The world has gone insane and there's nothing to do except sit and watch movies. Except, if you're Netflix, you've probably seen them all already, right? That's the only reason I can think of that would have led the Netflix Twitter account down the rabbit hole it recently jumped into. The streaming service did a survey of Al Pacino's wardrobe in his decades of films to answer one simple, and yet somewhat bizarre question. Has Al Pacino ever worn shorts in a movie?
Upon reflection, you'd probably think, as Netflix apparently did, that considering the movies we've seen where Al Pacino characters go to beaches and other very hot locations, he must have worn shorts at least once, except, apparently not as this excerpt from a longer-than-you-might-think Twitter thread shows.
In Scarface, apparently just wearing white suits is enough to stay cool on Miami Beach because he never wears shorts. In Donnie Brasco other people are wearing shorts on the beach, making the fact that Al Pacino is wearing long pants while lounging all the more obvious and slightly weird. Sure, tough guys maybe don't wear shorts all that often on screen but are you going to remark that an Al Pacino character in a movie looks silly in shorts when that character could almost certainly murder you? Yeah, I don't think so. If you're tough enough you can wear what you want.
I'm not saying that this is hard-hitting journalism that needed to be done, but it's at the very least entertaining. There's only one problem with it. Netflix apparently dropped the ball. While Netflix claimed at the end of the investigation that Al Pacino never wore shorts in a movie, some fans responding to the thread claimed that wasn't true. It seems there's a shot in early in the 1999 film The Insider where Al Pacino, in fact, does wear shorts.
Netflix at least, was honorable in its acceptance that the fans beat them on this one.
It's maybe not too shocking that Netflix missed The Insider. While the movie is actually excellent and was nominated for several Oscars, including a Best Actor nomination for Russell Crowe that he probably should have won, the movie was criminally overlooked and didn't win a single award. And it largely seems to have faded from memory ever since.
Of course, now that it seems that The Insider might be the only time Al Pacino ever wore shorts on camera in over 50 feature films, does he realize this? Did he realize while putting on the shorts in wardrobe that day that he'd never done that before? Did he hate it and have to be talked into wearing them? I have so many more questions now than I did when this started.
