There’s no plaque to honor the encounter, and neither of its central participants can pinpoint the exact date it occurred, but somewhere on a stretch of 14th Street in Manhattan’s East Village is the spot where, in the late 1960s, two rookie actors named Robert De Niro and Al Pacino first crossed paths.

They were up-and-comers enjoying early tastes of steady work and visibility, and they knew each other by name and reputation. They compared résumés, sized each other up — Pacino still remembers De Niro as having “an unusual look and a certain energy” — and each walked away wondering what the future held for himself and the man he had just met.