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Oracle.com slash cbs. Good morning. I'm Jane Pauley, and this is Sunday Morning.
Decades of overhunting coupled with climate change and the risk of collision with huge carbon monoxide Decades of overhunting coupled with climate change and the risk of collision with huge cargo ships have further endangered some species of whales. This morning, we'll head out to sea with David Pogue, who reports that recent steps may offer these majestic marine mammals a lifeline. Then, with just over three weeks until Election Day, we'll be talking with respected reporter Bob Woodward about his new book. You've probably already heard some of its stunning revelations, but there's a lot more to talk about, which he'll be doing with our David Martin. It's about the Ukraine war, the war in the Middle East. In his patented style, Bob Woodward takes us inside the room to eavesdrop on what President Biden and his top advisors really said. These are transcripts?
Yes. It's a long way from secret meetings with his famous Watergate source, Deep Throat. Coming up on Sunday morning, Bob Woodward goes to war. At age 90, Shirley MacLaine has been charming audiences for decades, amassing awards, accolades, and a treasure trove of stories she'll be sharing with our Lee Cowan. And that's my grandmother. Shirley MacLaine seems to have known everyone and experienced just about everything in Hollywood. I mean, who else gets to call herself the mascot of the Rat Pack? Was it really as glamorous and as fun as it looked?
How can I describe it? I was on the set with them and they saw how I was and how I wasn't. MacLaine is walking, dancing, and singing down memory lane with us later on Sunday morning. From one screen legend to another, he's starred in some of the most celebrated films of our time, The Godfather, Dog Day Afternoon, Scent of a Woman, to name just a few. This morning, Al Pacino looks back with Ben Mankiewicz. An epic actor with an epic life, Al Pacino is finally telling his own story.
This is it. I don't care what happens to me, whether I succeed or not succeed. It didn't matter. I had this. The kid from the South Bronx became a Hollywood star. What do you want from me?
I actually put a tie on to see you. That's what famous guys do. The one and only Al Pacino ahead on Sunday morning. He's worked with everyone from Taylor Swift to Bruce Springsteen to Kendrick Lamar. Tracey Smith catches up with hit maker Jack Antonoff.
With the playoffs in full swing, Faith Salie explores a baseball epidemic, elbow injuries, affecting everyone from teenagers to the game's biggest stars. And more on this Sunday morning, October 13th, 2024. We'll be back in a moment. You can live out your MasterChef dreams. When you find a professional on Angie to tackle your dream kitchen remodel. Connect with skilled professionals to get all your home projects done well. Inside to outside, repairs to renovations.
Get started on the Angie app or visit angie.com today. You can do this when you Angie that. To begin this morning, David Pogue with a whale of a story. So we're on the beach at Half Moon Bay and we see this massive thing.
In the summer of 2022, I was walking on a California beach when I saw the strangest thing approaching on the waves. When it struck the shore and deflated, I knew it was a dead whale. But it wasn't just any whale. I knew this whale. I'm like, oh, and it just hit my heart because Fran is, at the time, she was the most well-known whale in our entire database.
Ted Cheeseman is the creator of HappyWhale.com, a database of whale sightings. It includes over 850 pictures of Fran the humpback whale identified by her tail markings. She had a big personality. She's playful around whale watch boat. You know, you'd hear on the radio, hey, Fran's over here.
Oh, cool. You know, let's go hang out with Fran. Look at Fran lying on his side. Fran, what's up? Fran had a baby known as Aria. There's mom and calf, cute little Fran and Aria.
So what happened to it? Mother is killed and there's this orphan. We didn't know if the calf could survive. I didn't think so.
I didn't think it was very likely. Fran died from a collision with one of the cruise ships and container ships that make more than 200 million trips a year. Number one and number two threats to whales are ship strikes and entanglements in fishing gear.
Sean Hastings is a policy manager for NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Nobody knows exactly how many whales are ship strike victims every year because most of them sink after they're hit. But blue whales, humpbacks and fin whales are on the endangered list and the northern right whale is just about extinct. Only about 350 of them are left on Earth. That's why every whale counts, so that we can bring their populations back and help them recover. The good news is that the shipping companies themselves say they care.
There's no one in our industry that wants to see any one of these magnificent creatures harmed or killed by anything we do. This is one of your smaller ships? This is one of the smaller ships, yeah.
Bud Darr is the policy director for the world's largest shipping company, MSC. Are your knees getting tired yet? Mine are. They will.
Your thighs will feel like you skied a double black diamond. He wanted to demonstrate why ship captains can't just steer clear of whales. And we're looking forward to the bow here?
You are. Okay, now I get why the captain cannot see a whale. It's hundreds of feet away.
It is, and very difficult to see them in close proximity. And even if you could spot a whale ahead, there's not much you could do about it. You know, the ship is an extremely large object.
It's moving very fast and it's noisy. I mean, you may not know there was impact with a whale at all, if there was. Unfortunately, I mean, you've had whales that have remained on a bulbous bow of a ship when it's come in. One obvious solution, move the shipping routes. Off of Sri Lanka, we realized if we could just move where we operate, about 15 miles further offshore from where that was, you could reduce the risk by 95 percent or more.
But the approach channels to most ports don't have the room for rerouting. So the second best idea is to slow the ships down from about 18 miles an hour to 12. By slowing ships down, it gives the whales more opportunity to get out of the way. And in the event that they are struck, there's a higher likelihood of survival ship.
This is much akin to having a slow speed zone around a school. There's an emissions payoff for the ports, too. Slower ships emit less air pollution and reduce the amount of greenhouse gases they emit out of their stacks. But rerouting and slowing down both require a key piece of data for the ship captains. Are there whales ahead?
And that's where technology comes in. So this is called a Slocum glider. It's an autonomous vehicle. At the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, marine ecologist Mark Baumgartner's lab operates a fleet of gliders like this one. They fly beneath the waves listening for whale song.
Every two hours the vehicle comes to the surface, uses the antenna to send all that information home to a computer in my lab. He's also deploying an array of these microphone buoys. The whole point of all these machines is to listen for this. And they're likely transmitting information to either other males or females to say how big I am, how fit I am, maybe we'd like to get a drink later, right?
All the things that men do to attract women is encoded in that song. Ship captains receive word of the whale locations from the buoys and gliders so they can slow down. But on the West Coast, slowing down is voluntary.
At whalesafe.com, you can see the paths of the ships, the locations of the whales, and letter grades for shipping company compliance. About 30 percent of them still plow ahead full speed, ignoring the warnings. MSC's Bud Darr can tell you why. There is some impact on the schedule, there is some impact on costs that probably comes with that, and that takes a lot of sophistication and planning to mitigate that and get that right. But most of these solutions are manageable. Compliance is also voluntary on most of the East Coast, so ships continue to kill northern right whales.
NOAA has proposed a regulation that would make the slowdowns mandatory in more areas. Mark Baumgartner is cautiously optimistic. If I didn't have a little bit of hope, I'd just go home and curl up in a ball and be done with it.
So it helps keep me going. Well, maybe this will cheer him up. Remember Aria, Fran's baby whale? Whale tracker Ted Cheeseman has some news. I got a phone call from a naturalist and he says, Hey Ted, I think I've seen Aria just now. Can you confirm this?
And then he texts me a photo. I confirmed. I was like, yes! And it was so exciting. Aria's alive! Aria's alive. You know, hopefully in a few years time she'll bring a calf here.
And if we protect them from ship strikes, if we protect them from entanglements, if we continue to protect the health of the ocean, you know, happily ever after I hope. There's nothing worse than getting home from your trip only to find out you missed a can't miss travel experience. That's why you need Viator. Book guided tours, excursions and more in one place to make your trip truly unregrettable. There are over 300,000 travel experiences to choose from, so you can find something for everyone. And Viator offers free cancellation and 24-7 customer service, so you always have support around the clock. Download the Viator app now to use code Viator10 for 10% off your first booking in the app.
Regret less, do more with Viator. Twenty-three books, all best sellers, two Pulitzer Prizes. It's no surprise journalist and author Bob Woodward is making headlines once again.
He talks with our David Martin. Throughout the war in Ukraine, Vladimir Putin has rattled his nuclear saber and the U.S. has dismissed those threats as reckless. That kind of rhetoric is very dangerous and unhelpful. Nobody wants to see a nuclear war happen. It's a war that all sides lose. But in the fall of 2022, as Russian forces were retreating, U.S. intelligence warned if it turned into a rout, Putin might very well resort to nuclear weapons.
The intelligence community concluded that there was a 50% chance, and that scared everyone. It is perhaps the most dramatic moment in Bob Woodward's latest book, War. It's about the Ukraine war, the war in the Middle East, and it's also about the war for the American presidency. In his patented style, Woodward takes us inside the room when Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin placed a high-stakes phone call to the Kremlin.
This is an astonishing moment. Secretary of Defense Austin gets the assignment to speak to Shogu, the defense secretary for Russia. Woodward reads the words as they were spoken. Austin says, we know you are contemplating the use of a tactical nuclear weapon in Ukraine. If you did this, all the restraints that we have been operating under in Ukraine would be reconsidered.
What does Shogu say? I don't take kindly to being threatened. Austin said, I am the leader of the most powerful military in the history of the world.
I don't make threats. After that call, Russia falsely claimed Ukraine was preparing to use a dirty bomb to spread radioactive contamination. The Russian defense minister called Austin back with this warning. We all have this intelligence that says the Ukrainians are thinking about using a dirty bomb. If they do this, we would consider this an act of nuclear terrorism, and we'd have no alternative to respond. That sounds like a pretty direct threat to go nuclear.
What does Austin say to that? We don't believe you. We don't see any indications of this. It seems to us like you're trying to establish a predicate for using nuclear weapons. How do you know those quotes are accurate?
Because there are documents and witnesses. Did you check it with Austin? I had to. This is an important moment. As I started reading this, Austin said, that's accurate.
That's accurate. The Russian retreat did not turn into a rout, and Putin pulled back from the brink. But the war grinds on. In Woodward reports, President Biden admitted to National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, Russia's nuclear saber still hangs over Ukraine. This is a direct quote. Putin is not going to let himself be routed out of Ukraine without breaking the seal on tactical nuclear weapons.
So we are stuck. U.S. intelligence had warned for months about Putin's plan to invade Ukraine, but was blindsided by the October 7th Hamas rampage into Israel. Biden's response was immediate. If the United States stands with Israel, we will not ever fail to have their back. But four days later, with Israel bombarding Gaza, Biden pushed back when Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu suddenly informed him he was about to launch a preemptive attack against Hezbollah in Lebanon. What you're about to do is going to guarantee a regional war.
You should not count on our support if you preemptively launch a war against Hezbollah. As civilian casualties in Gaza continued to rise, Woodward writes, Biden's frustrations and distrust of Netanyahu finally erupted. That son of a bitch, Bibi Netanyahu, he's a bad guy. He's a bad effing guy. A bad effing guy.
Israel has now attacked Hezbollah with everything from exploding beepers to 2,000-pound bombs, and Iran has launched 200 ballistic missiles against Israel, leaving the Middle East on the precipice of an all-out war just weeks before America elects a new president. Whoever gets to be president of the United States is going to inherit a world living on the edge of imploding. Woodward says former President Trump is not fit to hold the office again. You're a chronicler of presidents going back to Nixon. Where would you rank Trump?
At the very bottom, because he was always looking out for himself. Woodward, who is being sued by Trump over his last book, reports in this book that in the middle of the pandemic, then-President Trump sent Vladimir Putin some hard-to-come-by COVID test machines. He gives it to him for his personal use. People are scrambling for tests, and the president of the United States gives a bunch of them to Putin.
It's like feeding the neighbors instead while your own children are starving. Woodward also claims Trump has held as many as seven phone calls with Putin since leaving office. A spokesman for Trump says none of these made-up stories are true. But last Thursday, a Kremlin spokesman confirmed Putin had received COVID tests from Trump. Both Trump and President Biden refused to be interviewed for this book. But Woodward has talked to many top administration officials. These are transcripts? Yes. So you have all the interviews transcribed? I do. It's a long way from meeting his famous Watergate-sourced deep throat in an underground garage.
Forget the myths that the media has created about the White House. I go in, set the tape recorder down. This is on deep background. I'm going to use it all.
I'm not going to say where it came from. Yeah, but if somebody wanted to run an investigation on who talked to Woodward, you've given them a lot of evidence to work with. But I've done this for 52 years, and no one's ever run that investigation. Why?
Because we have a First Amendment. In those 52 years, he has written now 23 books and seems to have come full circle, dedicating this latest to his Watergate reporting partner, Carl Bernstein. Twenty-three books. Is this your last one? Never know.
Never know. He's thinking of mining his files for a memoir of his extraordinary career. But he is 81 years old, the same age as Joe Biden, who decided to step aside rather than risk his legacy. Do you worry about jeopardizing your legacy with writing another book? Look, we don't do our business for legacy.
We do our business because you know this, being a reporter is the best job in the world. In the music business, a good producer can make a good song better. But a great producer can turn that song into a mega hit. And right now, it seems no one's producing more mega hits than Jack Antonoff. We take note with Tracy Smith.
And it's new, the shape of your body, it's blue. For the last 18 months, Taylor Swift's eras tour conquered the pop music world. And in a show full of great moments, this one stood out. Cool Summer, a song produced by Taylor Swift and her friend, Jack Antonoff. It's hard to overstate Antonoff's influence on pop music. He's written or produced some of the biggest songs with some of the biggest names in the business.
Lana Del Rey, Sabrina Carpenter, The Chicks. But his career as a producer basically began when Taylor Swift decided that he was someone she wanted to work with. I love that. I think it's hard at this point to even imagine that there was a time that people didn't take you seriously as a producer. But I think you said in your last Grammy speech that Taylor was the one who kicked down the door for you. Literally. Literally? Well, metaphorically. Put the money in the bag and I stole the keys. That was the last time you ever saw me. Yeah, it felt so validated.
I was like, finally, someone hears what I hear and isn't afraid to just say, done. You know, press the records. He's been pressing a lot of records ever since. Besides his producing gigs, Antonoff is the lead singer and the soul of his band, Bleachers, and he owns 11 Grammys. Jack Antonoff. Including producer of the year in 2022. Thank you guys so much. He won it again in 2023. Jack Antonoff. And 2024.
Thank you so much. These days, when he's not on tour, he often works from his studio in L.A. He says a lot of it is just playing around, like the time he was on the synthesizer. It was right here. And found the Bleachers' signature sound.
Home in New Jersey, my headphones on. I literally started going like a... Started playing that.
Started playing around with that. That riff became Roller Coaster, one of the biggest songs yet for his band, Bleachers. He's become a reliable fountain of hit music, but Antonoff says he never knows when the creative lightning is going to strike. You look at the story of any album, any song, no one's ever like, we planned that day to write the best song we've ever written. We got coffee when we went in, and we did it. And that's how that happened. It's always, the story is always like, so-and-so's plane was delayed, and I got kicked out of my hotel, you know, because of some s*** that this person did, blah, blah, blah. So I'm walking down the street, and I hear this, you know, like it's always this randomness, and that buzz is where it all comes from.
And you just don't want to ever lose that. You never want to put yourself in a position as an artist where any of this feels normal. And frankly, there's nothing even close to normal about Jack Antonoff's life. Born and raised in New Jersey, Antonoff put his first band together in high school, but success came slowly. It took him a while to leave home. We went back there with him and mom Shira in 2017. Until fairly recently, Jack lived here full-time. You didn't leave until you were? I'm 29, and at that point, I mean, I had like, I had number one records at that point.
He was back East again last week for a personal milestone. Can you imagine these seats completely full, every single one? His band was playing Madison Square Garden for the very first time. No, most of the time I actually- And the butterflies were kicking in. Even if a show is sold out, I have such a level of surprise that doesn't get old.
And talk about milestones. His first Broadway show just opened. Antonoff did the music for the play Romeo and Juliet.
And then your second one is massive. That's great. The crazy thing about that show, when I think Romeo and Juliet, and I was doing this in music, I think about hope and love and finding something and running with it against all odds. I always forget about all the death. And so I started going back and sewing that into the score slightly.
A slight, not knowingness, but hint that it's going to be horrible, because I forget. His own love life is less troubled. Last year, he married actor Margaret Qualley. You might know that she's the daughter of actor Andy McDowell. You might not know that she directed and danced in the music video for the Bleacher's song Tiny Moves. Where'd that idea come from, Margaret dancing?
That was Margaret's idea. And it was the only video I've ever been a part of where I was in it, but also witnessing it. And it was real magic. Magic indeed.
At 40 years old, married to the woman of his dreams, and possibly in line for a record fourth producer of the year Grammy, Jack Antonoff is on fire. Does this all seem surreal to you? Completely. And it continues to be surreal because one of the only promises of the work I do is how fleeting, not the performance, not the audience, but that kind of success is. So there's never a moment when I'm not, like, amazed by it all. Welch's Can't Make Everything makes sense.
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Credit Karma, simplifying your financial choices. Black Sable one day, next day, it goes into hock, but I'm here. Top billing Monday, Tuesday, you're touring in stock, but I'm here. That's Shirley MacLaine putting her unique stamp on a Sondheim classic in the 1990 film Postcards from the Edge. This morning, the irrepressible screen icon is in conversation with our Lee Cowan. And that's my grandmother.
At 90 years old. Here I'm just trying to be coy on purpose. Jesus, what a jerk.
Veteran actor and Oscar winner Shirley MacLaine was in a spicy mood. We're the nude ones. Laid bare before us were moments in her long career, captured mostly in black and white. Oh, there I wanted to see how my legs photographed. Well, they photographed well. Well, I was born with good legs.
When you lead with your legs, a little bit of flirting is likely in the offing. You look just like George Clooney just then. Oh, really? Whoa. Well, thank you. Yeah. Nobody never been this sweet to me before, Dave. And you're sober too, practically.
Yeah. Shirley MacLaine always had a seductive spark. Watch your step.
Oh, man, watch your hands, Mr. Kirkby. A pixie-haired triple threat. If they could see me now, alone with Mr. V. Singer, dancer and actor.
Electric eels, I might add, do it, though it shocks and I know. She could turn just about every well-known head in Hollywood, and then some. D. Martin was the funniest person I ever met. Hey, give me a little kiss. How about it, huh? Sound idea.
It's constructive. You wait right there and I'll be there in a minute. I'll wait for you. And you sort of had a crush, but you said nothing. No. I sort of was afraid if I got that close. Mr. Ryder. He would be less funny. Oh, yeah?
And I think the humor meant more to me. Her picture of that love not to be, along with hundreds of others, from fellow rat packers to politicians, once adorned MacLaine's home in Santa Fe. She called it her wall of life.
I just started filling an empty wall and loved it. She just finished organizing that wall of life into sort of a captioned memoir. Look at my hair.
Long red curls. It starts where she did, growing up in Virginia, the daughter of two educators, and... That's you and Warren, right? That's him at the piano?
Oh, what do you think? Yep, the older sister of would-be actor and Oscar-winning director, Warren Beatty. He was a little baby pup.
And I took care of him and watched out for him. While Warren Beatty waited until college to go into acting, Shirley changed her last name to her middle name and danced her way to New York even before graduating from high school. They were my teachers, my beloved teachers.
She credits everything to those two teachers, who offered a bit of prophetic advice. I remember the day they sat me down and told me, I have too much expression in my dancing. I might want to think about acting. As the story goes, MacLean was cast as the understudy in the original Broadway production of The Pajama Game.
When the star, Carol Haney, injured her ankle, MacLean was thrown on stage. I never had a rehearsal. Not one? No.
And you went on with how much notice? Five minutes. She nailed it, or at least Alfred Hitchcock thought she did. He cast her in his next film. What did I tell you, Mommy?
Touch it, Arnie. It was her first film. She'd have lunch with Hitchcock almost every day. I had these huge Hitchcockian meals, and makeup and hair came to me and said, look, you're going to gain weight, and I did.
I gained 25 pounds. She says producer Hal Wallace had an appetite for her talent, too, and maybe a bit more. As she remembers it, he greeted her at that famous gate on the Paramount lot on her very first day. He walked out of his office and then walked toward my car. I rolled down the window.
He leaned in and put his tongue down my throat. He later gave her a sports car, but not an apology. What a jerk. McClain was newly married at the time, the only man she ever married, businessman Steve Parker. Love of my life. They soon had a daughter. Isn't she adorable? She really is. Sashi Parker.
We're in Hong Kong, I think. Her parents had a famously open marriage. McClain spent most of her time in New York and Hollywood, while Parker and their daughter lived mostly in Japan. You were sort of an unconventional mom and an unconventional wife, too, I guess, yeah? Yes. Her past affairs, if you can call them that, were hardly secret.
She's been pretty open about almost all of them. I don't think I was that attractive. You really don't?
No. For a while, I think, oh, God, I'm not sexy, attractive. But then I have my relationships, and they do think so.
And she was just as open about those she'd never been with. Beat controlling the universe. Like Jack Nicholson. I'm not enjoying this. Oh, wasn't that great? It was amazing. Oh, God. He wanted to get me on my back.
He just had to ask me. When she won her Oscar for that role in terms of endearment, she brought him up before her co-star, Debra Winger. I have wanted to work with the comic chemistry of Jack Nicholson since his chicken salad sandwich scene in Easy Pieces.
Nicholson couldn't keep a straight fit. And to have him in bed with such middle-aged joy. She never stopped inhabiting memorable characters. I'm not crazy, Malin.
I've just been in a very bad mood for 40 years. She found roles that suited her and her age. Remember my 17th birthday party when you lifted your skirt up in front of all those people? I did not lift my skirt.
It twirled up! She was in her late 70s when she joined the cast of Downton Abbey. Have we met? No, I read about you in the American newspapers. Gossip, really.
Nothing to worry about. And she was in her 80s when she appeared on Hulu's Only Murders in the Building. A cocoutini has coconut. That looks like a cup of canal water. For someone who famously claims to have lived several past lives, photos of her current life sure make it look spectacular. No wonder she believes people have come back from the beyond to talk with her about it. Like Cecil B. DeMille. He died almost 40 years before McClain received the Lifetime Achievement Award that was named after him. I'm going to take this award home but of course I will be speaking directly to Mr. DeMille later.
McClain still lives in Santa Fe. She fits here. I love the old, antique-y, it's still here feeling.
Reminds me of myself. She's well aware time is running out to satisfy all her curiosities. You're very open about saying you're not afraid of dying. Oh no, I'm kind of interested in going there. To see if you're right about all the stuff you've been... I think so.
I think that's a big part of it, yeah. I'm looking forward to being part of the Heaven experience. I really am. And I'm here!
But for now at least, Shirley McClain isn't going anywhere. I'm still here! I'm still here! Hey, podcast listeners! Great news! All your favorite comedy podcasts can be enjoyed ad-free on Amazon Music. Listen to your favorite music, plus top podcasts, completely ad-free on Amazon Music.
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That's Amazon.com slash ad-free comedy to catch up on the latest episodes without the ads. My father made him an offer he couldn't refuse. What was that? Luca Brazzi held a gun to his head, and my father assured him that either his brains or his signature would be on the contract. It's Sunday morning, and here again is Jane Pauley. That's Al Pacino as Michael Corleone in The Godfather. Over his 50 years on stage and screen, Pacino's played so many singular characters it's hard to pick a favorite.
With Ben Mankiewicz, he talks about the one character many of us don't really know much about. Al Pacino. On a bright day overlooking Beverly Hills, Al Pacino recalls a warning from years ago. What did your therapist tell you about coming out here to L.A.? He said, don't go to L.A., Al. But here he is.
And even now, at 84, he's still adjusting to that Hollywood life. You have to learn how famous you are. What do you think you have now? What, now? I'm trying.
What do you want from me? I actually put a tie on to see you. That's what famous guys do. He's more than famous.
Say hello to my little friend. He's Al Pacino. It's not personal, Sonny. It's strictly business.
Nine Oscar nominations. You are out of order. You are out of order. You are out of order. Seven straight.
Your face dead, and I want Tracy dead. Without a win. Just when I thought I was out, they pulled me back in.
Until scent of a woman. Hooah! You broke my streak. Plus two Emmys, two Tonys, a Kennedy Center Honor, and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the AFI.
He's been a leading man in the movies, and a character actor, for nearly 55 years. I'm an old fella, you know. And when I have my hair now, and I go out and someone takes a picture of me, all you see is like a white hydrant. You know, a white fire hydrant. I just say I don't feel I'm gray yet.
I don't want to be gray. I'm that guy in the book cover. The guy on the book cover is finally telling his own story. It's in his new memoir, Sonny Boy. That's what his mom called him. What's your mother's name? Rose. They lived with his grandparents in a three-room walk-up in the South Bronx. Rose kept her Sonny Boy in when his friends tempted him with the streets.
So they're calling up like, Sonny, come down. Come down, and she said, no, no. I was so upset, so angry at her. I think she was part of what saved my life, kept me off drugs. I couldn't go out. I went to school. If his mother saved his life, another woman changed it. This Blanche Rothstein, who was my eighth-grade teacher, actually came to my apartment, and she sat down and talked to my grandmother. What she said I don't know, but I think it finally came down to you should encourage this boy to do what he's doing, the acting. You have to. He is made to do this. Good reviews came early. At 13, after a school show, a stranger came up to him and said, you're the next Marlon Brando.
His response? Who's Marlon Brando? At 16, Pacino dropped out of school to immerse himself in the New York theater scene.
To survive, he took any job. Messenger, janitor, switchboard operator, twice an usher, twice fired. Well, I was in this Carnegie Hall place. This Carnegie Hall place. It's Carnegie Hall.
It's Carnegie Hall. I had this tuxedo on, and I was relatively good-looking, so there were these people coming in, and I'm supposed to seat them. It's the job of an usher, Al.
It is the job of an usher, finally. But I didn't last doing that. I just didn't have the heart. So I said, but sit any way you want.
I mean, you've got a better seat if you're up further than when you're down. And then there was a fistfight and a riot. On the spot, I was gone. The winner is Al Pacino. Thankfully, Pacino had the stage, where he made a name for himself and got the attention of a young director, Francis Ford Coppola, who saw him as Michael Corleone in The Godfather. Francis wanted you, but... Well, nobody else did, though. He got the part, but studio execs pushed to fire him.
We watched a scene that Pacino thought even hoped would be his last on the film. You run out of the restaurant. You jump into the car. I missed the car and fell. Your ankle's busted, and you think what?
Thank you, God. You felt... I'm going to get out of this film.
That's right. Al Pacino was relieved. He thought he was so badly injured, he could get out of The Godfather.
Thankfully, his ankle healed, and the kids stayed in the picture. If they would take all our energy, see, put it into straight police work, we'd have the city cleaned up in a week. A string of hits followed, including Serpico and Dog Day Afternoon... Robbing the banks of federal offense.
They got me on kidnapping, armed robbery. They're going to bury me, man. ...where an ad lib became a classic cinematic moment. This great AD, assistant director, comes running up to me as I'm about to go out and says, Say Attica.
I said, what? He said, Say Attica. Say Attica. Attica! Attica! Attica!
Attica! And the crowd just went into a spasm, and they knew it. They were right in it. All the attention, all the success, didn't sit well with Pacino. He coped by drinking. Alcohol is a depressant. Like, literally, it brings you down. And how'd your life change when you stopped? Well, it got a little worse for a while.
It really was terrible. But then eventually, thank God, they got there. In his memoir, he's candid about his struggles with alcoholism, and he also reveals that he nearly lost his mind. And he also reveals that he nearly died from COVID. One thing I'm sure will catch people off guard is how close we all came to losing you over COVID.
Yeah. Out of this world. I mean, I was here, and then I wasn't. The nurse said, my pulse stopped. Now, I don't think my pulse stopped.
But it doesn't really matter whether technically you were close to death or not. You felt it, and you had every... I really did. It was so real, and I didn't see any light.
I didn't see anything at all. There's a speech in Hamlet where he says, to be or not to be, you know. And then when he talks about leaving the Earth when you die, and he says, no more. No more.
How about that? These days, there's plenty more for Al Pacino. He's as busy as ever. I like sitting on a couch, but I keep working. I've got six films.
Smaller roles, of course, and they haven't come out yet. And despite that advice from his therapist, he's living in L.A. Can we say it? Are you, as Al Pacino, an L.A. guy now? No. Okay. Yeah, the bridge too far. I don't think so. I still speak English. In L.A., they speak Hollywood.
Truth is, this is where they make movies, a fitting place for a guy who remains what he's always been, an actor still experiencing the same buzz he felt 60 years ago on an off-Broadway stage in New York. I said, I'm never going to do anything else but this. I have found it. I don't care what happens to me, whether I succeed, not succeed. It didn't matter I had this. Yeah, you write that, like, maybe I'll be able to eat or I won't eat. Maybe I'll have money or I won't have money.
Maybe I'll become famous. Maybe I won't. Doesn't matter. Didn't matter. Because? That's the freedom. This was where I belonged. Achieving a gorgeous grin from home isn't a total mystery with bite-clear aligners.
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Your cash back really adds up. It's October, which means the World Series is just around the corner. If you watch any games this month, you probably won't be able to tell, but baseball is going through an injury epidemic that's even striking players far too young for the big leagues.
Faith Salley explains. How fast do you throw? I throw 95. Meet Quincy Bright, his team, mom Erica, dad Omari, and his arm. At just 17, the Connecticut High School star pitcher was on a track to the major leagues until he learned he had a torn ligament in his elbow. I broke down in tears. I cried like a baby. And why did you cry?
What were your thoughts? I love the game so much, so me not being able to play, it just really hurt me. I just felt like I was letting people down.
Including his family, who has nurtured his talent. How do you feel? Good. How old were you when you started having a speed gun put on your pitches? Ever since I was probably 11. And at just 13, he was recruited to play at Mississippi State University. Did this injury happen because you were throwing too hard too much? I think it happened when I was throwing too hard, especially at a young age, and my body not being able to handle it. He always rotated very quick. So every time he threw a ball, I was worried.
So I'd always try to limit what he was throwing. Like thousands of other athletes, Quincy was thrown a lifeline called Tommy John surgery. How does it feel to have a surgery named after you? Well, it's better to have an orthopedic surgery than a proctological surgery.
Fair. In 1974, Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher Tommy John was having a dream season until he tore his UCL, the ligament that supports a pitcher's arm while throwing. At the time, a career-ending injury. That is, until Frank Job, the Dodgers' team physician, invented a procedure to fix John's arm, changing baseball forever.
I just said, you do what you have to do to get me back playing baseball again. What Tommy John surgery involves is taking tissue from your forearm, a tendon, and replacing a ligament in your elbow, tighten it up, secure it, and that recreates a brand new ligament that replaces the injured ligament. Dr. Chris Ahmad was Quincy Bright's surgeon and is also head team physician for the New York Yankees. Baseball is America's pastime, and throwing hard is part of this pastime, and therefore, Tommy John surgery is now part of America's pastime. Among active MLB pitchers, an astonishing 35% have had the surgery, up from 27% in 2016.
Why do these injuries keep increasing? The harder you throw, the higher your velocity, the more force on your ligament, and every year, fastball velocity increases. Today, the average major league fastball is 93.8 miles per hour, a full 2 miles per hour more than 15 years ago. And when that's happening at the major league level, it's also happening at the amateur level. In addition, the volume of throwing is going way up, meaning it used to be that you'd play baseball during baseball season, and now you play year-round. It's a time bomb and an explosion about to happen in the elbow.
Those explosions keep Ahmad in scrubs. Twenty years ago, I would do about ten a year. This first half of the year, I've done 150 Tommy John surgeries. What percentage of your Tommy John surgeries are on patients under 18? Most are under 18. More than 50% are under age 18. Is this an epidemic of pitcher injuries?
Yes, it's an epidemic for sure. Baseball Hall of Famer, MLB commentator, and Tommy John recipient John Smoltz is an advocate for a cultural shift. And that's all for the Phillies pitcher. When you get into thinking that this is normal for your 12-year-old, yet alone a 25-year-old, we just act like no big deal.
Have a Tommy John. But he does understand the pressure young athletes are under. I also don't blame them for chasing their reward system because that's how they're getting paid. At some point, this industry will have to self-correct, and the way it self-corrects is by rule changes and philosophical changes. Smoltz thinks change could begin with Little League's discouraging, uncontrolled pitching velocity and encouraging kids to take seasonal breaks from baseball. When I see a young man just throwing everything he has at 13, he's not giving himself the best chance to pitch in high school. Or major leagues, for that matter.
Yeah. For better or worse, the legacy of 50 years of Tommy John means players like Quincy Bright have a chance of strong-arming themselves toward major league dreams. What will happen if you don't play in the major leagues? That's not going to happen. I'm sorry, but that's not going to happen.
I will be in the major leagues. Thank you for listening. Please join us when our trumpet sounds again next Sunday morning. If you like this podcast, you can listen ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app.
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