Dog Day Afternoon

WHAT WENT WRONG

This episode of 'What Went Wrong' explores Sidney Lumet's 1975 film 'Dog Day Afternoon,' a tense, claustrophobic heist drama based on a real

Key takeaways

• The film's realism and sweaty, raw aesthetic make it one of the most immersive and stressful cinematic experiences ever made.
• Al Pacino's performance is considered among his greatest, blending likability with underlying danger.

Main topics

• The true story behind 'Dog Day Afternoon' and discrepancies in retelling
• Al Pacino's performance and career trajectory leading up to the film

Notable quotes

"This is one of my favorite heist movies, if you could even call it that."

Conclusion

While 'Dog Day Afternoon' remains a landmark film for its emotional depth, performance

Transcript preview

Speaker 4 (0:20) Hello, and welcome back to What Went Wrong, your favorite podcast full stop that just so happens to be about movies and how it's nearly impossible to make them, let alone a good one, let alone one of the most stressful movies I think I've ever watched, but a very good one. I'm very excited to talk about this film. I'm one of your hosts, Lizzie Bassett, here as always with Chris Winterbauer. And Chris, what do you got for us today? We're Speaker 3 (0:45) heading to a whole different Speaker 4 (0:46) country, Speaker 3 (0:47) Wyoming. That was the Speaker 4 (0:49) saddest Speaker 3 (0:49) part of the movie. We're going to talk about that line. It has a specific origin and is kind of hotly disputed by various folks actually involved in the real life events that this is based upon. We are talking about Dog Day Afternoon, one of my favorite heist movies, if you could even call it that. I agree. A very stressful film, perhaps a film the Safdie brothers watched over and over again. Yes. I think this movie inspired the Safdies amongst many others in terms of panic inducing New York based movies. Let's bring that heart rate up. But before we dive in, a quick note. If you guys are interested in hearing this podcast sans ads, no ads and with bonus episodes, con bonus episodes, you can now do so on Apple. Spotify, and Patreon for five bucks a month. No matter what platform you sign up for, you get all of our episodes ad free and at least one bonus episode per month. They're typically reviews of new films that have come out. So if you're interested, you can hit subscribe on Apple or Spotify under the special features banner, or you can head to www.patreon.com slash what went wrong podcast to do so. If you sign up on Apple, a quick note. The ad-free episodes that release every Monday may take a few extra hours to update on your feed. They will be up by the afternoon. We apologize for that, but that is a technical limitation brought on by Apple. Please send personal mail to Tim Cook to tell him to fix this because we would love to get you guys these ad-free episodes at midnight every Monday. All right, enough housekeeping. Lizzie, we are talking about Dog Day Afternoon. A movie in which everyone is sweating so much all the time, including the viewer. It's Speaker 4 (2:30) the sweatiest movie I've ever seen. Speaker 3 (2:32) And it's perfect because we are dealing with an historic heat dome is settling in over the United States, especially the western United States, as an historic El Nino, perhaps a once in a century El Nino, is percolating in the Pacific Ocean. Can't wait. The humidity in LA is just swamp gooch territory up the yin yang. Yeah, Speaker 4 (2:48) and there's mosquitoes. Absolute nightmare. There Speaker 3 (2:50) are mosquitoes. My children have been chewed up. So Lizzie, I have to ask you, had you ever seen Sidney Lumet's Dog Day Afternoon before? And what were your thoughts upon watching or re-watching it for the podcast? I Speaker 4 (3:02) had not ever seen this movie in full. I had seen plenty of scenes from it. I, you know, knew very basically what it was about. But this was my first time really sitting down and watching it beginning to end. And I loved it. I can't believe I haven't seen this movie before now. Shame on me. This is one of the top three Al Pacino performances, I think, certainly. There's so many things about this movie that I loved. I loved the pacing. I loved that even though it gets very big by the end, it feels so small for so much of it, very, you know, claustrophobic. And it focuses so much on the personal relationships and interactions more than it does, you know, action or anything, to your point about the question of whether or not this is really a heist movie. I think the answer is yes, but it's a heist movie that cares about... the people doing the heist and also the people that are being held up. Obviously, it's a movie with some very interesting and I think nuanced queer representation, which I know we will talk about over the course of this episode. If you've not had a chance to listen to our episode with Raina Dearwater from GLAAD, please go back and listen to that. It's a really great conversation about where we are today in terms of LGBTQ representation in film now. And also, I think it speaks a little bit to where this movie would fit in, in terms of the kind of, specifically in this case, trans representation that we see in film. All to say, this movie's great. Man, do I miss when people were sweaty and weird looking in movies. I really wish we could bring that back. Everybody in this just has a real face and a real body, and they're all a little weird looking, but they're also all attractive. And I just, I just miss it so much. And Al Pacino is super hot. Just had to throw that in there at the end. Also, Carole Kane. So cute. Little tiny under the desk mouse, Carole Kane. Squirrel. Yes, he does call her a Speaker 3 (4:49) squirrel, which is ruder, I think, for some reason. Speaker 4 (4:52) Anyway, yeah, I found it very moving. Even though I knew what the ending was going to be, I still found myself hoping that maybe they were going to find their way out of it. And of course, they don't. Spoiler alert. Chris, what's your experience with Dog Day Afternoon? Speaker 3 (5:04) I had seen this before a couple times. This was one my dad introduced me to. God, Speaker 4 (5:08) Steve's got great taste. Speaker 3 (5:09) He does. He loved this movie. A few early, this Serpico was the other big one that he did with Sidney Lumet, which I rewatched for this episode. And I loved it in high school. I couldn't believe how good it was. It was also my first experience with John Cazale when I was in high school. Oh, Speaker 4 (5:26) because had you not seen The Godfather? Speaker 3 (5:27) I saw this before I saw The Godfather. Interesting. And so this was my first Cazale experience. I didn't know Fredo. And I love his performance in this movie. He's so good. Sal Natturale. And so I knew it was based on a true story. I didn't know much about the true story. And a lot of what we're going to talk about is the story behind this movie. I agree with you. I love the pacing of this film. I love that it doesn't have music, with the exception of a needle drop that opens the movie. And we'll talk a little bit about that song selection. I think this is one of Sidney Lumet's best films. It's so interesting that he has kind of a mid-career, I would not call it a revival, but from a prestige perspective, perhaps a mid-career revival that corresponds to Al Pacino having one of the most incredible openings to any film career that an actor has ever had. And we'll talk about, I watched all of his lead roles leading into this movie, and we can talk about the crescendo that builds kind of through Dog Day Afternoon. It's pretty remarkable. And yet this movie was kind of controversially received, especially by a lot of people in the gay community at the time, even though it was really well received critically. And the subjects of the film are even more complicated than they appear in the movie. And we're going to talk about that, too. Speaker 4 (6:32) Okay, I'm glad because I have a lot of questions about. Well, we can get into it. I have a lot of questions about the way that Sonny's wife is portrayed in the movie. Well, both of them, actually. He Speaker 3 (6:44) has two wives in the film, and he has more wives across his life. Okay. And we can talk about that. I Speaker 4 (6:49) have questions about both, because in some ways, they both feel like somewhat unfair portrayals, but I don't know. So I'm interested to learn more. And obviously, one of his wives is trans. And that is, of course, the sort of linchpin that a lot of the movie hinges on. kind of, is whether or not he did this to get money for an operation. Speaker 3 (7:08) Yeah, we'll talk about that too. It's really a Russian nesting doll of stories within stories within stories within stories. We'll do our best to try to see if we can get to a truth, but ultimately it's kind of John's word against many other people's word kind of, you know, over time. Let Speaker 4 (7:23) me say this though. I think one thing that the movie actually does well, and I don't know enough for this to, you know, be an absolute truth that I'm about to say, but I think it did a decently good job of exposing how complicated he was and the fact that it seems like he had been dangerous to both of his partners at that point prior to this. And they don't brush that under the rug. It's brought up multiple times by both wives. And it's interesting, though, because Al Pacino plays him as so likable and so sort of gentle towards the hostages that it's a weird dichotomy to have to hold over the course of the movie. But I appreciated that they didn't erase that, whatever that was. Speaker 3 (8:01) Yeah. Pacino is just at this point in his career, he is so unbelievably likable. I went and watched The Panic at Needle Park, his first lead role from 71. And then rewatched The Godfather and then Scarecrow, which I had never seen with him and Gene Hackman, which one of our audience members recommended as a bait and switch movie because it does become very kind of serious midway through. And then. Serpico, Godfather Part II, and this. And what's interesting is Corleone is kind of the outlier performance in how taciturn and reserved that character is. Yes. And he's much more dynamic, light on his feet, charismatic, now still very somber, troubled, tragic in a lot of these roles, but there's a lightness to him. He's sweet. He's very sweet. And that comes through. In Serpico, you could argue actually to the detriment of the film a little bit. He seems a little too naive. But the point is, there's a sweetness to Pacino. And I agree with you. I'm glad they don't shy away from certain things that, as we'll learn, are very real. Speaker 4 (8:55) Yeah, I Speaker 3 (8:55) figured. Let's get into it. For me, this is my favorite Pacino performance movie. I love this movie. Speaker 4 (9:00) I think I agree. I think, yeah. I Speaker 3 (9:03) just think it's the most interesting. But let's dive in. Great. Because it very nearly didn't happen. And Pacino had a really hard time with this role. And it's a very interesting story. So before we begin, the details. Dog Day Afternoon is a 1975 American crime drama based on a true story film directed by Sidney Lumet. It was written by Frank Pearson and is based primarily on the Life magazine article The Boys in the Bank by writers P.F. Kluge and Thomas Moore. It was produced by Martin Bregman and Martin Elfend, and it stars, and I'm going to read the names of the characters as they are described in the film, and then we'll talk about their real counterparts later. Al Pacino as Sonny Wartzik. John Cazale as Sal Nacidale. Charles Durning as Sergeant Eugene Moretti. I love Charles Durning. Charles Durning's great. Chris Sarandon as Leon Shermer. Penelope Allen as Sylvia. Susan Peretz as Angie Wartzik. You mentioned Lizzie, his first wife. James Broderick as FBI Special Agent Sheldon, Lance Henriksen as FBI Special Agent Murphy, Carol Kane as Jenny, Sully Boyar as the bank manager Mulvaney, and many, many more. You'll notice a lot of people throughout this film. It was released on December 25th, 1975 in the United States by Warner Brothers. And as always, the IMDb logline reads, Three amateur robbers plan to hold up a Brooklyn bank. A nice, simple robbery. Walk in, take the money, and run. Unfortunately, the supposedly uncomplicated heist suddenly becomes a bizarre nightmare as everything that could go wrong does. I propose what I'm now introducing as Chris's alternate logline. Three small-time crooks hit big-time fame when a simple bank heist goes awry, bringing the police, the public, and the media colliding together one afternoon in the dog days of the New York summer. Speaker 4 (10:49) Beautiful. It's like he's a professional writer. Also, can I just say... Thank God Sidney Lumet made this movie because I guarantee you Ryan Murphy would have this thing turned into an American crime story in 0.2 seconds. And maybe he still will. I Speaker 3 (11:02) don't know. I'm surprised it hasn't happened, to be honest, as we'll talk about, because you could explore the before and the after and it would continue to be very interesting. Speaker 4 (11:10) Don't Speaker 3 (11:10) give him any ideas, Chris. Speaker 4 (11:12) I don't know. Maybe he could do a good job at it. I Speaker 3 (11:14) mean, as long as Jessica Lange's in it, I'm fine. I Speaker 4 (11:17) don't know who she's going to play. Oh, one of the tellers. Perfect. She's cast. Or his mother, Terry. Oh, yeah. Speaker 3 (11:22) Yeah. Sources for today's episode include, but are not limited to, and really not limited to, there were so many sources for this one, but these are the main ones. Born to Lose, The Misfits Who Made Dog Day Afternoon by Rachel Walther, Making Movies by Sidney Lumet, Sunny Boy, a memoir, which I highly recommend by Al Pacino, and The Dog, a documentary on John Wadowitz, who is the subject of this film by Alison Berg and Frank Karaudrin. and many more articles, interviews, and retrospectives with those involved in the making of the film. So Lizzie, as you saw, Dog Day Afternoon begins with two sentences on a black screen. What you are about to see is true. It happened in Brooklyn, New York on August 22nd, 1972. So let's talk about Brooklyn, New York, August 1972. It was hot. Yeah. And it was humid. Hurricane Agnes had brought record rainfall in June. followed by a historic heat wave in July, and the world was changing. And New York was the center of a lot of that change. This was just a couple years after the Stonewall riots, I'm sure you're well familiar with, Lizzie. Mayor John Lindsay, who was a Republican mayor in a Democratic city, had just signed an executive order prohibiting employment discrimination against gay workers in the public sector, which was the first time that public workers were protected for sexual orientation in the United States. The New York Police Department Following the efforts of Officer Frank Serpico and Sergeant David Dirk was facing increased scrutiny by the Knapp Commission for corrupt practices. But at the same time, cameras were appearing all over the city with the advent of VTRs and VCRs, videotape recorders and videocassette recorders. The surveillance state of CCTV was being born. It was just a few years old. All the while, Lizzie, what was the biggest movie in the country? in the summer of 1972. You covered it in a two-part episode, and it stars Al Pacino. The Speaker 4 (13:16) Godfather. Speaker 3 (13:17) The Godfather. Just the first one. Just the first one. It had been in theaters for five months. It would, of course, bring in $250 million against a $6 million budget, which would make it the highest-grossing movie of the year and of all time for a few years. And New York-born Al Pacino was suddenly very, very famous. And soon, New York-born John Wadowitz would be, too. A bit on John Wadowitz. He was five years younger than Al Pacino. He was a Vietnam War veteran. And on August 22nd, he and two acquaintances, Sal Natchadali and Robert Westenberg, caught a matinee showing of what movie, Lizzie? The Godfather? The Godfather. To pump themselves up. After the movie, they went into Chase Bank in Brooklyn just before closing time at 2.58 p.m. and John Wadowitz handed the manager a note and the note ended with a single line. Just do what you're told and no one will get hurt. This is an offer you can't refuse. Oh my God. Of course, it is an offer you can refuse if you're Alfred James Sonny Pacino, better known as Al Pacino. Now, the first time Al Pacino read the script for what would become known as Dog Day Afternoon, he passed. But let's get back to that. Let's go back to the summer of 1972 and jump away from John Waterwitz to producers Martin Elfand and Martin Bregman, who had about as much experience producing movies as John Waterwitz had robbing banks. Uh-oh. So Elfand got his first producing credit that year with the Raquel Welch vehicle, Kansas City Bomber. I've never seen this. Have you seen this, Lizzie? Never heard of it. Never seen it. It was made, though, under Artists Entertainment Complex, a film production and talent representation company headed by Martin Bregman. And Bregman was looking for material. He had just bought the rights to the story of NYPD whistleblower Frank Serpico, specifically for Pacino. Have you seen Serpico, Lizzie? A long, long time Speaker 4 (15:12) ago, but yes. I Speaker 3 (15:13) really liked it. It's great. Very interesting story. I think really showed that Pacino could cover a lot of ground. He ends up playing much older than he actually is in that film. It's Speaker 2 (15:22) a Speaker 3 (15:22) pretty dynamic performance. On September 22nd, 1972, Life magazine published an article called The Boys in the Bank. And the title is an allusion to a 1968 play that I'm sure you're familiar with, Lizzie. Which one? The Boys in the Band. The Boys in the Band by Mark Crowley. There was a film adaptation by William Friedkin in 1970. It was one of the first movies to revolve around a group of gay male characters. So Cluj and Moore, the writers of the article, had interviewed the hostages, the police officers, the people in Wadowitz's life, including his mother. his estranged first wife, and of course, his second wife, who is at this point going by the name Elizabeth Eden. So there's a lot of confusion, both in the film and in materials around the film, around Elizabeth Eden and her preferred pronouns and how she identified at the time of this robbery and the making of the film. To be clear, Elizabeth Eden used both he and she pronouns. She said in a lawsuit against Warner Brothers that at the time of the making of the film and the robbery, she identified as a boy. That's, again, her words. We'll do our best to honor the pronouns she used later in her life throughout this episode. But just so you know, the confusion, I think, stems from a bit of ambiguity at the time about what was preferred by Elizabeth Eden. I'm guessing what caught Bregman and Elfin's eye was the following. In the third paragraph of the article, The writers describe would-be bank robber John Wadowitz as, quote, a dark, thin fellow with the broken-faced good looks of an Al Pacino or Dustin Hoffman. Speaker 4 (16:49) They're just casting the movie. Speaker 3 (16:51) Lizzie, this is not hyperbole. Have you ever seen John Wadowitz? Show me. Speaker 4 (16:54) Oh, yeah. He's given, like, Al Pacino and Ringo Starr had a baby, kind of. Speaker 3 (17:00) Yeah, definitely the haircut is very Ringo at the time. The pageboy bowl. Speaker 4 (17:04) Yeah. Yeah, I mean, yes, he definitely looks like Al Pacino or Dustin Hoffman could play him. Who does he look like today? There's someone he looks exactly like. I actually think he also looks a little like De Niro at the time because of his nose. Yes, he does. I mean, I don't know. I don't know who you would put in this role today. Like Jeremy Allen White with a wig. That's possible. Sure. Chris doesn't love it, but he'll consider it. I'll consider it. Speaker 3 (17:25) So do you know who played him? And they did a stage adaptation of it. I do know who played him. John Bernthal. That's right. So the Martys, as we'll call them, Bregman and Elfin, had both represented Pacino. Elfin as an agent, Bregman as a manager. And in fact, Pacino once said, quote, Martin Bregman discovered me off-Broadway. I was 26, 25, and he discovered me and became my manager, and that's why I'm here. I owe it to Marty. I really do. He later wrote in his memoir that he told Pacino, look, I let Dustin Hoffman go by. I'm not going to do it again. And they weren't going to let this story go by either. Speaker 4 (17:58) Well, and also, as we know from the Godfather episode, Pacino... was not like an obvious shoe in for the leading roles that he ended up getting, especially not The Godfather. He was on a lot of, you know, Broadway and off-Broadway, and he was making a space there, but it was definitely a big push to get him into the movies. Speaker 3 (18:17) Bregman wasn't going to let this story go by because it was unbelievable. So let's get back to the robbery. John Wadowitz Lizzie had worked in a bank. In fact, he'd worked... In Chase Bank, Chase Manhattan. He knew what he was doing and he had a plan. He would walk in with guns and leave with over $200,000 in cash. The whole thing would be over in minutes. It fell apart even faster. Speaker 4 (18:41) Robert Speaker 3 (18:41) Westenberg got cold feet and bailed, leaving Wadowich and his 18-year-old or 19-year-old, I've read both ages, I believe it's 18, accomplice Sal Nacidale a man down. Speaker 4 (18:53) Oh, wow. Sal was 18? He Speaker 3 (18:55) was 18. Speaker 4 (18:56) Oh, no. That makes that a lot sadder. They got the vault Speaker 3 (18:59) opened, and they found less than $50,000 inside when they were expecting $250,000. Before they could leave, the police had arrived. Now, in the movie, it's not explicitly explained how the police have found out what's happening at the bank. There is a suggestion that perhaps a fire that takes place inside one of the trash cans, the smoke. In reality, it's because Wadowitz had let the bank manager answer the phone. Ralph Aiello, an assistant treasurer and HR officer from a different branch, was calling about transferring a teller. And he could tell that something was off from the way that the branch manager, Barrett, was speaking. Wow. So Ralph Aiello asked, is there a problem at the branch? And Robert Barrett answers, very much so, and have a nice day, and then hangs up. Aiello calls Chase Corporate Security. They call the NYPD. And suddenly... Wodewitz and Naturali are trapped, and so are the eight employees inside the bank, and the robbery becomes a hostage standoff. So by early 1973, several newspapers reported that the Martys had secured the rights to the boys in the bank. But Lizzie, there's a problem. Do you think the studios were eager to touch this story? No. Nobody wanted to touch it. They had struggled to find a studio to back Serpico a couple years earlier, which is actually why they partnered with Dino De Laurentiis on that movie, and we're going to talk about the consequences of that a little bit later. Speaker 4 (20:25) There's Speaker 2 (20:25) always consequences. Speaker 3 (20:27) Yeah, Speaker 2 (20:27) a lot of personal expenses in the budget, as they learned. Speaker 3 (20:30) The same was proving true with The Boys in the Bank. According to Andrew Yule's Pacino biography, A Life on the Wire, there was one interested party, Dick Shepard. He was an ex-agent, now working as an executive at Warner Brothers. The people involved in the robbery were also just as skeptical about a movie as the studios. According to Bregman, quote, they all had to be convinced that we would tell it pretty much the way it happened. Elfin put it more bluntly. Everyone was suspicious, and I don't really blame them. There was this feeling of the little guys being exploited by the giant corporation, and I understand that. End quote. All but one hostage ended up signing on, including Wadowicz, after a protracted negotiation and holdout. We'll get back to what he ended up getting paid at the end of this episode. But they didn't have Al Pacino. Not yet. As Bregman put it, no actor was attached at first. I couldn't go to Al hand in