays, but Pacino saw very little of him, even after he had become a star. By then, Salvatore, who married five times and for decades worked as an insurance salesman for Metropolitan Life, owned Pacino's Lounge, a restaurant and bar in Covina, California, where he frequently joined the band to sing, play the maracas, and shake his booty. "When a friend met my dad, he looked at him and said, 'There it is with you, Al. I see it. The survivor,' " Pacino said. "I got that from my dad."
Rose, according to Pacino, was a reader who had "a sensitivity and a connection to the theatre." She took Pacino to see Tennessee Williams's "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" on Broadway. She was playful, with a good sense of humor, but also volatile and reclusive. She often refused to leave her room when company came over. "She reminded me of a Tennessee Williams character. She would have been a really good Laura, also a good Amanda. She had both," Pacino said, referring to Williams's play "The Glass Menagerie." In other words, she was a troubled, fragile, controlling, somewhat hysterical soul, who fought a losing battle against her own desperation. Despite the family's meagre income, Rose scraped together enough to pay for visits to a psychiatrist. To treat her chronic depression, she resorted to electric-shock therapy. Eventually, she became addicted to barbiturates, which may have been the cause of her death, at forty-three, in 1962. The stain of her possible suicide hangs over Pacino's memory of Rose. "Poverty took her down," he said. Not long before she died, Pacino recalls rushing to a casting session for Elia Kazan's "America America." "I had one of the few fantasies I've ever had in my life," he said. "I would do well, my mother would be O.K. with it all, and I could say, 'Mom, we got it. We're gonna make some money. It's gonna be O.K.' " As it happened, Pacino arrived late and missed the audition.
After Salvatore left, Rose and Sonny (as Pacino was known throughout his childhood) moved in with her parents, James Gerardi, a plasterer who was an illegal immigrant from Corleone, Sicily, and his wife, Kate. In their cramped three-room apartment in the South Bronx, which sometimes housed as many as seven people, Pacino never had a space of his own. ("I remember years of sleeping between my grandmother and grandfather," he said.) At the same time, he was an only child, often left to his own devices. "I was always sort of building stories, creating stories," he said. "It was a way of filling up the loneliness."
Storytelling ran in the family. In warm weather, Pacino's grandfather, with whom Pacino had what he calls "one of the great relationships of my life," would sit with him on the tar roof of their tenement and spin tales about his rough Dickensian youth in turn-of-the-century New York. "He got the shit kicked out of him by cops with helmets and big clubs—'You little wop! Get over here, you stinking Guinea!' " Pacino said. "He'd talk about running away from home, living off the farms, how he would steal milk. He just loved talking to me, like we were on some little rowboat." The roof, Pacino added, "was our terrace. There was this cacophony of sound—the Poles, the Jews, the Irish, the German, the Spanish. This definitive melting pot is what I came from. In some Eugene O'Neill plays, you hear the same thing."
Among many odd jobs, Rose worked as a cinema usherette, and when Pacino was three or four she began to take him to the movies. "The next day, I would act out all the parts," he said. "I think that's how it started." Pacino was often coaxed into performing scenes for his extended family, which included a deaf aunt. His party piece was an imitation of Ray Milland in "The Lost Weekend," playing an alcoholic writer desperate for a drink. Pacino would open cupboards and doors, pretending to search for a hidden stash of booze. "I never understood why they were laughing, because I didn't think it was funny," he said. "But I knew it produced laughs."
On Bryant Avenue in the forties and fifties, people escaped their small, hot apartments to sit on stoops or hang out under street lamps to roll dice or play poker. To disarm bullies and find friends, Pacino used the same strategy on the street that he'd used at home: he performed and enlisted others to perform with him, earning the nickname "the Actor." "We'd act out parts from joke books and comic books," he told me. "Kids make videos today, but it was kind of an unusual thing then to get street urchins to join you in acting out comics. Of course, it never got off the ground; there's a comedy in there somewhere." "He was always full of drama," said his neighbor Ken Lipper, who would later become the deputy mayor of New York and a producer and screenwriter of "City Hall" (1996), in which Pacino starred. "He loved to take on different personae. He used to go to 174th Street and pretend he was a blind child." Pacino's bravado and good looks got him noticed. "The girls in the neighborhood would say, 'Sonny Pacino, the lover bambino.' The boys would say, 'Sonny Pacino, the bastard bambino,' " Pacino told me. "It started early."
Pacino was smoking at nine, chewing tobacco at ten, and drinking hard liquor at thirteen. He walked the edges of rooftops and jumped between tenement buildings. His favorite place was "the Dutchies," a swampy labyrinth on the Bronx River, where truant kids hid in high marsh grasses. Pacino played third base for the Police Athletic League team, the Red Wings, which became a "quasi street gang," with Al as its de-facto leader. In black wool jackets with a red stripe down the sleeve, the Red Wings patrolled their turf and protected it from roaming invaders, like the Young Sinners and the Fordham Baldies. Once, when they were twelve and sitting on the steps of a tenement after finishing a game of stickball, Lipper said, "some guy came over who was thirtyish and started menacing us. Al got up and whacked him with the stick." Pacino's wild crew, "tough kids with high I.Q.s and tragic endings," became a template on which he modelled many of his memorable characters. "These people were a springboard for my profession," he said. "They were part of what I consider the best time in my life."
Pacino was less popular with the authority figures around him. "I wasn't out of control, but I was close," he said. "My mother had to come to school to talk to the teachers. Their conclusion? That I needed a dad." When Pacino's junior-high-school drama teacher, Blanche Rothstein, climbed the five flights of stairs to talk to his grandmother about his acting skills, it was, he said, "the first time I ever had encouragement." He went on, "The world we came from, the encouragement just wasn't there. We weren't seen. Or we weren't regarded. Do you think ever, once in my life, my mother or any adult ever said, 'How was school today?' Never! It was unheard of." Nonetheless, Ms. Rothstein spotted a spark when Pacino read Bible passages in school assembly—"I didn't know what I was talking about, but I felt it," he said—and she cast him in school plays. Thanks to his talent, at the end of junior high Pacino was voted "most likely to succeed."
Pacino was accepted into Manhattan's High School of Performing Arts, which meant that his South Bronx street life was more or less a thing of the past. "All that remained was acting," he said. His stay at the school, however, was a short one. "You gotta be kidding," he told his Spanish teacher, when he discovered that the class was conducted entirely in Spanish. And he found the Stanislavsky method boring. "What does a kid who was thirteen, fourteen know about Stanislavsky?" he said. "All I knew was you sing, you dance, you have fun, you imitate. Now I was looking at my navel twenty-four-seven. It took me I don't know how many years to get over that." By his own admission, Pacino was a "dunderhead" at academic work, and by the time he dropped out of school, at sixteen, to support his mother, he was ready to go. Rose, who had at first approved of his ambition, now saw it as foolhardy. "Acting isn't for our kind of people," she told him. "Poor people don't go into this." Pacino said, "I didn't know what she was talking about. On an unconscious level I did, but it didn't mean anything to me. I'm a survivor. Survivors only hear what they want to hear."
Between odd jobs, Pacino attended auditions, where he soon learned that, as an Italian-American of a certain class and demeanor, he didn't "look right" for most parts. His instinct was to bide his time. "I knew, when the opportunity came, all I'd have to do is be there," he said. But his mother's death, when he was twenty-one, sent him into a tailspin. Within a year, his grandfather, too, was dead. Pacino had buried the two people to whom he was closest. "And I had no father," he said. "I think that was my darkest period. I felt lost."
On Pacino's living-room mantelpiece is a small moody photograph of him in profile in his early twenties, in an Off-Off Broadway production of August Strindberg's play "Creditors." The image marks the seminal moment, he said, "when I knew that nothing mattered except that I became at one with the play." "Creditors," a tragicomedy about a credulous young artist whose mind is poisoned against his wife by her bilious ex-husband, was directed by Charlie Laughton, an actor turned acting teacher at the Herbert Berghof Studio, whom Pacino first met in a Village bar when he was seventeen. Laughton, who'd also had a hardscrabble early life, recognized both Pacino's talent and his difficult circumstances. Over time, he became Pacino's mentor, his sidekick, his drinking buddy, his dramaturge, and, ultimately, his business partner. Laughton also introduced the teen-age Pacino to the works of Joyce and Rimbaud. "He would read them, and then I would read them myself," Pacino told me. In those knockabout years, he added, "I dealt with whatever was bothering me through reading. You could not find me without a book."
Still, in the early days of rehearsing "Creditors" Pacino, surrounded by classically trained actors, panicked and wanted to quit the show. Laughton sat him down and went through the script with him until he fully understood what was going on. Pacino had been spooked in that way before, in his Off-Off Broadway début, in a production of William Saroyan's "Hello Out There," which grew out of Laughton's classes. Pacino's first line got a laugh, but he didn't understand the joke. In the alley, during intermission, he burst into tears and didn't want to continue. Laughton talked him through it. "It was a very important moment for me," Pacino recalled. "I went back in there and finished the run."
Laughton, who was for years wheelchair-bound with multiple sclerosis and who died in 2013, at the age of eighty-four, remained an emotional bulwark for Pacino until the end. Pacino visited him in his last days, at a hospital in Santa Monica, and they got to talking about the time that Pacino was taking Laughton's class at the Berghof Studio and performed a scene from Reginald Rose's "Crime in the Streets" in front of Berghof and the rest of the school. After he finished, he said, "Berghof got up there and started to put me down. He started screaming at me, 'How dare you!' He was absolutely flipping out." Pacino asked Laughton, "What was going on?" "A new era," Laughton said. "He saw a new era."
On January 17, 1967, for his first scene at the Actors Studio, Pacino presented a monologue from Eugene O'Neill's "The Iceman Cometh," which morphed into a soliloquy from "Hamlet." It was risky, but, as Pacino said, "It's a risk not to take risks." Breaking a long-standing Studio tradition, the audience of actors applauded his performance. Lee Strasberg then asked Pacino to play O'Neill's character, Hickey, as Hamlet, and Hamlet as Hickey. Afterward, he addressed Pacino. "The courage you have shown today is rarer than talent," he said. Pacino had broken through. "I was now an actor," he said. "I had an identity."
He spent much of the next year in Boston doing plays (Clifford Odets's "Awake and Sing!," Jean-Claude van Itallie's "America, Hurrah"), in which, he said, "I played notes that fell flat and I didn't connect." But when Israel Horovitz delivered his one-act "The Indian Wants the Bronx" to Pacino, in a messy basement room in a building on West Sixty-eighth Street, where he was earning fourteen dollars a week as a superintendent, Pacino found the perfect vehicle—a script about two taunting teen-age louts in the Bronx who take out their frustrations on an Indian man at a bus stop.
Over the next months, Pacino and Horovitz performed the play in and out of town to raise interest in a production. But when a producer was eventually found she had her own ideas about casting. "On audition day, she brought in the actor she wanted: blond, blue-eyed, tall, untalented," Horovitz wrote in a memoir. "I said no, absolutely no. She said, fine, O.K., she wouldn't produce the play. I said, 'Let both actors audition.' " Pacino was furious with Horovitz for putting him in this position; since he didn't belong to Actors' Equity, he was forced to attend an open call. "It seemed like every young, non-union actor in New York City showed up that day," Horovitz recalled. When it was Pacino's turn, he came out singing, then crossed to downstage center and looked directly at the producer:
Hey, Pussyface, can you hear us?
Can you hear your babies singin' to ya?
"Startled and terrified," according to Horovitz, she agreed to cast Pacino.
"The Indian Wants the Bronx" opened at the Astor Place Theatre, on January 17, 1968. Of all the débuts I attended in more than fifty years as a theatre critic, Pacino's was the most sensational: immediate, arresting, and inexplicable. "I saw an actor up there with a shaking jaw, who was on the verge of tears," Horovitz recalled. "The circumstance of the play was bringing him to a deep place of pain. And the audience connected to this terrible sense of humiliation, of unworthiness." Pacino won an Obie for Best Actor, and a Tony the following year, for his performance in Don Petersen's "Does a Tiger Wear a Necktie?"
"All I could see was Al Pacino's face in that camera. I couldn't get him out of my head," said Francis Ford Coppola, who nearly got fired from "The Godfather" (1972) for insisting that Pacino play Michael Corleone, the educated youngest son of Don Corleone, the Mafia kingpin. The studio lobbied for such bright box-office names as Robert Redford, Warren Beatty, Jack Nicholson, and Ryan O'Neal. But Mario Puzo, who wrote "The Godfather" and adapted it for the screen, came to Coppola's defense and gave him a letter to be used at his discretion. "Above all, Pacino had to be in the film," he said.
On the day of his first screen test, however, Pacino was hung over: he didn't know his lines, and he ad-libbed the scene. Puzo felt that Pacino "was terrible. Jimmy Caan had done it ten times better." Puzo went over to Coppola. "Give me my letter back," he said. "Wait a while," Coppola said. Pacino tested three times for the role. The back-and-forth agitated him to such a degree that he finally refused to take Coppola's calls and made the actress Jill Clayburgh, his girlfriend at the time, speak for him. " 'Francis, you're making him crazy. He doesn't want to be where he's not wanted,' " Pacino recalls her saying.
When Pacino was finally offered the part, he almost couldn't take it. A few months earlier, he'd signed on for an adaptation of the Jimmy Breslin book "The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight," and M-G-M and the producer, Irwin Winkler, refused to release him. Winkler and Horovitz were sharing a house on Fire Island, and Pacino begged the playwright to intercede on his behalf. "This was the door opening, and they wouldn't let him out of his contract," Horovitz recalled. "I went crazy with Irwin, and he said, 'You find me a young Italian actor that's as good as Pacino, and I'll let him out.' " Horovitz took Winkler to see a performance by a young unknown named Robert De Niro. "He took De Niro, and he got two options on Pacino and two on De Niro," Horovitz said.
After Pacino got the "Godfather" role (for which he was paid a flat fee of thirty-five thousand dollars), he walked from his apartment, on Ninetieth Street and Broadway, to the Village and back, thinking about how he'd play it. "I didn't see Michael as a gangster," he said. "I saw his struggle as something that was connected to his intelligence, that innate sense of what's around and being able to adjust to things." He added, "The power of the character was in his enigmatic quality. And I thought, Well, how do you get to that? I think you wear it inside yourself, and you find a way to avoid, as much as you can, the obvious." However, after his first week of avoiding the obvious, according to Pacino, "they wanted me fired—they didn't see what I was doing. Luckily for me, the Sollozzo scene"—in which Michael earns his Mafia spurs by executing two men in a Bronx restaurant—"was the next day. When they saw that scene, they kept me."
Pacino's performance in "The Godfather" put him at the center of one of the great cinematic sagas of the century and on a first-name basis with the world. He was showered with accolades and offers. (Coppola asked him to star in "Apocalypse Now," but he declined. "You know, sometimes you look into the abyss?" Pacino said. "I'm, like, this is the abyss. I'm not gonna go there." He also turned down "Star Wars," "Die Hard," and "Pretty Woman.") But perhaps the most satisfying response came from Puzo, who wrote, "It was, in my eyes, a perfect performance, a work of art. I was so happy . . . I ate crow like it was my favorite Chinese food."
Pacino's other great early successes—"Serpico," "The Godfather, Part II," and "Dog Day Afternoon"—only added to his momentum. But, of all his performances in those years, the sleeper was his embodiment of the garish, vulgar, sensationally violent Tony Montana, an impoverished Cuban refugee who becomes the most powerful drug trafficker in Miami, in "Scarface." The role was dismissed as "macho primitivism" at the time, but, over the years, it has emerged as a challenger to Michael Corleone as Pacino's most popular creation. The director, Brian De Palma, designed "Scarface" as a kind of hyperbolic pageant. "The picture had a fire to it," Pacino said, in "Al Pacino: In Conversation with Lawrence Grobel." "The violence blown up, the language blown up. The spirit of it was Brechtian, operatic." To play Montana, Pacino drew inspiration from the swagger of the Panamanian boxer Roberto Duran and from Meryl Streep's committed rendering of the traumatized Polish immigrant Sophie, in "Sophie's Choice." As an actor, Pacino said, "you're always looking for that thing that's going on besides the words." In "Scarface," he connected with Montana's raging ambition and the rebelliousness in his epigrammatic lines: "All I have in the world is my balls and my word, and I don't break them for no one"; "You know what capitalism is? Getting fucked!"; "You wanna play rough? O.K. Say hello to my little friend!"
In the twenty years following the release of "The Godfather," Pacino made seventeen films and was nominated for an Academy Award six times. (He finally received one, in 1993, for his performance in "Scent of a Woman.") But he was discombobulated by the distractions of his success. "I felt like the fighter that was in Round 8, exhausted in the corner, they're pouring water over my head and rubbing Vaseline on my face, then ding went the bell, and I was back out there in another film," he recalled. "It was a whirlwind." Pacino disappeared into work, and, after hours, into a bottle. "I don't remember much of the seventies," he said. "All that stuff—the explosiveness of my life change. It would be almost fair to say I wasn't really there. It was too much for anyone to handle." Eventually, Laughton called Pacino on his alcohol abuse, which had been a constant since he was a teen-ager. He stopped drinking in 1977.
During his first year of sobriety, a time of great stress, Pacino made "Bobby Deerfield," a plodding Sydney Pollack melodrama, in which he played a celebrity race-car driver, who hides his vulnerability behind sunglasses and a carapace of toughness. His next movie, "Cruising" (1980), William Friedkin's thriller about a serial killer who targets gay men—which sparked protests in the gay community—was "a terrible experience" for Pacino as well as for the critics. "Author! Author!" (1982), which was written by Horovitz, was also a bust. "Scarface" came out to mixed reviews, and was followed by "Revolution" (1985), in which Pacino played a Scottish fur trapper with a Bronx accent, who gets embroiled in the Revolutionary War. "Revolution" was proof, if more was needed, that on the Hollywood merry-go-round Pacino had lost track of who he was. The movie cost twenty-eight million dollars to make and grossed less than $360,000. It was one disaster too many.
In a radical move, at the height of his celebrity, Pacino called a halt to movie-making and moved to Snedens Landing, in Palisades, New York, with Diane Keaton. There he settled, he said, "into something that was wonderful with Diane and my life. I didn't feel rushed or that I had to put out. I felt relatively content." The stoppage was a crucial emotional recalibration. "It is the very nature of fame that the light is on you a lot," he said. "I sort of wanted to turn the light out of my face, so I could see."
Pacino's return to New York was also a return to theatre. He appeared in Dennis McIntyre's "National Anthem" at the Long Wharf Theatre, in New Haven. He played Mark Antony, in a disastrous "Julius Caesar" at the Public, a role he could never find his way into. But his main creative focus was on "The Local Stigmatic," a little-known 1969 one-act by Heathcote Williams, about two British ne'er-do-wells who grievously harm a famous actor whose success enrages them. Pacino produced and starred in a fascinating film version of the play. "I took almost a year to edit this fifty-two-minute play," he said. "I had no one wanting it to work or not work. It was under my control. I was free." (The film was never released theatrically but was included in the DVD boxed set "Pacino: An Actor's Vision.")
Although Pacino remembers this time as "probably the best period" of his adult life—"It was as close to egoless as I've ever been"—four years into his self-imposed exile from Hollywood he was running out of money and Keaton was running out of patience. One day, according to Pacino, she read him the riot act. "What do you think you're doing?" he remembers her saying. "Do you think you're gonna go back and live in a rooming house again? You've been rich too long, buddy. You can't go back. You think you're on the A-list, but you're not. You're out because you put yourself out. You've got to go back to work." Keaton added, "This script. This is your thing. This is what you've got to do." She handed him Richard Price's screenplay for "Sea of Love." "It was so sweet of her," Pacino said. "It was so giving, so caring. I have to say, she was right."
"Sea of Love" (1989), the story of a cop in a midlife crisis who falls for a woman who may be the killer he's pursuing, made a star of Ellen Barkin and restored Pacino's box-office clout. In the next five years, he made "Dick Tracy," "The Godfather, Part III," "Frankie and Johnny," "Glengarry Glen Ross," "Scent of a Woman," "Carlito's Way," and "Heat."
As Pacino paced his living room, a tall, striking woman with long auburn hair swept in, draped an arm over his shoulders, and pulled him to her, like a swan taking a cygnet under its wing. Lucila Sola, a thirty-five-year-old Argentinean actress, spoke in Latin-inflected English. "I am his longest relationship—seven years," she said, by way of introduction. Sola, who studied law and sociology before switching to acting, is the latest in a long line of strong, smart actresses with whom Pacino has been involved—Tuesday Weld, Kathleen Quinlan, and Marthe Keller, among them. The two met at a dinner party in 2005, when his twins were four and her daughter, Camila, was seven. They were both dating other people, but their kids got along and they found themselves going to movies together, swimming in Pacino's pool, taking trips to San Diego, the beach. "We were friends. For two years—two years—nothing," Sola said. "When people ask, 'How long have you been together?,' I say, 'Forty-nine years.' A year with Al is like a dog year because it's so intense." She explained, "He's a medium. He's channelling something. When he's doing a part, it's hard to be around him because he's very different. Al has left the building."
The conversation turned to Diane Keaton's bittersweet second memoir, "Let's Just Say It Wasn't Pretty," which had been published the week before and in which she discussed "the lure of Al." "His face, his nose, and what about those eyes?" Keaton wrote. "I kept trying to figure out what I could do to make them mine. They never were. . . . For the next twenty years I kept losing a man I never had." Sola expounded on the astuteness of Keaton's observation. "Al has this ephemeral, childlike quality about him," she told me. "His friend Charlie used to say he's like smoke. He's there, but he's not there. That's maybe what drove the women crazy. You want to catch him, but you can't because Al is—"
"Leave John alone," Pacino cut in, bringing the conversation effectively to an end.
Sola had persuaded Pacino to accompany her to a friend's birthday bowling party the next day. That evening, complaining about the "fucking bowling shoes"—"I can't stand putting on my shoes every day. Imagine putting on bowling shoes," he said—Pacino got behind the wheel of his white Range Rover and headed for Lucky Strike, in Hollywood, which turned out to be more of a bowling den than an alley.
A bookshelf extended from the entrance into the large underlit space; jokey signage—a poster advertising "10 Rules for Sleeping Around"—hung from the walls; from a distance, beyond the bar, came the echo of ricocheting pins. The birthday girl, Kam, in blue satin shorts and a diamanté tiara, waved Pacino and Sola over to the leather banquette where her posse of svelte girlfriends and their men were huddled. While Sola plunged into the crowd of chatty celebrants, Pacino took a barstool at a table behind them and ordered a plate of barbecued chicken. As he ate, the standup comedian Bill* Bellamy, who is credited with coining the phrase "booty call," appeared. "We're blessed, man," Bellamy said. "I'm blessed. You killed in that Liberace shit, man."
"That was Michael Douglas," Pacino said, wiping barbecue sauce off his fingers.
As Pacino was putting on his bowling shoes, a Lucky Strike staffer approached. "Sorry to disturb you," he said, holding up his cell phone to indicate a promotional photo op. "But would you mind?"
"I don't do that," Pacino said.
Sola pulled him away toward the party. "Once that starts, it's over," she said.
Pacino guttered his first ball. His second swerved left and picked off five pins. By the next frame, his score was fifteen. He sat down on the sofa.
"I usually get myself into a Zen place and am just very quiet," he told me later. "People give you room when you get real quiet with your disposition." At the bowling party, however, the tactic wasn't working. The phones came out, and Pacino was swarmed with requests for selfies. Having done his duty, he slumped back down on the couch. From his body language, Sola could tell that the night was over. Thirty minutes after they arrived, she was leading Pacino toward the exit.
In the garage, he fumbled for his parking ticket and couldn't find it. "You know me, I'm in pictures," he said to the attendant. At the exit, he struggled again, this time to fit his new ticket correctly into the machine. The barricade finally lifted. "I'm a natural, baby," he said, as he accelerated into the balmy night. "I just pick things up."
In mid-2010, Pacino learned that his business manager, Kenneth I. Starr, had been arrested for embezzling his clients' money in a Ponzi scheme. (Starr is currently serving seven and a half years in prison.) There had been warnings. Early on, Mike Nichols, who had taken his money out of Starr's company, had raised suspicions. "I'll get to it," Pacino told Nichols. "Then I never got to it," he said. "Millions of dollars were gone," Sola said. "Gone."
Pacino took the loss in stride. "I thought, Hey, this is the world. It's real," he said. "Not one day I saw him down or depressed," Sola said. "He was, like, 'O.K., now what do we do? Roll up our sleeves and go to work.' "
Pacino's agent, John Burnham, told me, "In his halcyon days he made around fourteen million a picture, but the industry's changed. Nowadays, he gets five million. With a gun—seven million." It has taken Pacino four years to work himself back to a position where, he says, "compared to a normal person, I have a significant amount." He sold a Snedens Landing property, did commercials, took out a loan, and signed on for Adam Sandler's dismal but profitable "Jack and Jill" (2011)—a "kids' movie," according to Pacino, in which he sent up both his legend and his financial predicament. In the film's best moment, a hip-hop ad for Dunkin' Donuts, Pacino can be seen dancing and pitching the "Dunkaccino": "You want creamy goodness / I'm your friend / Say hello to my chocolate blend."
"I've recently come to terms with the fact that I can only do something I am creatively connected to," Pacino told me. "The Humbling," based on the 2009 Philip Roth novel, which Pacino optioned, is part of that mission. The novel tells the story of a depressed, aging actor whose talent is slipping away and who tries to rejuvenate himself through an affair with a younger woman (who in the movie is played by Greta Gerwig). "I liked the idea that an actor is losing it and wants to revive not so much his career as his life, and finds that there's no life there," Pacino said. "He's trying to be a real person, and discovering that he doesn't have the appropriate tools to do this. I felt that these things were sad and almost farcical."
Barry Levinson, the director, who enlisted Buck Henry to write the screenplay, was also taken with the novel. "It was a great character study," he said. "We wanted to flesh that out a little bit more, to apply some of the things that Al's gone through in his life, and, hopefully, not in a super-serious fashion. There's a dark comedic trail to the piece." The film was undertaken with a freewheeling spirit. "We did a lot of improvisation," Levinson said. " 'The Humbling' is about as homemade a movie as you can make. We made it for two million dollars in twenty days. We shot part of it in my house, because we didn't have enough money to go somewhere else."
Pacino's legend is based on the films of his youth, for which he drew on his anger, his sexuality, his energy. The films he's interested in now tend to dwell, like "The Humbling," "Manglehorn," and "Danny Collins," on old age and the issues of decline. They are of a different amperage and a different spiritual mind-set. They are not, so to speak, the rock-'em-sock-'em Pacino of old but a new Pacino: a man who is consolidating his family, regretting some of his life choices, and living under the strictures of his fame.
In late June, I met up with Pacino in Boston, one of the twenty-three cities in which he would be performing "Pacino: One Night Only," a business junket disguised as a lap of honor. The promoters referred to this form of entertainment as "talk theatre." In essence, Pacino was taking himself on the road. He had flown in late the previous night from Ottawa, where he'd sold out a twenty-six-hundred-seat theatre at the National Arts Centre. In Boston, he was at the Wang Theatre, a fun palace built to hold thirty-seven hundred customers, who were shelling out up to a hundred and seventy-nine dollars a seat—plus an extra three hundred if they wanted to attend a meet-and-greet after the show.
A slick eight-minute montage of clips from Pacino's movies opened the evening. He told Sonny Corleone, "It's not personal, Sonny. It's strictly business"; he shouted, "Attica! Attica!"; he jumped Ellen Barkin's bones. When Tony Montana drunkenly turned on the scowling patrons of a swank restaurant ("Say good night to the bad guy!"), the audience roared. The lights came up, and Pacino entered to a standing ovation. He let the volley of sound wrap around him, then, with his hands clasped together in front of him, he bowed low.
After a few reverent questions from Ty Burr, the Boston Globe's film critic, who was his interlocutor for the evening, Pacino picked up his legend and ran with it: performing as a kid for the deaf aunt ("started my overacting, I guess"); the high-school teacher who called him a prodigy ("How do you spell that?"); when he knew he had "it" as an actor ("I hope I never do"). Pacino played off the hoots of approval—"riding the bull," he calls it—taking the audience into his confidence, and, when he went off course, letting it guide him back to his story. "Where was I? Oh, yeah—I was a superintendent. . . . I put an eight-by-ten picture of me on the door—kind of looking handsome. Underneath, I wrote 'Super.' And there wasn't a girl that went into that apartment that I didn't go after!"
Afterward, at the meet-and-greet, Pacino sat on a stool in front of a camera for forty-five minutes while premium ticket holders lined up for a photograph. The night before, he had obliged a blind woman who handed off her cane and asked him to dance. Tonight, the fans approached him solemnly, like communicants, uncertain how to arrange themselves beside their icon. Some leaned in, some stood apart, some asked if it was O.K. to put an arm around his shoulder. (It was.) One woman planted a kiss on Pacino's cheek, then placed a lily and a rose in his lap. Another woman, in formal evening gloves and a gray dress, who positioned herself in front of Pacino to speak to him, told me later that she had devoted her life to theatre after seeing Pacino act in "The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui," on her twenty-first birthday, thirty-nine years before. "He gave me a passion for the theatre," she said. "It was a great gift."
At Logan International, a private jet was waiting to take Pacino and his crew to New York. "There'll be a crowd at the airport," Pacino warned me, as the bags were loaded into his two-car convoy. As predicted, a group of autograph hunters were waiting like spectres outside the reception area. "It's their job," Pacino said. "At first, I didn't know. I just thought they were strange people who kind of looked alike, but they do it for a living." As he got out of the car, the scrum of about twenty pushed forward. "Al! Al! Over here, Al!" they called, flourishing photographs and memorabilia. Head down, Pacino walked straight through the glass doors and into the bright silence of the lounge.
At takeoff and landing, Pacino crossed himself and kissed his fingers. During the flight, he talked about another kind of blessing he'd felt that day. In the late afternoon, with his bodyguard a hundred feet away, Pacino had spent an hour on Boston Common, sitting unnoticed on a bench and watching the passers-by. "It felt like I was back on the block, back home," he said. "I felt lonely, but I always feel that way. I could feel connected to myself, just like when I sat there fifty years ago. I started there, in that park and that town. I didn't feel I had changed. I was still me. The park was still the park. I'll remember that moment." The temporary anonymity had brought "a kind of peace," which, he said, "is pretty much a luxury." Later, he told me, "I haven't been in a grocery store or ridden the subway in fifty years. My kids have a difficult time going out with me publicly. We have yet to go on a camping trip. But one day I want to rent a small house on a lake. It's my dream—I don't know how to get to it yet, but I'll give it another year." Still, he said, "I'm fine not having anonymity. I've learned how to live with the other thing, and the sort of enjoyment that comes with that. It ain't bad." He added, "Not that I recommend it, but, like they say, you should try it sometime." ♦
Watch John Lahr's commentary on films from Al Pacino's career.
*An earlier version of this article misstated Bellamy's first name.


text: Just when we start wrapping things up with the Black History 2017 series Malcolm Speaks! It seemed like yesterday when I got in the so called "conscious" community grill about Philosophical Romanticism, and betrayal. Couple weeks ago it was Beyonce's Grammy performance, not real enough for all the "conscious" people who claim to be IFA practicioners. Couple months ago it was Erykah Badu's blond Albino look on Take Out Media. Now Remy Ma pops off on the scene with her less than philosophical, no metaphors, no simile, no punchline having lyrical passion to dominate the great Nicki Minaj in a rap battle. I'm gone make this short and sweet because my freestyle in the latest Malcolm Speaks! docudrama explains it all. I'm not even from New York. I'm straight out of MOCO. By way of West Africa. But somebody has to tell the story, since all the other Griots just want to smell themselves all day. Enjoy this last part of Malcolm Speaks! It is the shortest and the best one so far. Its only going to take five minutes of your time to slay this piece. Now that black History Month is over for 2017, we will go one to celebrate 365 days of Black History. 365 Days of Woman's history, and 365 days of Our story. P.E.A.C.E.

subset: commoncrawl


text:
Supply Chain & Logistics Link (Link) magazine was first published in year 2003 — the magazine started as quarterly publication. Link is now published each month as an information to industry and its members. The magazine includes trend setting articles, white papers, research insights and news. You are welcome to view some of the latest editions and also some of featured Link magazine from the past.
Founded in Dubai/UAE, SCLG is a membership driven industry business group with 200+ corporate members. SCLG is expanding internationally to continuously enhance its global foot-print.
Managing supply chain and logistics more effectively shall contribute to positive growth of economy in range of 3% to 5% (GDP terms).
Impact of climate change on managing supply chain should be on agenda of all supply chain professionals.
Oil and Gas industry should enlarge its theme to manage supply chains of larger energy domain.
Reduction in current level of wastage in food supply chain shall help mitigate poverty.
Managing Fresh water supply chain needs attention of all.
Sophisticated demand forecast and planning for sure helps improve efficiency of supply chain.
Refining & Petrochemicals World Thailand 2019 , Bangkok, Thailand 23rd -24th January 2019
5th Middle East Leasing summit 2019 , Dubai, UAE 16th -17th January 2019
Breakbulk Middle East 2019 , Dubai, UAE 11th -12th February 2019
Middle East Rail 2019 , Dubai 26th -27th February 2019
Block Chain Summit , The Mira Hong Kong 27th -28th February 2019
World Mobility Show , Dubai, UAE 06th -07th March 2019
Saudi Maritime Congress 2019 , Riyadh, KSA 11th -12th March 2019
Block Chain Summit , Kap Europa, Frankfurt 25th -26th March 2019
IOT Asia 2019 , Hall 1 Singapore EXPO 27th -28th March 2019
8th Supply chain innovation summit 2019 , Shanghai China 16th -17th May 2019
5th Logistics innovation summit 2019 , Shanghai China 16th -17th May 2019


text:
Discussion in 'Graphics Cards' started by DragonQ, Jan 9, 2019.
Sorry, it's the ol' F5 mash for you!!!
My (baseless) guess would be that 1/3 would go to the Americas, EMEA, and Asia-Pacific regions each, after subtracting the reviewers' units and what AMD wants to sell directly.
If we assume 5000 units produced globally for launch, then ~1500 for EMEA sounds not far-fetched. UK has ~10% of EMEA GDP, so ~150 units would be what I expect then.
There are a lot of people that talk like they know exactly how many units AMD are making based on a couple of factless websites publishing something. Don't assume how many are available, just get one while you can if you want one.
I shared our stock and as AMD's biggest VEGA customer in UK, we get majority, the numbers are far from factless.
However it is first wave of stock!
Once Chinese New Year is over more stock shall ship for sure.
AMD are just keeping stock levels initially low to push up prices and induce panic buying, a familiar tactic to take advantage of early adopters.
^^^^ This
I was talking more about over the last couple of weeks, people stating there are only 5000, 7000, 10,000 cards and that's it. I think there will be a decent supply continuing if there is decent demand.
Doubtful, the launch is timed badly due to CNY and CNY happens no matter what, so factories are shut down and as Sapphire make the majority of the cards, if they are not manufacturing they are not manufacturing, end of.
AMD would loving more than to drop 1000 units into each country hero and have an insane launch, sell 10k plus worldwide on day one, would do wonders for their share price and market share.
I've heard no such numbers mentioned by AMD, so maybe it is indeed made up but at the same time I've not asked AMD if they have a max production roll out.
Vega 56 and 64 was dead, but when I requested one last production run of 10,000 cards, they made it happen for us with Sapphire, hence the 56/64 deals we currently have, you will see no one can match our Sapphire deals.
That's the point, there were no numbers mentioned by AMD but some websites quoted production numbers that then got banded around as fact. I am considering getting one but I have a 1080Ti already so it's almost certainly pointless.
Just be a sidestep, Vega 7 and 1080Ti trade blows, Vega 7 advantage is compute and mining, likely both are which your not doing.
When do they go live Gibbo
2pm Thursday he said
MSI got their shipment in, so around 150 units in UK now, we've got 79 units for launch total so far.
Did you just break NDA?
Nope it was on the slides from AMD in their stream at CES.
That was a 2080 which is a little quicker than a 1080Ti though...
When do benchmarks/reviews come out? tomorrow as well?
Seeing as the stock numbers are so low for tomorrow is there any chance you plan on limiting bulk buys? You know they'll all sell regardless of how you do it and by limiting how many can be bought in one go it gives everyone a chance to get one.
I missed out on the Vega launch even though I was sat here waiting for the chance to order and I was on the phone to OCUK as soon as sales went live and I still didn't get one. I'd like to avoid a repeat of that if possible.
waiting to see that photo of the Radeon 7's stacked up
Separate names with a comma.


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Caught On Camera: Ram Spied Testing a 5500 Heavy Duty with a Pickup Bed
Chassis-Only Truck May Give Way to Trade-Oriented Pickup
Looking at these pictures, the ill-informed wonder why we're devoting spyshot coverage to a vehicle that already exists, a Ram Heavy Duty dualie. But look closer and notice that the model designation reads "5500," reflecting a Class 5 truck. Currently, Ram only sells its Class 5 as a chassis cab, while this example is fit with a dualie cargo box. Furthermore, the box is from a previous-generation Dodge Ram, not the current-generation Ram 3500.
Ram's reasoning behind testing such a vehicle is a little bit mysterious, but we have a few ideas. The company's 2012 Longhauler concept was a 5500-based pickup with a conventional 8-foot bed and an auxiliary fuel tank grafted in the space between the cargo box and the crew cab. Although this truck's shorter wheelbase and more conventional proportions don't suggest a production version of the Longhauler, they add grist to the rumor mill that Ram might bring a consumer-oriented version of the 5500 to the brand's lineup.
Such a vehicle would be ideally suited to do battle with the upcoming Ford F-450 Super Duty, a model that, in its previous generation, claimed top towing rights away from the Ram brand for a time. You can bet Ford intends on regaining its crown with the next F-450. That would set the stage for a Ram 4500 or 5500 pickup, giving truck customers two 10-lug options for their tow machines.
The Ram medium-duty pickup has a few obstacles in its way, including mounting the bed to the frame. The 4500 and 5500 have completely different chassis compared to the 3500, so the latter's pickup box doesn't fit onto the former's body. Wiring and bumper mounting are two more challenges, as evidenced by this vehicle's cobbled-together appearance. Still, we know more than a few weekend racers, off-road enthusiasts, equestrians, and overland travelers who'd love to have a big Ram as their tow vehicle, so maybe the company is onto something here.
Source: Glenn Paulina/KGP Photography


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Summer, sunshine and shade. This is where our Chiang Mai Classic™ Patio and Garden Umbrella comes in.
The Chiang Mai Classic™ Patio Umbrella does its work best in strong sunshine, providing a generous shade in a classic atmosphere. It is the larger sibling of the smaller Chiang Mai Classic™ Umbrella and is similarly made with choice, strong bamboo. Its cotton-based cover has been made water resistant with mostly traditional and some modern materials. It provides excellent sun protection and very good rain protection.
As all our bamboo umbrellas it is made with environmentally sustainable materials in a socially responsible, fair trade work environment.
Height is the total length of the umbrella pole with umbrella top. The umbrella pole consists of two sections.
To specify a color or a hand painting please use the gallery description, for example "red" or "Silver Lotus on red". Add this color or painting description to the product code. Select from colors and hand paintings in our gallery pages:
Our Patio and Garden Umbrellas have the same color selection as our hand carried Chiang Mai Classic Umbrellas. The painted designs can be similar as well, or very different. Generally, for same type of paintings, patio umbrellas may show a lesser degree of detail.
2018 most popular colors for Chiang Mai Classic™ Patio and Garden Umbrellas:
Off-white, cream, natural, grey and red.
To let us know which products you are interested in, please use these model numbers. Colors and hand paintings are communicated by their name, for example "red" or "Silver Lotus on red".
Wholesale prices are based on quantity. Shown prices for Chiang Mai Classic™ Patio Umbrellas are ex works for the minimum order quantity of 6 pieces in assorted sizes, colors and painted design patterns.
The ex-works price includes export packaging for overseas shipping. It excludes shipping cost. We calculate and send you our suggestion for most economic shipping based on your location, preferred models, quantity and delivery deadline.
Above price is for the Chiang Mai Classic™ Patio Umbrella, without base. The optional standard base for this umbrella is a matching, foldable, tripod bamboo base, as shown in the last image, the collage of umbrella details. Yet any base with a suitable diameter can be used for this umbrella.
The shipping cost of bases may equal the shipping cost of the umbrellas. To save on shipping costs, consider if a shop near you can supply a locally made base. Contact us for the matching bamboo base or a hardwood base.
You can customize and personalize your Patio Umbrellas in several ways.
For a quote, and to confirm that we can produce your customization, please contact us, then e-mail us your logo or text. Prices depend on the type and intricacy of the logo or text. Your logo, slogan or text remains your sole property and remains confidential.
- Garden Wedding Umbrellas, by customer Chloe Ringrose, UK
- Chiang Mai Classic Patio Umbrellas - Mekong river lounge deck, by Tasama Meechai, Thailand (id 86864589)
- Chiang Mai Classic Patio Umbrellas - Take one on your stroll, by Pulpitis (id 111753874)
- other images by the Chiang Mai Umbrellas team
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Jam Factory
— Packaging
Brand by Name designed promotional packaging for Melbourne's iconic Jam Factory, to celebrate their first honey harvest from their rooftop beehives.
The project is a collaboration with Rooftop Honey, founded in 2011 by Vanessa Kwiatkowski and Mat Lumalasi, who now manage 70 beehives located on rooftops around inner-city Melbourne.
We created a striking 2 colour design inspired by the bee's 5 kilometer daily search for nectar and pollen, and sourced the perfect eco-friendly packaging.
The honey has a warm, caramel & beautifully floral taste. We highly recommend you treat your taste buds to some!


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The Field Book: Or, Sports and Pastimes of the United Kingdom; Comp. from the Best Authorities, Ancient and Modern
E. Wilson, 1833 - 616 من الصفحات
ما يقوله الناس - كتابة مراجعة
لم نعثر على أي مراجعات في الأماكن المعتادة.
الصفحات المحددة
طبعات أخرى - عرض جميع المقتطفات
عبارات ومصطلحات مألوفة
allspice animal antimony appear ash-colour bait ball barrel belly bill birdlime birds body boil breast breed brown calomel cards clyster cock colour common costiveness covered diuretic dose drachms dusky edged eggs emollient feathers feed feet female fish five flatulent foot four frequently glanders ground hair half hare hawk head hole hook horse hounds hunting inches inflammation irides killed kind legs length LINN male mandible middle mouth neck nest opium ounces pale pheasant piece play player pledget plumage poultice pounds powder prey quadrupeds quantity quills river scapulars scent season seldom shooting shot side skin sometimes species sport spots spring stomach striker strong tail taken tincture tion toes tree trout turpentine upper weight wild wings woodcock worms wound yellow young
مقاطع مشهورة
الصفحة 423 - The length of this bird, from the tip of the bill to the end of the tail, is...
الصفحة 329 - ... fast; but by building only in the morning, and by dedicating the rest of the day to food and amusement, gives it sufficient time to dry and harden. About half an inch seems to be a sufficient layer for a day. Thus careful workmen, when they build...
الصفحة 24 - In what esteem are you with the vicar of the parish? Can you play with him at backgammon?
الصفحة 507 - The person appointed to start the horses shall mark in his list the time when the horses in each race actually started ; and if there have been any false starts, the first of them shall be considered as the time of starting for that race, and he shall make a report thereof to the Keeper of the Match-book in the afternoon of the day the races are run.
الصفحة 415 - When a plate is won by two heats, the preference of the horses is determined by the places they get in the second heat.
الصفحة 38 - The pack wide opening load the trembling air With various melody ; from tree to tree The propagated cry redoubling bounds, And winged zephyrs waft the floating joy...
الصفحة 461 - I believe, however, that it depends chiefly on two things, the condition the ground is in, and the temperature of the air; both of which, I apprehend, should be moist, without being wet: when both are in this condition, the scent is then perfect; and vice versa, when the ground is hard, and the air dry, there seldom will be any scent. - It scarce ever lies with a north, or an east wind; a southerly wind without rain, and a westerly wind that is not rough, are the most favourable.
الصفحة 415 - Horses are not entitled to start without producing a proper certificate of their age, if required, at the time appointed in the articles, except where aged horses are included, and in that case a junior horse may enter without a certificate as to age, provided he carry the same weight as the aged.
الصفحة 70 - Meynel's fox-hounds are likewise quoted as an instan.ce of the success of this practice; but upon speaking to that gentleman upon the subject, I found that he did not attach the meaning that I do, to the term in-and-in. He said that he frequently bred from the father and the daughter, and the mother and the son. This is not what I consider breeding in-and-in; for the daughter is only half of the same blood as the father, and will probably partake, in a great degree, of the properties of the mother.
الصفحة 415 - No person shall start more than one horse of which he is the owner, either wholly or in part, and either in his own name or that of any other person, for any race for which heats are run.


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Google to Acquire Celebrities to use Google+
Lady Gaga has 11.7 million Twitter followers but why she is not on Google+?
Well, she might be on Google+ soon when Google releases its "celebrity acquisition plan".
Google is going to devise a system to verify the identities of public figures who sign up for the service. The validation system will prevent users from imitating celebrities, like Twitter's "verified" stamp.The company plans to ask celebrities to fax a copy of his or her driving licenses to them for profile verification.
In the past, Google allowed users to validate the identities tied to their Google Profiles by checking their name and phone number against telephone records and ask them to enter a PIN code upon receiving a call. Users will get a green "verified name " badge when their profiles are verified. Twitter also provide verified partners, advertisers, and accounts that regularly deal with identity confusion with a "verified" tag. However, their current rival Facebook does not have a system for promoting legitimate pages.
Although Google is interested in getting celebrities in the latest social network, many celebrities like Catherwood has little interest in joining it. "For a living, I voice my opinion, and so I'm guarded and very protective of my opinion," Catherwood said." I don't want anyone to muddy up the waters with false opinions that seem to be." She also stated that she would consider joining Google+ if Google offer him incentives such as validating or promoting his profile while eliminating imposters.
Google appears to be very interested in getting celebrities to get involved in their new product when they managed to get big names such as Lady Gaga and Tina Fey to drop by its campus to speak for YouTube audiences.


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As is the custom on 5:4, here are highlights from yesterday's broadcast of the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols from King's College, Cambridge, which took place on Christmas Eve. In a delicious repeat from last year, is Jan Sandström's gorgeously dreamy rendering of Det är en ros utsprungen; Praetorius' original music is practically unrecognisable, but when the result is as rapturously beautiful as this, who cares? Pieces like this prove best how good the King's College choir really is, negotiating their way through the dense shifting clouds of notes apparently effortlessly.
The occasion continues to be staunchly male-dominated, so it's refreshing and badly-needed to hear an arrangement by June Nixon (a name probably unfamiliar to many; she is in fact a well-known organist in her native Australia). Her setting of The holly and the ivy, which turns it into a joyous dancing romp, is so much better than its traditional version that it deserves to be heard much, much more often. Read more


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Black-Eyed Kids – Urban Legend or Reality?
Black-Eyed Kids (BEKs) – Urban legend or reality?
8th May, 2017
BEKs – A typical scenario
Imagine this scenario – You are home at night, and are preparing your evening meal, the animals that share your home are at your feet begging for scraps. Suddenly there is a knocking at the door, initially you ignore it, not expecting anyone. The knocking however, doesn't stop – instead it is long, becoming very insistent and much louder. You decide to go and see who is so intent on getting your attention. You also become aware of a nagging sense of unease – trepidation even. As you walk towards the front door , with your animals at your feet, the feeling becomes stronger and more intense the closer you get.
Attempting to shake off your growing feelings you reach for the door – suddenly your cat arches it's back and starts hissing and spitting furiously. You find this behaviour very unusual, and it only increases your sense of discomfort and anxiety. The cat takes off and your dog begins to growl. Shaking off your feelings you open the door to see the two young kids standing there. The dog lets of a frightened yelp and runs for the back bedroom where you later find it hiding under your bed.You wonder why kids are out alone at night when one of them speaks "Hey lady can we come in and use your phone?". They are still looking at the ground and you cannot understand why you feel such fear, as though your very life is in physical danger. Suddenly the kids raise their heads and look at you. You realize that their eyes are completely black, completely. Terrified you try to shut the door but for some reason you have opened it further instead, As you become aware of this you hear the children repeatedly asking to be let in. You slam the door shut and lock it, terrified of what you have just seen and your overwhelming feelings or mortal danger. The knocking and the asking to be let in continues for some time, then suddenly stops and the kids have gone.
BEKs – What and who are they?
This is a very good question – Although I had heard of the black-eyed kids, it was not in the 1990 a very well known, or discussed subject. It really came to public attention in 1998 when a Texas reporter Brian Bethel posted of his experience on an online message board. This opened a floodgate of people who have since shared their experiences on line and in books which have been written about the subject.
So what precisely are the BEKs? Are they an urban legend or some very clever viral marketing program? Who or what they are and where they come from is open for debate, as is what they are really after. Personally, I tend to feel that they belong more within the UFO community than religious or spiritual.
The BEKs all share some similar characteristics:
- They tend to insistently knock on a persons home or car door
- They ask to be invited in, and seemingly cannot enter without invitation
- They often get increasingly demanding and insistent that they be let in, if the person is reluctant to let them in
- They seem to range in age from about six years old to early teens
- They are mostly boys that are seen
- Initially they all are seen with their heads down so one cannot fully see their eyes or have eye contact with them
- There is an intense feeling of fear and foreboding, including a sense of physical danger that oozes from the BIK
- When they raise their heads and the person sees their eyes, they are totally black with no whites whatsoever
- Their eyes seem to have a hypnotic effect on the experiencer as if they can compel them to open the door.
- The child is generally dressed in clothing that would make them blend in with the locals, but odd variations (such as the winter clothing in Mike's sons encounter, in the middle of summer), can cause these kids to stand out
- Generally very pale skinned and often talk in a sort of stilted manner as if following a script
- Animals are either absolutely terrified of them (even trained attack dogs), and will run from them and hide or they hiss at them
BEKs – A New Zealand Experience
Back in 1990 Mike, a friend of mine, came to see me. This is a man who was a builder, solid build, not bothered by much at all. It wasn't unusual to have a visit from him, we often sat and talked about spirituality, and things that go bump in the night. I noticed he was quieter, more introspective than normal. I asked him what was wrong and so he told me.
His son (who was then about 18 years of age, a big strapping lad), had been on a visit to a swimming hole not far from Hamilton, that weekend. A place called Kaniwhaniwha – popular with brave souls in the summer as the water was feed from a local mountain, Mt Pirongia. There is a walk that you can take along this stream (which was only a few meters wide, in the walk areas). He and his mates had been exploring the walkway after taking a dip in the swimming hole. It was a bright summer's day, early in the afternoon. His friends decided after a while to turn back and go for another swim, he wanted to walk on a little further so they parted company. This was not uncommon for them.
So this lad walked on for another 10 minutes or so. He he looked up and noticed a young kid about 10 years of age standing on the other side of the river, with his head down, very pale skin – similar in fact to the MIB from last weeks blog. The kid seemed out of place and with no other person around him. He also noticed that the kid was dressed unusually, in cold weather clothing – this stood out to him, being the middle of summer. For some reason he started to feel really uneasy as he looked at the kid. He called out a greeting to open conversation as he was concerned about such a young kid being by himself in the middle of nowhere, and without adult supervision. He paused, waiting for a response, when the kid looked up and directly into his eyes.
This was when things became very scary for the him. He said that when the kid looked at him, his eyes were solid black – no whites what so ever. This, along with already feeling uneasy, scared him terribly and he turned and started to run back to where his friends were gathered. Running wasn't a problem for this lad, he was actually an extremely fit kid and him a very fast runner. So he turned tail and started running back to the swimming hole. As he was running he noticed the kid on the other side of the stream was right there, effortlessly keeping pace with him. This terrified the kid even more, and he told his Dad that he actually felt like his life was in physical danger. The feeling of impending doom, spurred him to run faster. He said that it felt as though the run took forever, but as soon as he spotted the swimming hole and his mates, and turned to look again, the kid had disappeared – just vanished, although there was no where for him to have gone. He gathered his mates together and they left the swimming hole immediately. When he got home he was terribly distressed and for weeks afterwards would go no where but WINTEC and home. Most unusual for him. He also had nightmares for months afterwards.
I knew this family very well, the kids mother had been a friend of mine from my early nursing days and the whole family was deeply religious and totally trustworthy. I had no reason to doubt Mike's word when he was telling me this story. He was not a man to make stories up and I could tell that the incident troubled him greatly. It was this concern for his son, that brought my friend to share the incident with me and to ask me what I felt it actually was.
This was not the first time I had heard about the BIK, but it was the very first time I had personally known someone who had actually had an encounter with one, and here in New Zealand.
So what does one make from this? To Mike's son, the BEK are very real, very threatening. These encounters can leave the person feeling extremely drained and overwhelmed with a mix of emotions, mostly fear and dread. There are numerous accounts on the net of personal and up-close experiences with these children, such as these ones compiled on this blog or this page here. But what actually happens if someone lets these kids into their home? This is one woman's account of what happened to her when she did – but she is not alone, there are a number of similar accounts that are readily researched. Also there are many accounts on social media of people who specifically study this phenomena and are actively trying to find out the truth behind the stories. Next time you hear a knocking, you never know who may be waiting for you to open your door and let them in …
Til next time –
Shadowlands Paranormal Investigations team


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As the Broncos continue to search for additional help on their offensive line, they re-signed veteran Billy Turner to a one-year deal, an NFL source confirmed.
Turner, a four-year lineman, first joined the Broncos as a waiver claim in 2016 and served as a backup at guard and tackle last year. But his 2017 season was cut short after he suffered a broken hand while filling in for right tackle Menelik Watson in the Broncos' Week 6 loss to the New York Giants. Giants defensive end Jason Pierre-Paul pushed off Turner to get to quarterback Trevor Siemian for the sack, and Turner came out of the play holding his hand in pain.
Though Turner played the remainder of the game, he underwent surgery the following evening and was subsequently placed on season-ending injured reserve.
Turner, for now, is expected to vie for a spot at either guard or tackle, but the Broncos' front five remains an unknown as they continue to shop in free agency and mull their options in the draft.


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Now where were we?
Oh, right. Initiative rolls between tough, dwarven ex-soldier Jindra and three Redbrand ruffians on the streets of Phandalin. Here she was, trying to do everything on the DL, with a mind towards infiltrating this gang's base. But it turns out they've gathered some intel on her as well, and the thought of some adventurer hanging around town is something they ought to nip in the bud.
Initiative rolls came out to a tie (4) but these ruffians have the edge in dexterity so to them the first attack goes. Unfortunately, these enemies each get two attacks, so there was a very real possibility of getting smoked before the round even went to Jindra. However, out of six attacks, only one was a hit.
Surrounded by three enemies, Jindra had little in the way of options so she took a swing at one…and missed. Feeling in dire straits though, she blew her action surge and not only hit, but scored a critical. She actually managed to drop one of them right off the bat. i thought she might have justice on her mind more than fury, and it would be a knockout shot rather than a straight up kill.
Next round didn't go so great, with the Redbrands landing one strike each, and Jindra scoring a single hit of her own plus using her Second Wind to get some precious hp back. The following round took Jindra's health down pretty low, while Jindra dropped another bad guy. At that point, she risked an opportunity attack to move away from them and try to escape, with a mind towards making it to the Townmaster's Hall and maybe getting some help from Sildar.
As it turns out, when only one Redbrand remained, he's supposed to flee as well and head for Tresendar Manor. So, i guess it's really no secret where this gang is holed up? Which begs the question why they need that secret tunnel entrance in the woods.
In retrospect, i should have thought a bit more about options and tactics. The smart move would have been making a break for the Townmaster's Hall right away. At any rate, this particular encounter was a learning lesson that could be applied to any size group, really. While the default actions of an RPG group is basically fight to the death every time, it makes more a more interesting experience to put some thought into any encounter.
On a related note, i've been listening to a lot of gameplay podcasts recently, most notably those of Acquisitions Incorporated. And also Titansgrave. There's a few other ones but those are my favorites.
Both of these shows offer excellent examples of my idea of an ideal RPG experience. Although different in tone, both campaigns are focused primarily on the story. More than that, there is a real dedication to bringing the characters to life in the spotlight as the heroes of their respective stories.
What i enjoy most about AI games (aside from the humor) is the players' efforts to think in relatively realistic terms about the situations they find themselves in, the elaborate schemes, plots and tactics they devise, and the shift from multiple combat encounters to instead usually one grand battle per session.
In Titansgrave, the roleplaying is just so delicious. i don't want to diverge too much, or spoil it for anyone who checks it out. Suffice it to say, the flow of the show and the game itself does an excellent job of creating real drama by expertly weaving together great DMing and on-the-fly story developments through player actions and reactions.
Back to the game at hand, the townspeople who witness Jindra's streetfight with the Redbrands are grateful and bolstered to see someone stand up to them. Those manacles once again came in handy, using them to secure the Redbrand she KO'd and bring him to jail. Townmaster Harbin is reluctant to emprison the ruffian, afraid of the almost certain blowback from the rest of the gang. But Sildar admonishes him and it's into the cell for the thug. A natural 20 Intimidation roll from Jindra helps cement the deal.
At that, with just 1hp to her name, Jindra announces she's just going to take a little rest…and passes out.
The next morning (after a long rest) it's time to head for the Redbrand base. They probably wouldn't waste any time at least coming in force to the jail to retrieve their man, more than likely with violence on their mind, so Jindra makes haste to get underway with her own mission.
Following Carp's directions, she very un-stealthily (rolled a 6, stupid disadvantage) makes her way through the woods and finds the secret tunnel entrance. She tries to remain concealed and watch the tunnel for a bit, but sees no signs of anyone coming or going, and then heads into the tunnel warily.
Not too far ahead, the tunnel opens into a crevasse, with two arched wooden bridges across the span on the close and far ends of the chamber.
In her head, she begins to hear murmurs and mad cackles. Something tries to penetrate her thoughts, but her strong dwarven resolve keeps the strange intrusion at bay. Nevertheless, she senses a powerful hunger and hears whispered demands for food in her thoughts. It's pretty freaky.
Reaching into her explorer's pack, she removes what is left of her rations and holds them out into the darkness.
A bizarre, horrifying creature creeps out from further in the crevasse and snatches the rations, greedily devouring them. But the mind-speak suggests it hungers for fresher meat, like maybe dwarf flesh that has to be tastier than the corpse-flesh given to it by the redcloaks.
At a loss, and with nothing else to offer, the creature's large single eye gleams maliciously – an absolutely devastating attacked called "rotting gaze" that melts off 10 necrotic damage from a failed Constitution save.
For the nonce, however, the nothic won the initiative after its surprise round rotting gaze, and a hit with one of its two claw attacks brings Jindra low. She feebly hits the thing and, realizing i'd need to survive long enough to hit it maybe five or six more times, i'm already wondering what sort of character i'll roll up next.
And that's what i'll share next time, since the nothic's claw-claw combo on round 2 translated into the nasty thing feasting on dwarf flesh.
Jindra was dead.
Even in a solo situation like this, with no other players to react or DM to lay this at the feet of, it was quite deflating. In all the decades i've played RPGs, i don't recall ever having a character die – either my own or someone else's (although that could very well be due to game groups fizzling out before that could happen). i'll admit, i was bummed. But then i realized it was an opportunity for a fresh start, and a new take on this whole solo tabletop rpg experiment.
One of the best character death stories i've heard was that of a TPK, with the players all rolling new characters and starting over the same adventure. Eventually, they delved into the same dungeon where their previous character all met their end. Deep inside, they came across a half-crazed wildman fiercely guarding a pile of bodies…which they learned were those of their earlier creations, one of whom had actually survived but become hopelessly lost in the labyrinth and survived only to protect his fallen friends, desperate that someone might come and save them. That's pretty awesome gaming right there.
What's your most memorable RPG character death? Did you fall into an acid pit and even rolling a nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh nineteen wasn't good enough to get you out? Were you unceremoniously felled by a random encounter? Was your killed saving the rest of his party from certain doom? Let me know in the comments!