Dog Day Afternoon

54 years ago, nearly to the day, John Wojtowicz and two accomplices caught a matinee showing of The Godfather, then walked into a bank and inadvertently changed cinema history. Chris & Lizzie explore Sidney Lumet's adaptation of Wojtowicz's sensational and tragic failed heist, the major studios' reticence to touch the material, Al Pacino's struggles with the role, and what Hollywood owes the subjects who inspire the films they make. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Lizzie Bassett?

  12 celebrities, one Don and cold, hard cash. From the producers of The Traitors comes The Mob, a new Hulu original series coming to Hulu and Hulu on Disney Plus on October 26th. In this unique new reality competition show hosted by the iconic Parker Posey, 12 celebrity contestants are about to become members of a powerful family. For two weeks in a lavish Italian villa, they'll shake down and hustle to win a share of up to $250,000. And every good mob needs a Don. Whoever they choose to lead them will have absolute power deciding who stays and who gets taken out, who makes money and who walks away with nothing. In a game of power where loyalty and trust are the currency, will the most powerful

• 0:45Lizzie Bassett?

  reality contestant in TV history be able to keep the family happy? And if they're overthrown by the mob, who will step up and become the new Don? Let the games begin. Watch the new Hulu original series, The Mob, premiering October 26th on Hulu and Hulu on Disney Plus for bundle subscribers. Terms apply.

• 1:05Chris Winterbauer?

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• 1:56Lizzie Bassett?

  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?

• 2:21Chris Winterbauer?

  We're heading to a whole different country. Wyoming.

• 2:25Lizzie Bassett?

  That was the saddest part of the movie.

• 2:28Chris Winterbauer?

  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 couldn't even call it that. I agree, a very stressful film, perhaps a film the Safdie brothers watched over and over again.

• 2:50Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 2:50Chris Winterbauer?

  I think this movie inspired the Safdie's 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 $5 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/whatwentwrongpodcast to do so.

• 3:33Chris Winterbauer?

  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.

• 4:07Lizzie Bassett?

  It's the sweatiest movie I've ever seen.

• 4:08Chris Winterbauer?

  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.

• 4:19Lizzie Bassett?

  Can't wait.

• 4:20Chris Winterbauer?

  The humidity in LA is just swamp gooch territory up the ying yang.

• 4:25Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, and there's mosquitoes. Absolute nightmare.

• 4:27Chris Winterbauer?

  There 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 rewatching it for the podcast?

• 4:38Lizzie Bassett?

  I 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 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

• 5:21Lizzie Bassett?

  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 GLAD, 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.

• 6:05Lizzie Bassett?

  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, Carol Kane, so cute, little tiny under the desk mouse, Carol Kane.

• 6:24Chris Winterbauer?

  Squirrel.

• 6:24Lizzie Bassett?

  Squirrel. Yes, he does call her a squirrel, which is rude, I think, for some reason. 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?

• 6:40Chris Winterbauer?

  I had seen this before a couple of times. This was one my dad introduced me to.

• 6:44Lizzie Bassett?

  Steve's got great taste.

• 6:46Chris Winterbauer?

  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 and.

• 7:02Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, because had you not seen The Godfather?

• 7:03Chris Winterbauer?

  I saw this before I saw The Godfather.

• 7:05Lizzie Bassett?

  Interesting.

• 7:06Chris Winterbauer?

  And so this was my first Cazale experience. I didn't know Fredo and I love his performance in this movie.

• 7:12Lizzie Bassett?

  He's so good.

• 7:12Chris Winterbauer?

  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.

• 7:55Chris Winterbauer?

  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.

• 8:08Lizzie Bassett?

  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.

• 8:20Chris Winterbauer?

  He has two wives in the film and he has more wives across his life.

• 8:23Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay.

• 8:24Chris Winterbauer?

  And we can talk about that.

• 8:25Lizzie Bassett?

  I 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.

• 8:44Chris Winterbauer?

  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 truths, but ultimately it's kind of John's word against many other people's word, kind of, you know, over time.

• 8:59Lizzie Bassett?

  Let 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 likeable 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.

• 9:37Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. Pacino is just at this point in his career, he is so unbelievably likeable. 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 Two, and this. And what's interesting is Corleone is kind of the outlier performance in how taciturn and reserved that character is.

• 10:08Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 10:09Chris Winterbauer?

  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.

• 10:17Lizzie Bassett?

  He's sweet.

• 10:18Chris Winterbauer?

  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.

• 10:31Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, I figured.

• 10:32Chris Winterbauer?

  Let's get into it. For me, this is my favorite Pacino performance movie. I love this movie.

• 10:36Lizzie Bassett?

  I think I agree. I think, yeah.

• 10:39Chris Winterbauer?

  I just think it's the most interesting. But let's dive in.

• 10:41Lizzie Bassett?

  Great.

• 10:42Chris Winterbauer?

  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 More. It was produced by Martin Bregman and Martin Elfin. And it stars, and I'm going to read the names of the characters as they are described in the film.

• 11:17Lizzie Bassett?

  Right.

• 11:17Chris Winterbauer?

  And then we'll talk about their real counterparts later. Al Pacino as Sonny Wartzick, John Kazal as Sal Nachedali, Charles Durning as Sergeant Eugene Moretti.

• 11:26Lizzie Bassett?

  I love Charles Durning.

• 11:27Chris Winterbauer?

  Charles Durning's great. Chris Sarandon as Leon Shermer, Penelope Allen as Sylvia, Susan Paretz as Angie Wartzick. 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 25, 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 can go wrong does.

• 12:11Chris Winterbauer?

  I propose what I'm now introducing as Chris's alternate logline."

• 12:14Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 12:14Chris Winterbauer?

  "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."

• 12:25Lizzie Bassett?

  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 don't know.

• 12:39Chris Winterbauer?

  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.

• 12:47Lizzie Bassett?

  Don't give him any ideas, Chris. I don't know, maybe he could do a good job at it.

• 12:50Chris Winterbauer?

  I mean, as long as Jessica Lange's in it, I'm fine.

• 12:53Lizzie Bassett?

  I don't know who she's gonna play. Oh, one of the tellers, perfect, she's cast.

• 12:56Chris Winterbauer?

  Or his mother, Terry.

• 12:58Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, yeah.

• 12:59Chris Winterbauer?

  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, Sonny 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 Corradran. 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 22, 1972.

• 13:41Chris Winterbauer?

  So, let's talk about Brooklyn, New York, August, 1972. It was hot.

• 13:47Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 13:47Chris Winterbauer?

  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 of 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 NAP Commission for corrupt practices.

• 14:30Chris Winterbauer?

  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.

• 14:52Lizzie Bassett?

  The Godfather.

• 14:53Chris Winterbauer?

  The Godfather.

• 14:54Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 14:55Chris Winterbauer?

  Just the first one.

• 14:56Lizzie Bassett?

  Just the first one.

• 14:57Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. 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 22, he and two acquaintances, Sal Nachedali and Robert Westenberg, caught a matinee showing of what movie, Lizzie?

• 15:33Lizzie Bassett?

  The Godfather?

• 15:34Chris Winterbauer?

  The Godfather, to pump themselves up. After the movie, they went into Chase Bank in Brooklyn.

• 15:40Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, no, guys.

• 15:40Chris Winterbauer?

  Just before closing time at 2:58 PM. 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."

• 15:53Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, my God.

• 15:55Chris Winterbauer?

  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 Wadowitz to producers Martin Elfin and Martin Bregman, who had about as much experience producing movies as John Wadowitz had robbing banks.

• 16:23Lizzie Bassett?

  Uh-oh.

• 16:23Chris Winterbauer?

  So, Elfin got his first producing credit that year with the Raquel Welch vehicle, Kansas City Bomber. I have never seen this. Have you seen this, Lizzie?

• 16:30Lizzie Bassett?

  Never heard of it.

• 16:31Chris Winterbauer?

  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?

• 16:48Lizzie Bassett?

  A long, long time ago, but yes.

• 16:49Chris Winterbauer?

  I really liked it.

• 16:50Lizzie Bassett?

  It's great.

• 16:50Chris Winterbauer?

  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 a pretty dynamic performance. On September 22, 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?

• 17:11Lizzie Bassett?

  The Boys in the Band.

• 17:12Chris Winterbauer?

  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 Kluge and More, 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.

• 17:57Chris Winterbauer?

  We'll do our best to honor the pronouns she used later in her life throughout this episode. But just, 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."

• 18:26Lizzie Bassett?

  They're just cast in the movie.

• 18:27Chris Winterbauer?

  Lizzie, this is not hyperbole. Have you ever seen John Wadowitz?

• 18:30Lizzie Bassett?

  Show me. Oh, yeah. He's given, like, Al Pacino and Ringo Starr had a baby, kind of.

• 18:36Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. Definitely the haircut is very Ringo at the time. The page boy bowl.

• 18:40Lizzie Bassett?

  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.

• 18:49Chris Winterbauer?

  I actually think he also looks a little like De Niro at the time because of his nose.

• 18:52Lizzie Bassett?

  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.

• 18:58Chris Winterbauer?

  That's possible, sure.

• 18:59Lizzie Bassett?

  Chris doesn't love it, but he'll consider it.

• 19:01Chris Winterbauer?

  I'll consider it. So do you know who played him? And they did a stage adaptation of it.

• 19:06Lizzie Bassett?

  I do know who played him, John Bernthal.

• 19:08Chris Winterbauer?

  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.

• 19:34Lizzie Bassett?

  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.

• 19:53Chris Winterbauer?

  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.

• 20:06Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh.

• 20:06Chris Winterbauer?

  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.

• 20:17Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 20:18Chris Winterbauer?

  Robert Westenberg got cold feet and bailed, leaving Waterwitz and his 18-year-old or 19-year-old, I've read both ages, I believe it's 18, accomplice Sal Natchodali, a man down.

• 20:29Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, wow. Sal was 18?

• 20:31Chris Winterbauer?

  He was 18.

• 20:32Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, no. That makes that a lot sadder.

• 20:35Chris Winterbauer?

  They got the vault 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 trashcan, the smoke. In reality, it's because Waterwitz had let the bank manager answer the phone. Ralph Iello, 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.

• 21:10Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow.

• 21:10Chris Winterbauer?

  So Ralph Iello asked, is there a problem at the branch? And Robert Barrett answers, very much so, and have a nice day. And then hangs up.

• 21:18Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay.

• 21:18Chris Winterbauer?

  Iello calls Chase Corporate Security, they call the NYPD, and suddenly Waterwitz and Natchodali are trapped, and so are the eight employees inside the bank. And the robbery becomes a hostage standoff.

• 21:33Chris Winterbauer?

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• 22:36Lizzie Bassett?

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• 24:27Chris Winterbauer?

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• 24:54Chris Winterbauer?

  So by early 1973, several newspapers reported that the Mardis 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?

• 25:06Lizzie Bassett?

  No.

• 25:07Chris Winterbauer?

  Nobody wanted to touch it. They had struggled to find a studio to back Serpico a couple of years earlier, which is actually why they partnered with Dino Delaurentis on that movie. And we're going to talk about the consequences of that a little bit later.

• 25:18Lizzie Bassett?

  There's always consequences.

• 25:20Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, a lot of personal expenses in the budget, as they learned. The same was proving true with The Boys in the Bank. According to Andrew Yules' Pacino biography, A Life on the Wire, there was one interested party, Dick Shepherd. 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 Waterwitz, after a protracted negotiation and holdout.

• 26:05Chris Winterbauer?

  And 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 hand. First of all, I still represented him. Then you're never going to get a firm commitment from anyone until you have a screenplay. It would be like joining a heist without a plan." And we know how that goes. So Bregman needed a man on the inside, someone who could figure out who John Waterwitz really was. He needed writer Frank Pearson. So Frank Pearson, like Waterwitz and Pacino, was a New York native. He was also a veteran, not the Vietnam War, but World War II. According to his son, quote, "When he came back, he was very, very sick. He got malaria, dysentery, jungle rot. He was like a human skeleton. The impact from the war was monstrous on him. It created somebody who was a huge pacifist

• 26:49Chris Winterbauer?

  and deeply cynical of our government." We should note, John Waterwitz had a similar transformation. He's described himself as a Goldwater Republican prior to going to Vietnam.

• 26:59Lizzie Bassett?

  Which they mention in the movie, or he mentions in the movie.

• 27:01Chris Winterbauer?

  There are photos of him at the Republican National Convention in 1964, I believe. Goes to Vietnam. We'll talk about the sexual experience he has. But more importantly, when he's in Da Nang, he witnesses a large percentage of his battalion or his fellow soldiers wiped out in a rocket attack. And he becomes a peacenik, you know, when he returns to the United States. He has a full 180-degree turn. So Pearson got a job in the mailroom at Life Magazine. And then he worked his way up to journalist. And he eventually wrote for both life and time, like the writers of The Boys in the Bank. He pivoted into television. He wrote episodes of Have Gun, Will Travel, and Empire. Started directing television. He even directed a TV movie, The Neon Ceiling, which co-starred Denise Nickerson, aka Violet Beauregard, a couple of months before Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory came out.

• 27:46Chris Winterbauer?

  And then he broke into movies with a re-riot of Cat Baloo, the Jane Fonda Western comedy. Lee Marvin got an Oscar for his dual performance in that movie. Frank Pearson got an Oscar nomination for that movie. And then he got nominated again a few years later with his adaptation of Cool Hand Luke.

• 27:59Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, amazing.

• 28:00Chris Winterbauer?

  Which I'm sure you're familiar with.

• 28:01Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 28:02Chris Winterbauer?

  But Dog Day was a different challenge, Lizzie, because he was struggling to figure out what kind of movie it was going to be. It was actually unclear where the focus should be based on the article. Should it be focused on what's going on outside the bank? Is it a police officer's story? Is it about the police hysteria, the crowd hysteria? Should it take place entirely inside the bank? Should he follow one of the tellers, you know, in particular? Or is it the personal history of this man, John Waterwitz? And what's confusing for him is that the direction of the studio was that this was going to be a comedy.

• 28:33Lizzie Bassett?

  What?

• 28:33Chris Winterbauer?

  Yes. And actually, if you watch the trailers for the final film, they lean very comedy.

• 28:40Lizzie Bassett?

  I can like, kind of see. I mean, I can't, because in order to do that, you would have to either massively belittle or omit major parts of the story, including the fact that someone dies.

• 28:53Chris Winterbauer?

  I think belittle is the right word. And it's the word to keep in mind as we get to some decisions that Sidney Lumet makes later that the studio doesn't agree with.

• 29:00Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, I could see someone at that time making the case for how you could turn this into a comedy. It would be bad, but I could see them doing it.

• 29:09Chris Winterbauer?

  So finally, Pearson decides, I'm going to write it from John's perspective. This is going to be the story of this bank robbery from the perspective of John Waterwitz. Before he puts pen to paper, he does his homework. He interviews everybody involved in the real-life incident, just like the writers from Life Magazine, except for one very important person. So according to an FBI report from March of 1972, there were an average of nine bank robberies per day in the United States in 1971, Lizzie.

• 29:37Lizzie Bassett?

  What?

• 29:38Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. The same report noted that more and more banks were using CCTV security cameras, which was a new technology, kind of. The technology had existed, actually, in some form for decades, but it was just now starting to be employed in banks and across cities. Actually, the first city to use it widely was Olean, New York, which is in Western New York on the border with Pennsylvania, I believe, in 1968. Again, according to this report, which was released four months before the events portrayed in Dog Day Afternoon, bank robbers were coming up with new ways to work around these high-tech security measures, like robbing the bank as it closed, taking hostages to force the bank officially To open the vaults. And this had actually worked. There's reference to one case in which the gunman

• 30:22Chris Winterbauer?

  held 13 members of a bank manager's family hostage while his two co-conspirators drove the official to the bank to open the vault. They escaped with $400,000. They were later arrested. And the report ends with the following. Quote, "A campaign of continuous coordinated effort is needed to make the odds against success so great that hostage bank robberies will cease." So let's get back to the robbery. Heading into the evening of August 22nd, 1972, John Wadowitz's odds were not looking very good, Lizzie. He describes how when he looked out of the bank to leave for the first time, he saw that there were police officers on the fire escapes, in the windows, around the corner, on the roof. And he said, "Where the hell did all these guys come from?" He sees a quote in that documentary with the dog. He goes, "You know when you see in the movies

• 31:07Chris Winterbauer?

  how they say, 'We got one minute. We got one minute to get in and get out.'" He goes, "It's because of this. This is why you got one minute to get in and out." Despite this, the mood inside Chase Bank was surprisingly upbeat. Wadowitz let the hostages take phone calls and go to the bathroom. Bank manager Robert Barrett later said he had more laughs during that situation than he'd had in weeks. As the head teller later said, "If they had been my house guests on a Saturday evening, it'd be hilarious." Now, we should note, this is taking place a year before the bank hostage situation in Stockholm, Sweden, which would lead to the widely disputed pop psychology term.

• 31:43Lizzie Bassett?

  Stockholm Syndrome.

• 31:44Chris Winterbauer?

  That's right. And this is two years before Patty Hearst kidnapping and subsequent aiding with the Symbionese Liberation Army. Stockholm Syndrome is, again, widely disputed. The man who came up with it did not actually speak to anybody involved in the hostage situation. And many of the people involved said, "No, we were frustrated with the police because we just thought they were doing their jobs badly. We were, quote, 'identifying with the kidnappers because we were doing anything we had to to survive' at the end of the day."

• 32:09Lizzie Bassett?

  Right.

• 32:09Chris Winterbauer?

  Now, it does seem like the general camaraderie that they developed inside the bank may have been in part because of the chaos forming outside of the bank. The street was, as you see and can see in news footage, filled with police trucks, hundreds of armed officers, helicopters flying around, crowds and reporters. It's also important to note that broadcasting technology had taken off after World War II. Outside broadcasting, which is the production and transmission of audio and video from an external location, like live on the scene, had started to become portable. So KTLA had deployed the helicopter in 1958. This was the first helicopter broadcasting platform. It was hard because you had to get an antenna up without it getting sliced off by the rotors. And so it's a tricky thing back in the day.

• 32:54Chris Winterbauer?

  So electronic news gathering had just really been introduced. And it was this thing called the Portapack Videotape Analog Recording System from Sony that changed the game. Basically, outside broadcasting systems required enormous cameras that were on specialty vehicles with huge tripods or pedestal mounted. And these new electronic tape-based cameras could be carried and operated by one person. So you actually see this in the movie, Lizzie. You run up with, it looks like, laser guns, you know, with giant backpacks on.

• 33:19Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 33:19Chris Winterbauer?

  From the local news. So coupled with microwave transmission, the time between recording and broadcast is cut way down. So you could send a cameraman running right up to the front of a bank with a robbery in progress.

• 33:31Lizzie Bassett?

  But should you? Is the question no one asked?

• 33:35Chris Winterbauer?

  An open question. But as we mentioned earlier, Lizzie, there were eight or nine of these bank robberies a day. And in fact, there were a couple of plane jackings in a couple of years prior that were dealt with by the FBI in New York as well. Obergfeld, for example. What made this one special? What is the kind of unexpected pseudo midpoint twist of this movie, Lizzie? The piece of information that kind of turns the whole thing on its head?

• 33:59Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, there's sort of two things. One is that he comes outside and manages to kind of get the crowd on his side with a bit of crowd interaction.

• 34:07Chris Winterbauer?

  Sure.

• 34:07Lizzie Bassett?

  But I believe the piece of information you're talking about, which I'm sure blew up the news waves, is that he has a wife who is trans. I'm sure that's not how they reported it, but.

• 34:19Chris Winterbauer?

  It wasn't even how he reported it at the time.

• 34:21Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay.

• 34:22Chris Winterbauer?

  And again, for portions of this section, I'm going to use John's language when I'm quoting John, to be clear, because I want to give you guys the facts as they happened on the day. So yes, Lizzie, you nailed it. The mainstream media caught wind of a detail they were not expecting. When Wadowitz asked the police to bring down his wife, he did not mean his estranged first wife, Carmen Befulko, with whom he had two kids. He meant his second wife, Elizabeth Eden, who, at the time of these events, identified as a man under the name Ernest Aaron.

• 34:53Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, okay.

• 34:54Chris Winterbauer?

  Yes, it's complicated in terms of the timing of transition and social transition versus post-operative transition. But John refers to Elizabeth Eden as Ernest Aaron at this point in time. And the quote that he gives the FBI is during negotiations, he says, "I'm gay, my wife's a guy." And he said that he needed money to pay for her operation.

• 35:19Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay, but so she is identifying, in the way that we would qualify it today, it sounds like she is identifying as a woman at this point, even if she is not living.

• 35:28Chris Winterbauer?

  I don't think so exactly. Again, it's a little fluid. This is a period of transition for Elizabeth Eden. And it has been a serious point of contention in their relationship. Elizabeth has wanted to transition, and John has actually not wanted her to transition. In fact, they broke up months before the robbery because she wanted to transition and John did not want her to transition.

• 35:54Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay, I guess what I meant is, if she wanted to transition, that's all I wanted to clarify, because that, I guess.

• 36:00Chris Winterbauer?

  She did. Her intention and her desire at this point in time was to transition. That's my understanding.

• 36:05Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay.

• 36:06Chris Winterbauer?

  Again, all of this gets a little complicated in terms of the language used and the language available at the time.

• 36:11Lizzie Bassett?

  Sure.

• 36:11Chris Winterbauer?

  So journalist and gay activist alliance co-founder, Arthur Bell, knew Wadowitz from GAA, or Gay Activist Alliance, meetings. After being tipped off about a robbery involving two gay men, a detail that Natura disputed, Bell called the bank directly during the standoff. "Hello, this is Arthur Bell from The Village Voice. Can you tell me what's happening?" And he's shocked when John Wadowitz replies, "Arthur, I'm glad it's you. This is Little John." Little John Basso was a pseudonym that John used at the GAA meetings that he attended. Little John, as he describes in the documentary, is a reference to his small penis, and Basso is his mother's maiden name.

• 36:53Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay.

• 36:53Chris Winterbauer?

  He's a colorful, lewd individual, John Wadowitz. He had been, living to a certain extent, a double life. According to the Life magazine article, quote, "John Wadowitz divided the last weekend before the robbery as he divided his whole adult life between his two wives. On Friday night, he took Carmen and the kids to see a double feature. Saturday night, he saw," and they use the name Ernest. "He was anxious and depressed. He took enough barbiturates to scare his friends. They called an ambulance, and he was rushed to King's County Hospital." He was a very unstable person at this point in time. By the time Frank Pearson started writing, John Wadowitz was in prison. Frank Pearson would call the prison, and Wadowitz would agree to meet. But then, when Frank Pearson would show up at the prison,

• 37:38Chris Winterbauer?

  Wadowitz would refuse to see him. And this happened again and again and again. Now Frank Pearson claims it's because Wadowitz was in a dispute with Warner Brothers over the fee for his life rights. Lizzie, how much money do you think they offered him for his life rights for the film?

• 37:55Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, maybe this didn't exist at the time. Isn't there something saying that you can't profit off of, like, story rights directly related to a crime committed? Or is that just murder?

• 38:04Chris Winterbauer?

  Lizzie, you're exactly right. But that law actually didn't exist yet. That law, the Son of Sam law, went into effect in September of 1977. And it stipulated that, quote, "Profits gained from a written or dramatic reenactment of the crime of a convicted felon must be held in reserve for possible judgments in favor of the criminal's victims." So actually, some of that money went to child support and alimony payments for Carmen. And then in 1981, the bank manager, one of the hostages, Robert Barrett, was actually paid $30,000 plus $11,000 in interest, which went to medical bills.

• 38:36Lizzie Bassett?

  How much do I think? I don't know, $100,000, $50,000?

• 38:39Chris Winterbauer?

  $7,500.

• 38:41Lizzie Bassett?

  Feels a little low.

• 38:42Chris Winterbauer?

  He said, "I got a wife and a couple of kids. How am I going to live on that? What do you make in a week?" End quote. Now Pearson and Wadowitz never met. And Pearson started to freak out. Quote, "I couldn't figure out who he was. Who was it who could induce these hostages to come around to his side to defend him and to become friendly towards him?" So Pearson went to the record. He had hours of interviews to pull from. Carmen Befulko, the first wife, Wadowitz's mother, Terry, the police, the bank tellers. He also had input from journalist and gay rights advocate, Randy Wicker, who had spoken with Wadowitz and had written about him extensively. The problem became they each seemed to be describing a different person. Pearson couldn't make sense of who John was. Pearson wanted to quit.

• 39:27Chris Winterbauer?

  He wanted to walk out of the bank. But he couldn't, Lizzie, because he'd already taken the money and he'd spent it. So he couldn't give it back. So finally, he decides there's one common theme to all the material. Quote, "Basically, he would be looking at you, and he'd say, 'I'll take care of you. I'll make you happy.'" And then he's gonna fail. And that's the story of the bank, end quote. Now, to be clear, I'm not convinced that's who John was, but that is where Frank Pearson landed in crafting this character. So he finishes the script just after Christmas, 1973. The communications director of the National Gay Task Force did review the script before it went into production and reportedly said it was, quote, "sensitive and tasteful." And the script was landing at exactly the right time. So Bregman, for example,

• 40:12Chris Winterbauer?

  was celebrating the success of his first big producer credit and Pacino's follow-up to The Godfather, Serpico, directed by Sidney Lumet, which was a very tough movie. It's sprawling. It covers years of Frank Serpico's life. It features hundreds of speaking roles. It was shot on location in New York in just 51 days.

• 40:30Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow.

• 40:30Chris Winterbauer?

  Which is crazy fast for how many locations and how much time is covered in this script. Pacino's beard alone.

• 40:37Lizzie Bassett?

  I know.

• 40:37Chris Winterbauer?

  Would take 51 days to grow. It's a good beard. It was nearly derailed by Dino Delarentius in post, who may or may not have inflated the budget by $3 to $4 million in personal expenses, according to Martin Bregman. Who knows?

• 40:52Lizzie Bassett?

  What's a dollar here or there, Chris?

• 40:54Chris Winterbauer?

  What's a million here or there? It would gross nearly $30 million against an actual production budget of $3 million. It was an extremely financially successful movie. I think it also proved that Al Pacino could be a leading man outside of Michael Corleone in The Godfather Part One. And there was a big silver lining, director Sidney Lumet. So he'd actually been a late hire. I didn't know this, Lizzie. He was brought in to replace John Avildsen, who would win Best Director for Rocky in a few years.

• 41:22Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 41:23Chris Winterbauer?

  Avildsen and Bregman did not get along, nor did he get along with the screenwriter. So he ended up leaving. They bring in Lumet. And Lumet, at this point, is known, you know, as a professional journeyman director, right? So he broke out huge with what's now regarded as one of the greatest films of all time, Twelve Angry Men. That was his debut. That got nominations for Best Director, Best Picture, Best Screenplay. His next two films, Long Day's Journey Into Night and The Pawnbroker, also received Oscar nominations for their actors.

• 41:51Lizzie Bassett?

  Am I right, though, in thinking that a lot of his early films are stage adaptations? Because Twelve Angry Men, Viewed From The Bridge, Long Day's Journey Into Night, there's a run of like five or six that are all stage adaptations.

• 42:04Chris Winterbauer?

  They are, and a lot of them are New York-based.

• 42:06Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 42:06Chris Winterbauer?

  So a big thing with Lumet is wanting to shoot in New York as opposed to LA. And so, you know, he worked really steadily through the 60s and 70s. But if you look at his filmography, and these films were well-received, don't get me wrong, but he only had one movie receive Oscar attention after his first three films. And that was actually a documentary. He made a documentary about Martin Luther King Jr. called King: A Filmed Record, Montgomery to Memphis. He co-directed it with Joseph Bankovitz. I've never seen this. So he carved out this niche for himself during the auteur era. And he's, I think, a little bit of a throwback in a certain sense. He is this reliable workhorse director. He has a really un-showy style. I mean, even, Lizzie, I rewatched Murder on the Orient Express for this episode.

• 42:47Lizzie Bassett?

  It's great.

• 42:47Chris Winterbauer?

  I love that movie. It's so fun. And he gives Albert Finney, for example, so much room to have fun as Hercule Poirot in that movie by, again, preferring a camera that doesn't draw attention to itself. And he also uses music so sparingly, even in that movie.

• 43:02Lizzie Bassett?

  The lack of showiness in Dog Day Afternoon is remarkable because it would be so tempting to use this as an opportunity to, you know, go big or go home. And he doesn't do that, and it's really effective.

• 43:15Chris Winterbauer?

  That's exactly right. He actually wanted no music in Serpico at all. He realized that De Laurentiis was going to add it if he didn't, so he added it himself. And I think it would be better without music, personally. No disrespect to the composer. But I think this belies a bit of a maverick streak to Lumet. So you mentioned the stage adaptations. So Long Day's Journey Into Night is centered around a dysfunctional American nuclear family. It deals with morphine addiction, alcoholism. The Pawnbroker was the first movie made entirely in the US to deal with the Holocaust from the perspective of a survivor. And it was an early film to feature a gay character. It was the first to feature a woman's full bare breasts that received Hays Code production approval, which was, you know, kind of groundbreaking at the time. And again, he really focused on shooting in New York.

• 43:58Chris Winterbauer?

  He spurned Hollywood's sense of superiority in the movie biz. And, Lizzie, as you mentioned, he casts real-looking people through all of his movies. Interesting, dynamic, real-looking people. I don't think he was interested in the glitz and the glam so much, which will line up nicely with Pacino's sensibilities. Now, as I mentioned earlier, Lumet is kind of about to launch into a pretty amazing career second act. So according to Pearson, he, Al Pacino, and Bregman and Elf and the Martyrs flew to Lumet in London to deliver the script in person. I believe he was prepping or shooting Murder on the Orient Express at this point in time. And so for Lumet, it's simple. He reads the script. He says, "The script is great," and he's in.

• 44:40Lizzie Bassett?

  Today's episode is sponsored by Mars. You might not realize it, but Mars is behind so many of your favorite Halloween treats. And I'm not just talking about your candy bowl. Yes, Mars makes iconic candies like M&M's, Snickers, Starburst, my personal favorite, and Skittles. But they also have salty snacks, easy-to-make meal options, and even treats for your pets. There's something for everyone to enjoy this spooky season. David and I are too old to trick or treat, so we've been getting creative with our Halloween movie night spreads for our friends. I put together a char bootery board with some classic sweets like Rice Krispie Treats and Peanut Butter M&M's. And because I'm a salty girl, I added some Pringles and my all-time favorite snack, Cheez-It crackers. Scary delicious. For Halloween night, I'm making a spooky seven-layer dip using Ben's Original Ready Rice because there is nothing that my kid loves more than a rice and bean dip. And don't think I forgot about our dog, Q. Mars knows he needs a celebration too,

• 45:25Lizzie Bassett?

  so I put together a special Halloween treat jar packed with Greenie's Original Pumpkin Spice Dental Chews and Pedigree Tasty Biscuits. He's agreed to share with the neighbors because he's a very good boy. Find Mars products in a retailer near you or on Instagram at Mars Global, M-A-R-S-G-L-O-B-A-L, where you can shop everyday favorites and limited-time Halloween offerings.

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• 46:18Chris Winterbauer?

  And then, all of a sudden, Al Pacino says, "I don't know. I don't know about this, guys." He agreed that the script was amazing, but back in his hotel room, drunk, he started to spiral. Quote, "What was I doing with my life? Did I really want to get up there again, holding a gun in my hands and committing crimes? Having starred in all of four movies, maybe I just didn't want to be a film actor anymore." You mentioned this, Lizzie. He was oscillating back and forth with the stage. He'd really come from the stage world. I remember he agreed with Brando's assertion when he was making The Godfather that acting in film was not an art. It was just a mechanical action, effectively.

• 46:51Lizzie Bassett?

  Right.

• 46:51Chris Winterbauer?

  He'd also been struggling with alcohol, and he carried a lot of personal burdens that I wonder if they were brought to the fore by the subject matter of this script. So, for example, you know, his mother had attempted suicide when he was young. She had been sent to Bellevue Hospital to recover. His father had walked out on him when he was young, much in the way that John Wojtowicz walked out on his own children. Pacino had long dreamed of pulling his mother out of poverty. I think they had a really complicated relationship. There's a kind of beautiful passage from his memoir where he says, "My mother once said to me that she had a dream about me. I was standing on some cliff, like in Wuthering Heights, with the wind blowing my hair, my face pale and undernourished. I was skinny and I looked so drained. I had no color in my face. That dream made her so sad. How do you go from hearing that to saying, 'Don't worry, I'm going to make it'?"

• 47:35Chris Winterbauer?

  And she actually died of a drug overdose in 1962 at the age of 43.

• 47:39Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, Jesus.

• 47:41Chris Winterbauer?

  He was only in his early 20s. He was 10 years shy of The Godfather and stardom. And it also may have been that he was going to be playing a gay man, which was an extremely risky move for an A-list actor in the early to mid 1970s. It's also possible he was just tired.

• 47:58Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 47:58Chris Winterbauer?

  He had done a long string of movies. We know The Godfather films were not easy to make. He struggled with the Michael Corleone character also. And he knew that working for Lumet would be tough, too. Lumet was, you know, a pretty demanding realism-based director. It was going to be, you know, long hours, and it was going to be a difficult character.

• 48:16Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, and also, at this point, I mean, when did The Godfather Part Two come out?

• 48:19Chris Winterbauer?

  The Godfather Part Two comes out in 1974. So it's right around the time of these conversations.

• 48:24Lizzie Bassett?

  So he would have been either filming that or having just wrapped filming it. Yeah.

• 48:29Chris Winterbauer?

  Yes, that's exactly right. So for whatever reason or reasons, Al Pacino had doubts and was on the fence. And Village Voice journalist Arthur Bell had doubts, too. So in his coverage of the event, he wrote that John Wojtowicz told him the idea to rob the bank had come from a Chase Manhattan bank executive he'd met at Danny's, a Greenwich Village gay bar. The executive told him how he could rob a branch of $150,000 to $200,000. Of course, Lizzie, as we see in the movie, the money had been picked up at 11:00 AM before they get there, leaving them, Wadowicz and Nacho Dale, with $29,000, according to Bell's reporting. But the thing is, that actually would have been more than enough for Elizabeth Eden's gender reassignment surgery.

• 49:10Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 49:11Chris Winterbauer?

  So according to John, they had broken up in April of that year. Eden had attempted suicide on her birthday, August 19th, three days before the robbery. And he says that that is what convinced him to pay for the operation. He wanted to break her out of Bellevue, get her the operation to, quote, "save his life." But Arthur Bell later reported that, quote, "According to at least two inmates, this was a mob-backed operation. The Gambino family head, Carlo, was under indictment for conspiracy to rob a Chase armored truck a few years prior. And these inmates alleged that at least one of the guns Little John Bassow, or John Wojtowicz, used was provided by a mob source." Quote, "The sex change story was peripheral to the real motive," end quote.

• 49:53Lizzie Bassett?

  I'm inclined to believe it.

• 49:56Chris Winterbauer?

  Liz Eden says this on television.

• 49:58Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, really?

• 49:59Chris Winterbauer?

  Years later, after John's been released from prison and he's stuck to this narrative, she actually confronts him and says, "Tell them the real reason. Tell them the real reason he was in debt to the mob from our wedding."

• 50:11Lizzie Bassett?

  And I also think, you know, like, there is, which I think they do a good job of exploring in the movie, but there is a bit of a cop out happening to say that, like, you're doing this extremely risky, dangerous thing where people could potentially and do get killed because it's, I want to get the money for my wife. And it's like, there's about 100 other ways you could have gotten that money for your wife. Like, you want something else out of this.

• 50:37Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, John's sexuality is what seemed to stick in the mainstream media coverage. Some referred to it as a, quote, "gay robbery." He was frequently described as, quote, "an admitted homosexual" and Elizabeth Eden as his, quote, "male wife or lover," end quotes. This was novel, at least in the straight media, because as Arthur Bell put it, quote, "homosexuals are supposed to be victims, and here's a tough guy, John Dillinger Victor." But that's not the only reason people were fascinated. As you mentioned, Lizzie, Wadowicz walked outside of the bank, shook hands with the cops, told them to back up, threw $2,000 in cash out the door to pay for pizza after he demanded the police send hamburgers. He'd say that he didn't want to hurt anyone, but he'd also say things like, quote, "The Supreme Court will let me get away with this. There's no death penalty. It's ridiculous. I can

• 51:22Chris Winterbauer?

  shoot everyone in here, then throw my gun down and walk out, and they can't put me in the electric chair," end quote.

• 51:27Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, I mean, he's not a stable gentleman.

• 51:29Chris Winterbauer?

  No. The police needed a new strategy in dealing with John Wojtowicz, and Martin Bregman needed a new strategy in dealing with Al Pacino. So Pacino flew back to New York. He was out of the movie. Martin Bregman called him up and said, "Read the script one more time." And Pacino said, "That's absurd. No." And Bregman gets uncharacteristically gentle and says, "Why don't you give it a read for me? Do it. I really need you to read it." So he does reluctantly. And he calls Bregman back and goes, "Why am I not doing this film?" In a more recent interview, Pacino says that Bregman basically strong-armed him by saying, "We have somebody else who wants to do it, who's notorious, who's famous." He doesn't say the name, but the suggestion is that it's Dustin Hoffman.

• 52:08Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, that would make sense.

• 52:09Chris Winterbauer?

  Who Pacino has been competing with and kind of been in the shadow of for the first few years of his career. Bregman says he only ever wanted to make it with Al. It's possible both are true. It's possible he made the suggestion even if it was completely a false threat. Pacino was in, but he had conditions. If they were going to do this, they were going to do it for real. So, Lizzie, for the second time in three years, he's playing a real New Yorker after Frank Serpico, and he was going to be putting a lot of himself into the role, maybe more than ever before. His nickname in real life is Sonny, as the character goes by in this movie. In his memoir, he wrote, "This time, I was careful to cast the film where I could with actors I had already worked with, people who knew the real me and not just the image," end quote. And this suited Sidney Lumet just fine, because he didn't want big names. He wanted a realistic movie. Penelope Allen was cast as the head

• 52:54Chris Winterbauer?

  teller, Sylvia. Pacino described her and her husband as his adopted family. She actually has a great role in Scarecrow, if you guys want to check it out. She's Pacino's estranged wife, Annie. They actually never share the screen, but they have a great phone call scene together toward the end of the film. Judith Molina gets brought in to play Sonny's mother. She co-founded The Living Theater, where Pacino and Martin Sheen had worked together cleaning toilets and laying down rugs when they were first getting started. Sully Boyar was cast as the bank manager, Mulvaney. Pacino had known him for 15 years. He'd also, he plays a doctor very briefly in The Panic in Needle Park, which was Pacino's first leading role, and he has an uncredited role in Serpico. Charles Durning, Lizzie, who you mentioned, read for Mulvaney but was cast as Sergeant Moretti, which is what Pacino wanted him for. And they actually, Pacino and Durning were supposed to be in a play

• 53:39Chris Winterbauer?

  together in 1968, but the producer, Joseph Papp, wanted to fire Pacino, and Durning says, "No, keep him. Please keep him." And then Papp fired him anyway.

• 53:46Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, no.

• 53:47Chris Winterbauer?

  And then Carol Kane gets hired to play Jenny, or the squirrel hiding under the desk. You probably recognize her, Lizzie, from what television show most recently?

• 53:56Lizzie Bassett?

  Most recently, was that Kimmy Schmidt?

• 53:58Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt.

• 53:59Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, but I mean, also, of course, The Princess Bride and so many other things. Love Carol Kane.

• 54:03Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. James Broderick wanted to play Moretti, but Lumet cast him as FBI Agent Sheldon. Lance Henriksen actually wanted to play Leon.

• 54:10Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh.

• 54:11Chris Winterbauer?

  But he was cast as FBI Agent Murphy. And then you have Sandra Kazan as Deborah, Marsha Jean Clarke as Miriam. Again, a number of these folks were in, for example, The Panic at Needle Park. Amy Levitt is Maria, John Marriott is Howard. And did you recognize Dominique Chianese as Sonny's father? He had just done The Godfather Part Two with him as Johnny Ola. You see him only in darkness in this movie. You barely see him for a moment. He plays Uncle Junior in The Sopranos.

• 54:34Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes. Oh, my gosh. I did not recognize him. I recognized his voice, and I couldn't place it.

• 54:39Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, exactly. His voice is very, very distinct. So, the most unexpected hire, Lizzie. Now that you know the age of Sal Natarali.

• 54:47Lizzie Bassett?

  It's John Kazal.

• 54:48Chris Winterbauer?

  John Kazal. So, there was a little confusion when somebody suggested 39-year-old actor John Kazal, especially because Sal, in the script, is described as a, quote, "15-year-old Bonacelli angel." This is a 39-year-old man.

• 55:01Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 55:02Chris Winterbauer?

  A number of sources say the suggestion came from Pacino, but he says it was actually Charles Durning's idea. And Pearson says, "This guy's the furthest thing from what I envisioned." And Sidney Lumet agreed. In fact, he says that unlike John Wojtowicz and Sal Natarali and the rest of America, he hadn't yet seen The Godfather, so he had not seen Kazal as Fredo.

• 55:20Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah. Wow.

• 55:21Chris Winterbauer?

  So let's talk a little bit about who Sal Natarali really was, because there's frustratingly little about him in the coverage of the events from that day. We do know he was probably 18 or 19 years old. According to Stephen Brockelman, he worked at the Penny Candy Store on 10th Street. Brockelman was his manager. He'd hired Natarali a few months prior. He said he was a hard worker, polite, always punctual, and at roughly 5:00 PM, Sal called the Penny Candy Store, saying, "I know I'm late. I'm probably not going to be in today because we're holding up a bank."

• 55:52Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, buddy.

• 55:53Chris Winterbauer?

  And then Brockelman turned on the radio, and this is what he'd heard. I'd like to play a clip from the events of the day.

• 56:00Speaker 03

  WCBS News Time is 5:09. This is Harvey Hauptman. A bank holdup is underway at this time in the Chase Manhattan Bank Branch at Avenue P and East 3rd Street in Brooklyn. WCBS newsman David Levin talked with one of the armed men in the bank and asked him what the action is.

• 56:16Speaker 04

  Well, we were holding up a bank, and we were on the way out, so the stupid cop car pulled up in front.

• 56:23Speaker 03

  What's going on now?

• 56:24Speaker 04

  Walk in a minute, huh?

• 56:25Speaker 03

  What's going on now?

• 56:27Speaker 04

  We're waiting to negotiate the release of the people so we can get out of here.

• 56:31Speaker 03

  And what are your terms for release?

• 56:33Speaker 04

  Well, I want them to deliver my wife here from King's County Hospital. When they deliver me and my wife, I'll release one of the hostages.

• 56:43Chris Winterbauer?

  So that was John Wojtowicz.

• 56:44Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 56:45Chris Winterbauer?

  Speaking to the news. Shortly after, Sal told his manager he needed to go, quote, "I think there are police at the back door." And as you see in the film, Lizzie, one round is fired in the real events by John Wojtowicz when the police came to the back door. I did read that Natarali's motivation for the robbery was that he wanted to pay to remove his sisters from foster care.

• 57:08Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, aye, aye, aye.

• 57:09Chris Winterbauer?

  And that's why he was participating in the robbery, and he had been promised $50,000 for his part. That was going to be his split. Now, Pacino and Kazal had gotten their start together. In 1968, they both won Obi Awards for their performances in the off-Broadway play The Indian Wants the Bronx. Kazal comes in and reads the part. It breaks Lumet's heart the way that he performs it.

• 57:28Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 57:28Chris Winterbauer?

  And all of a sudden, he kind of becomes the heart of the movie in a lot of ways. Now, Finding Leon was as tough as getting Elizabeth Eden out of Bellevue and down to the bank. They considered a lot of actors, including, as I mentioned, Lance Henriksen. Some secondary sources claim that trans actress Elizabeth Coffey was considered but ultimately deemed too pretty. We could not find a primary source to verify that, though. And so the role went to the relatively unknown Chris Sarandon, a cisgender actor who Pacino and Kazal had worked with, who'd never acted in a movie before. Lizzie, I'd like to show you a photograph of Elizabeth Eden on the day.

• 58:02Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, wow. Okay, so they went pretty accurate with it.

• 58:06Chris Winterbauer?

  I believe so. I actually think Chris Sarandon's performance is very respectful and accurate to Elizabeth Eden on the day.

• 58:13Lizzie Bassett?

  I mean, I thought his performance was amazing, but I'm glad to hear that, you know, it seems like it was pretty drawn from reality.

• 58:19Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. So Lumet has his cast. He has his locations. They're going to shoot in a vacant automotive repair shop with a lift in the floor. The upper level's going to house dressing rooms and production offices. The lower level's going to be the bank, and in the basement, Pacino's going to live in an apartment. So Pacino lived under the set when they were making this movie.

• 58:37Lizzie Bassett?

  Good times.

• 58:37Chris Winterbauer?

  Across the street, there's a vacant storefront that's going to be the barber shop, and yet, it feels like it's all going to come crashing down at any moment. Pacino, according to Lumet, nearly pulled out just before rehearsals began, and Lumet was also terrified about the audience's reaction. He said that he doesn't normally worry about the audience, but, quote, "When you touch on sex and death, two aspects of life that hit a deep core, there's no way of knowing what an audience will do. They could laugh at the wrong places, catcall, start trying to talk back to the screen, any of 100 defenses that people throw up when they're embarrassed, when what's on screen is getting too close, or when they're looking at something they've never confronted before," end quote. I think Lumet is trying very hard to tell the story honestly, but also to do it in a way where

• 59:22Chris Winterbauer?

  he feels the audience will not be able to fall back on defense mechanisms and distance themselves from the material. So he decided to tell the actors to play themselves, so it would feel as real as possible. No accents, no costumes. He offered a $2 per day raise to anybody who brought their own clothes to wear to the set.

• 59:42Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow.

• 59:43Chris Winterbauer?

  Quote, "I want to see Shelley and Carol and Al and John and Chris up there. You're just temporarily borrowing the names of the people in the script. No characterizations, only you," which is when one of the actors said, "Can I use my own words?" And for the first time in his career, Sidney Lumet said, "Yes." So they started recording the rehearsals. They would take the improvised dialogue, type it up, polish it, and work it back into the script, which is how they developed the phone calls between Sonny and Leon and Sonny and Angie. Leon was supposed to come in Yelling from the start, but Lumet and the actors realized the material was already emotionally charged. They came up with a softer approach you see in the movie where Leon's scared as he's speaking to Sonny in these scenes. And in the end, Lumet estimated that 60% of the screenplay was improvised.

• 1:00:25Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow.

• 1:00:25Chris Winterbauer?

  Now, he also said, "We faithfully followed Pearson's construction scene by scene," and Pearson wasn't kicked aside. He gave his blessing. Lumet asked him to come to the rehearsal hall 10 days in to review everything with Lumet and start rewriting. And then Pacino was out again. He had an issue with one scene in the script. So Sonny calls for his wife Leon. She arrives, and instead of just talking on the phone, they meet in person out front of the bank and they kiss. Pacino later wrote in his memoir, "I thought this is absurd. It didn't happen that way. Not only was it not true, it was overly exaggerated, a comedic send-up that sort of minimized the situation." According to another source, Pacino asked Pearson, "When your relationships came to an end, how often does sex come into it?" And Pearson said, "Never. That's not what it's about." And Pacino said, "Why can't you make a picture about two people who love

• 1:01:07Chris Winterbauer?

  each other and can't find a way to live with each other? We are dealing with human beings, whether they are heterosexual or homosexual." He wondered if the cops would even allow it.

• 1:01:15Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:15Chris Winterbauer?

  But the thing is, there was a kiss during the robbery. It just wasn't between Wadowitz and Elizabeth Eden. It was actually between Wadowitz and his ex-lover, Pat Coppola, another man, who came down to the front of the bank. And in John Wadowitz's words, "He opened the door and he, quote, 'tongued him in front of the cops.'" He said, "As a way of defiance against the police at this time." But what's complicated is Elizabeth Eden has said that the reason she didn't go to the front of the bank is because she knew that John was going to try to drag her inside to put her on the plane, and that if she did not go with him, he would murder her in front of the bank, which John more or less corroborates on live television after the fact.

• 1:01:53Lizzie Bassett?

  Jesus Christ.

• 1:01:54Chris Winterbauer?

  And he had put a gun to her head, for example, as is described in the film.

• 1:01:59Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah. This is the part of the movie that I both appreciated and also, I think, struggled with the most, is that the accounts of the women in the film are that he is volatile and dangerous. And it sounds like he was volatile and dangerous. And so while you feel very sympathetic towards him, there's also, I think, played very well by Chris Sarandon, there is this real question of like, is this person being abused by him? It seems like yes, is the answer.

• 1:02:28Chris Winterbauer?

  So Pearson suggested in another interview that Pacino was uncomfortable with any reference to sex and did not want to come face to face with Sarandon's character. Pacino has said he had no issues with the character's sexuality, but he wanted the kiss cut. The kiss was cut. After three weeks of rehearsals, production began in September of 1974. And Lizzie, it was cold. It's supposed to be hot. It's the dog day afternoon. But the fall in New York was so cold that Lumet could see the actors' breath on certain days. So to have their breath match the air, they would have to put ice in their mouths before they would do the scenes, which, oh my God, can you imagine doing dialogue scenes after having ice in your mouth for that long?

• 1:03:05Lizzie Bassett?

  No.

• 1:03:06Chris Winterbauer?

  Whoa, what do I have to do? It would be impossible. He also had concocted his own mixture of glycerin and water to use as fake sweat, which is a trick he used on 12 Angry Men. And that's a lot of what you're seeing in this movie.

• 1:03:17Lizzie Bassett?

  They're so wet in this movie.

• 1:03:19Chris Winterbauer?

  They're so wet. Now, for Pacino, the struggle was, again, finding John Wadowitz. He couldn't find him. Lumet said that early on, Pacino, quote, "kept looking for disguises, like a mustache." He actually started the movie with a mustache, and Lumet thought it looked terrible. So at the end of the day, Pacino agrees, and he says, "Can we reshoot the whole day without the mustache?" They lose the mustache. But the way that Pacino tells it, it wasn't about the mustache. He actually said that he looked at the dailies and he thought, quote, "I'm playing nobody. I don't have a character. I need to be a person here because I don't see a person." So he went home, stayed up all night drinking a half gallon of white wine and trying to find his character. The next day, he came to set and started playing Sonny as, quote, "more animated, antsy, and agitated." And

• 1:04:02Chris Winterbauer?

  his friends started whispering, saying, "Is Al having a nervous breakdown?"

• 1:04:06Lizzie Bassett?

  No, that's just what half a gallon of white wine will do to you.

• 1:04:08Chris Winterbauer?

  Apparently, it was the only approach that worked. He stuck with this for all six weeks of shooting. And then Sidney Lumet got a call from the studio about a scene that he'd cut. So originally, they were supposed to play Sonny and Leon's wedding tape on television. This was going to be how the hostages and the audience were going to first meet Leon, was going to be through this video of the wedding, which there was real video footage of their wedding, taken by Randy Wicker, I believe, at the time, the journalist. Lumet decided not to shoot this. His reasoning was that the audience would stop taking Pacino or the movie seriously. It would be too sensationalized, basically. So he decided he just wanted to show a still picture of Leon on the television. He said that he felt the studio wanted the scene to, quote, "create notoriety for the movie," which is why he

• 1:04:52Chris Winterbauer?

  decided to cut it. He also said he'd removed the scene from the script two weeks prior, and no one had noticed. So when the studio said, "Put it back in," he said, "No, I already shot the scene in which the tape plays on the television. I can't do that." The studio exec hung up on him. So I agree with Lumet's decision here.

• 1:05:10Lizzie Bassett?

  I do, too.

• 1:05:10Chris Winterbauer?

  I think he is being smart in terms of anticipating audience reactions to certain things, fortunately or unfortunately. There are four key scenes that were heavily improvised on set, Lizzie. So there's a couple scenes between Sonny and Moretti. I believe, although I could not confirm, the moment when Sonny says, "Kiss me," and Moretti says, "What?" And he seems genuinely confused. He says, "Kiss me." I like getting kissed when I'm getting fucked. I think that was pretty improvised. But the next is arguably the funniest and saddest line in the movie, which we talked about earlier, Lizzie. What one word is so tragic in this movie?

• 1:05:38Lizzie Bassett?

  Wyoming. It's because Sonny asks Sal, you know, "What country do you want to go to?" Because they're discussing getting the jet. It's like, anywhere. You can go anywhere. "Where in the world do you want to go?" And he goes, "Um, Wyoming." And he has to explain to him, "That's not a country." He's like, "That's okay."

• 1:05:56Chris Winterbauer?

  Apparently, that was all cuz Sal.

• 1:05:58Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh.

• 1:05:58Chris Winterbauer?

  And Lumet said that he nearly ruined the take with his reaction. He had to cover his mouth to keep from laughing. And then finally, perhaps the most famous scene in the film, what does Pacino yell, Lizzie, when he starts throwing the money outside?

• 1:06:10Lizzie Bassett?

  Attica! Attica!

• 1:06:13Chris Winterbauer?

  I always assumed that must have happened on the day of the robbery. It did not. Al Pacino said that assistant director Burt Harris whispered to him, "Say Attica." And Pacino said, "What?" And Burt Harris says, "Say Attica. Say Attica." Pacino goes, "Attica." And apparently, the crowd went wild.

• 1:06:31Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, it had just happened, hadn't it? Just a couple of years earlier.

• 1:06:33Chris Winterbauer?

  It had just happened and a couple of years earlier. That's right. About a year prior to John Wadowitz's ill-fated robbery, there were the Attica prison riots. Inmates were protesting poor living conditions. Things escalated. They ended up taking guards and other staff hostage. Eventually, the police used deadly force to end the four-day standoff, and they killed more than 42 people, including some of the hostages, inmates and prison staff.

• 1:06:56Lizzie Bassett?

  It's kind of amazing that that was an improvised moment on set, because in the same way that Wyoming also comes back again later, that also comes back in terms of, you know, the reason that there's real fear for everyone involved, including the hostages of the cops, is their point being, like, the cops will kill everybody. They don't care.

• 1:07:12Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:07:12Lizzie Bassett?

  And that comes back multiple times of, you know, Sonny saying, "I'm not going to take you outside with me. I'm going to take a woman because they're less likely to kill her. They would probably just kill you." Like, it's amazing to me that they are able to sort of patchwork together this quilt and keep all of these loops coming back, even though so much of it was improvised.

• 1:07:29Chris Winterbauer?

  I agree.

• 1:07:37Chris Winterbauer?

  Shooting wrapped in November of 1974. After six weeks of production, John Wadowitz's standoff lasted 13 hours. At 2:00 AM, Shirley Ball, one of the tellers, stood in the front door of the bank and shouted at the FBI, "Enough is enough. Do you want to trade eight lives for two? Don't stretch our luck. Give them their demands." She could have walked away, but she followed John Wadowitz back into the bank. She said, quote, "I couldn't have lived with myself afterwards," end quote. Wadowitz demanded a jet. They offered him four drivers for the limousine to the airport. He picked the smallest one, Special Agent Murphy. At 4:45 AM, Wadowitz, Natarali, and the hostages loaded into a limousine to make

• 1:08:19Chris Winterbauer?

  their way to Kennedy Airport, driven by Special Agent Murphy. That is the only other name besides Sal that I believe was not changed for the script, just those two men. So Lumet said that they tried to, quote, "Stay as simple and honest and real as we could." Enter editor DeeDee Allen. Editor DeeDee Allen had cut Serpico, The Hustler, Bonnie and Clyde, and many, many more films. An incredible editor. She comes onto the picture. They trim it down. They watch the first cut. And you mentioned the pacing, Lizzie, because the first thing Lumet felt was that the movie was too fast. They actually added six to seven minutes back in, because when they got to Sonny drafting his will, it felt slow

• 1:09:04Chris Winterbauer?

  and didn't have the emotional impact that they wanted. And then Lumet got a frantic call from Martin Bregman. Al Pacino wants a cut in the scene where he reads the will. Reportedly, Pacino wanted to cut the line where Sonny says, "And to Ernie, whom I have loved as no man has ever loved another man," end quote. According to one biography on Pacino, quote, "Only after a gallon of black coffee and some highly persuasive fast talk was it agreed that the scene play as it was," end quote. I think there are two ways to interpret this. On the one hand, you could say Pacino seems uncomfortable with playing a gay character. He does not want to do the gay kiss. On the other hand, you could say

• 1:09:44Chris Winterbauer?

  this line could be taken humorously in the wrong way. It could seem exaggerated to an audience, and they might laugh, and there might be a fear of that. I'm curious what you think, Lizzie.

• 1:09:55Lizzie Bassett?

  I don't know. Perhaps I am prone to, you know, think the best of Pacino in this situation, but from everything you've told me, and also from the fact that it doesn't seem like his issue with doing this movie from the beginning had anything to do with the lead character's sexuality. I think if that were an issue, he wouldn't have done it. He didn't need to do it. And it's not like that was something that was hidden in the script. It's not like that's something that wasn't a major, major plot point and part of the character. So I am inclined to believe that this doesn't have to do with that. I just don't think he would have done the movie. And especially given some of the other things that he's said, it sounds to me like he is, to your point, maybe rightfully, or at least concerned about, you know, how certain things will play and how they can

• 1:10:39Lizzie Bassett?

  kind of walk that tightrope with the audience at this point in time.

• 1:10:43Chris Winterbauer?

  Lumet got his way with that scene. It stayed. It's a great scene. He also got his way with the music. There's only one piece of music in this entire film, the opening song. It's "Amarina" by Elton John. DeeDee Allen picked it. Lumet decided to keep it after seeing the rough cut. The lyrics include the line, "Lately, I've been thinking how much I miss my lady." It was released about a year before Elton John came out.

• 1:11:04Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:11:05Chris Winterbauer?

  Lumet said the studio loved the film. They pulled it off. John and Sal, not so much. They made it to the airport, but they never got on a plane. Sal Natarali was shot dead by Special Agent Murphy, the driver of the limousine. John Wadowitz was arrested. And on September 23, 1973, after he had attempted suicide, he was sentenced to 20 years for armed robbery. As Newsday reported, "The families of all three robbers seem more embarrassed by the homosexuality than the armed robbery." And not everyone in the gay community wanted to be associated with Wadowitz.

• 1:11:40Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, that adds up. He seems like a bit of a wild card.

• 1:11:44Chris Winterbauer?

  Even before this incident, there was a general sense that Wadowitz was unstable. He was well-known, but not necessarily well-liked. He'd now taken hostages, robbed a bank, gotten someone killed, all during a pivotal time for the gay rights movement. Arthur Bell of The Village Voice said there were discussions at GAA after the robbery where people debated, "Did it or didn't it, should it or shouldn't it relate to the gay liberation movement? Members of the gay liberation movement, including yours truly, are having a hell of a time figuring out how the whole Little John thing relates to gay liberation and what we can do about it, if anything. One gay activist in Brooklyn told a reporter, "I was proud to see him ask for his lover, but I don't condone the crime. The so-called straight world has to understand that we have problem people too."

• 1:12:25Chris Winterbauer?

  And those most impacted by John's choices were feeling duped by Warner Brothers also. Around the time that the movie wrapped production, Newsday published an article stating, "Most of the people involved in the incident have had no contact with the movie people since they signed releases more than a year ago. Some of them are a little miffed about that. They were expecting to be called in as technical advisers at the very least." That actually includes gay activist Randy Wicker, who was described in early press as a consultant, but did not end up credited on the movie. So Dog Day Afternoon was released in the United States on December 25th, 1975, and there was some fear amongst the gay community about the release of this film. Some pushed it for a boycott, and there were some strong reactions.

• 1:13:08Chris Winterbauer?

  Later on, in 1981, Vito Russo, who we just discussed in our episode with Raina Dearwater of GLAD, kind of lacerated the film in his book, The Celluloid Closet. He argued that it was, quote, "The ultimate freak show, a film that used the sensational side of a true story to titillate a square audience." But at the release, much of the criticism was positive, if nuanced, even from the gay community. So one critic from the LGBTQ newspaper, The Barb, wrote about the moment in the movie in which it is revealed that Sonny is in a relationship with Leon. "With the story out, the country has its first openly gay folk hero. As things begin to fall apart, I wonder if straights will appreciate the tragedy as Sonny is rejected by the one he did it all for, or will they just be waiting for the final shootout?"

• 1:13:50Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, I think what I like about the movie is that perhaps the one he did it all for, it might be himself, but yes.

• 1:13:55Chris Winterbauer?

  Walter White. Another critic from The Fifth Freedom wrote, "Sidney Lumet's film stars Al Pacino as a person, in this case, a bank robber, who happens to be gay, as opposed to, say, The Boys in the Band, who stars plague gays who, incidentally, may be people." The emphasis here is more than a semantic one. It suggests that our sexual preferences complement, but do not overshadow our shared humanity. And I think that's what we've been waiting for in a film. However, he does go on to say that he shares the frustration of those who see the film as another anti-gay exploitation film, but, quote, "What Lumet is saying, I think, suggests that anyone is susceptible to the systematic dehumanization that urban life subjects us to. Sonny and Sal, the bank robbers, are both lost souls

• 1:14:37Chris Winterbauer?

  whose lives seem to be ruled by the technology that was supposed to serve us," end quote. A very prescient review. On the mainstream straight media side, things were similarly generally fairly positive. Richard Schickel at Time Magazine praised Pacino and Casal's performances, but he wrapped up his review with, quote, "One tries to be sympathetic in the 'nothing human is alien to me' manner, but the viewer leaves the theater with that most devastating of disclaimers. This has nothing to do with me." But audiences didn't seem to agree. Dog Day Afternoon was very popular amongst audiences and the Academy. It was nominated for six Oscars: Best Picture, Director, Original Screenplay,

• 1:15:17Chris Winterbauer?

  Actor in a Leading Role for Al Pacino, Actor in a Supporting Role for Chris Sarandon, not John Casal,

• 1:15:23Lizzie Bassett?

  Interesting.

• 1:15:24Chris Winterbauer?

  and Film Editing, Dee Dee Allen. At the same time, Warner Brothers was being sued by Wadowitz's estranged wife, Carmen Befolko, for invasion of privacy and unauthorized use of her name and portrait in the movie and the subsequent novelization of the movie. They were also being sued by Elizabeth Eden, and they were being sued by John Wadowitz. The Oscars that year were dominated by, one flew over the cuckoo's nest, which won Best Director, Picture, and Actor. Sarandon lost to George Byrne in The Sunshine Boys, and Dee Dee Allen lost to Verna Fields' Jaws. Al Pacino did not attend the ceremony. He reportedly told a journalist, "Fame is a perversion of the natural human instinct for validation and attention." The sole winner that night was Frank Pearson, Best Original Screenplay,

• 1:16:08Chris Winterbauer?

  which is the element of the movie that John Wadowitz could not stand. So, Lizzie, let's talk about how John Wadowitz felt about this movie, and let's talk about one of your early points of criticism that he agreed with. In late 1974, a spokesman for the prison where Wadowitz was serving his sentence said that, quote, "The homosexual aspects of the film might eliminate it from the prison's film program," end quote. But the movie did screen there twice. Wadowitz basically said that he told the warden he was going to incite a prison riot if they did not put the movie on.

• 1:16:39Lizzie Bassett?

  He's got a style.

• 1:16:40Chris Winterbauer?

  So he first watched it by himself with a guard on October 3rd, 1975. He said it was, quote, "A very moving experience." There was then a second screening with other inmates two days later. We're going to talk about John's view of the film in excerpts, but to understand his perspective, you should read his whole review, which he sent to The New York Times. They declined to publish, but is available online. He called the reading of the will "one of the most moving scenes I've ever seen in a motion picture." He hailed Al Pacino, said he deserved an Oscar. He also called out Sarandon as having captured Elizabeth Eden. He said the entire cast was outstanding and monumental, and Lumet was fantastic. But he also said, "The movie was, in essence, a piece of garbage."

• 1:17:20Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay.

• 1:17:21Chris Winterbauer?

  He felt deeply hurt. "My feelings overall on the movie were that it was a good comedy, but I did not think it was funny because it was about me and my loved ones." Even though the movie opens with the statement that it is based on a true incident, he estimated that it was only 30% true. He says, for example, "He never spoke to his mother outside the bank. He also never spoke with Carmen on the phone, and he felt that Carmen was misrepresented." Quote, "I did not like the horrible way that they tried to make her the blame or the scapegoat for everything that happened, inferring that I left her and winded up in the arms of a gay man because of her," end quote.

• 1:17:54Lizzie Bassett?

  I don't get the impression that that's necessarily what they're implying, but she is a nag.

• 1:17:59Chris Winterbauer?

  Yes, I agree. My sister, Jessie, had a very strong reaction to her character, did not like the way they represented her character. I did not have that reaction initially, but after watching the documentary, The Dog, and when you get more insight into John's experience, he was dating her, he then went to Vietnam, he had his first sexual experience with a man in Vietnam, realized that he enjoyed it, he returned, then married her, and then continued to pursue sex with men after that. It's much more complicated than, I think, the way things are portrayed in the film, for example. But the most important distinction or problem he has with the movie is the way that the film made it seem like Sal had to die. "I regret the things that happened, but most of all that my friend Sal, who was only 18 years old, was murdered by the FBI.

• 1:18:43Chris Winterbauer?

  It was not necessary for them to murder him because he had been immobilized and unable to do anything, but yet the FBI murdered him before my eyes. I was also immobilized and unable to do anything." Okay, according to Special Agent Murphy, when they arrived at the airport, Barrett, the manager, was supposed to be freed. He refused, so instead, one of the women behind Murphy in the car was let out. This created an opening between Murphy and Sal. Murphy then goes outside to talk to Baker, his boss, to figure out how they can make a move on John and Sal. And they do make a move on them, almost identical to what you see in the film. There's a concealed gun that Murphy has. He pushes Sal's, in the real life, it's a shotgun, to the ceiling,

• 1:19:26Chris Winterbauer?

  and then he shoots Sal in the chest, not in the head, as portrayed in the film. Sal then was declared dead by the time that he made it to the hospital. Now, Special Agent Murphy says that when he went to see the movie with his wife, the crowd booed when Sal was killed. According to Murphy, after this, he was cornered by relatives who couldn't understand how he could have shot that guy. At the same time, Wadowitz's cellmates couldn't understand how he could have gone along with Sal's murder, because in the film, it's insinuated that the FBI tells John, or Sonny, at the front of the bank, that they will deal with Sal, and yet, he continues to work with the FBI in these negotiations. Do you remember that moment?

• 1:20:06Lizzie Bassett?

  You know, I do, but I thought that the way that it played was almost that he was confused by what they were saying. Not that he was going along with it, but that it was like an added wrinkle that he was sort of not able to process until they do end up killing Sal.

• 1:20:20Chris Winterbauer?

  I actually read it the way that the other inmates seemed to have read it.

• 1:20:23Lizzie Bassett?

  Really?

• 1:20:24Chris Winterbauer?

  Which is that, yes, that he knew that Sal was going to be in the line of fire. He's hoping things will work out, but the fact that he has not alerted Sal to this

• 1:20:32Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, yeah.

• 1:20:32Chris Winterbauer?

  is a betrayal.

• 1:20:33Lizzie Bassett?

  That's true.

• 1:20:34Chris Winterbauer?

  His cell was set on fire and ransacked multiple times. He was attacked repeatedly and put in protective custody. He was also gang raped multiple times in prison because people knew he was gay when he arrived. After the film came out, Frank Pearson was approached by a journalist who knew Wadowitz. He told him that Wadowitz had been put in solitary confinement for two years because of the movie's implication that Sonny had sold Sal out to the FBI. So Frank Pearson wrote to the editor of the prison newspaper and asked if they'd be interested in running an article about how a screenwriter goes about dramatizing a real-life crime. So he wrote the article, and he tried to subtly embed the story of how he made up the Sal and Sonny detail. But as of 2001, he said, "To this day, I still don't know, knowing what I know now, what I would do about that."

• 1:21:18Chris Winterbauer?

  What is our obligation as members of society? So let's talk a little bit about the obligations to those depicted in these films. So Dog Day Afternoon grossed roughly $50 million against a $1.8 million budget. The hostages were paid $600 each for their rights. Carmen Befulko, John Wadowitz's wife, later said, and John said this too, that she was paid $50 for her rights, which is $40 more than the $10 cab fare John left her the first time he walked out in 1969. She divorced John in 1983, worked three jobs, put herself through college. She started going to therapy with her two children. She worked for 25 years as an education associate for children with special needs in the public school system, and she died in 2013.

• 1:22:03Chris Winterbauer?

  John Wadowitz was ultimately paid $7,500 for the rights of his story, plus 1% of the net profits. For comparison, Robert Stroud, the inmate depicted in The Birdman of Alcatraz, was reportedly paid $25,000 and 10% of the net 10 years earlier.

• 1:22:17Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow.

• 1:22:18Chris Winterbauer?

  $5,000 went to Wadowitz's lawyer. The rest went to Elizabeth Eden to pay for her operation. John was released from prison in 1979. He and Elizabeth Eden also divorced. She died of AIDS-related pneumonia in 1987. Special Agent Murphy's son died of cancer in 1992, when he was only 12 years old, and at the suggestion of his wife, he became an ordained deacon in 1999. And John Wadowitz decided to embrace the fame of Dog Day Afternoon. He started calling himself The Dog. He would take photographs outside of Chase Bank, the one that he'd robbed, including photographs wearing a shirt that said, "I robbed this bank."

• 1:22:54Lizzie Bassett?

  I don't know if I would love that if I worked in that bank.

• 1:22:56Chris Winterbauer?

  I don't think folks did. He continued to perpetuate the story that he had done this for love. It's a story that stuck, and he continued to pursue the fame that he had been granted for a brief moment of time until his death of cancer in 2006. Bob Capstatter, the reporter who'd spoken with Wadowitz on the phone during the robbery, apparently reconnected with him in 1979 when he was released from prison, and he asked him after everything if he'd learned anything. And according to Bob, Wadowitz said, "Yeah, don't rob a bank."

• 1:23:25Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay.

• 1:23:27Chris Winterbauer?

  And that is our coverage on Dog Day Afternoon, Lizzie. So I have to ask you, what went right?

• 1:23:33Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow, that was fascinating. Thank you for walking us through that, trying to parse out what really happened. I feel like I don't totally know. I, you know, I really have to give the what went right here to Al Pacino, just because this is a very tough role to play. I think it could so easily have been played in a way that, you know, to your initial point, could have come across as funny, even though he does have line reads in this that are funny, and he is, you know, bumbling and nervous, but you still care about him so much, and it feels very serious, and it feels, I think, more anxiety-inducing than it feels funny. And I think a lot of that is due to Pacino's performance.

• 1:24:14Lizzie Bassett?

  He really seems to be treating this like a human being and not shying away from the more complicated elements of this person, although, as we learned over the course of this episode, there are certain elements of the script that he shied away from. We don't know why, but yeah, I just think he's amazing in this. I agree that this is his best performance. You know, we get to the screamy Pacino later, which is also fun, but boy, do I enjoy early Al Pacino, quiet Al Pacino. He gets to yell in this, obviously, does a little bit of yelling, but for the most part, he's just so, his performance is so small in a way that's really lovely, and he remains small and very human in what could easily have gotten out of hand.

• 1:24:56Chris Winterbauer?

  I agree. I think he is wonderful in this movie. We did like a Pacino Lumet run from 71 through 75, and then we watched The Dog, the documentary about John Wadowitz, and it was so fun, just movie after movie and seeing the ways he's growing as a performer and changing. I'd like to give my what went right to Sidney Lumet. I think this is a masterfully directed film. I completely understand the criticism and apprehension from the gay community at the

• 1:25:22Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 1:25:22Chris Winterbauer?

  And I don't disagree, especially with the notion that really the first story you're going to give us with a gay hero, where his sexuality is incidental, is going to be the one where he is a bank robber and an abusive person, you know what I mean?

• 1:25:35Lizzie Bassett?

  Totally.

• 1:25:35Chris Winterbauer?

  And all these things. That is very valid. I'm just going to go from the perspective of, once the subject matter was selected, I think Lumet does a very admirable job of shepherding it forward in a way that, to me, does not feel exploitative or sensationalized. And I understand that there are definitely people who disagree with that, and I understand why, but for me, I think he does a very lovely job with this movie. The last thing I want to mention, I do think watching the documentary The Dog is very much worth it. It was released in 2013. John Wadowitz was a very complicated person. Elizabeth Eden was a very complicated person. I think you could describe John as opportunistic at best, predatory at worst, in the way that he pursued sexual relationships. He's basically a self-admitted sex addict, the way he describes himself in that movie.

• 1:26:20Chris Winterbauer?

  Elizabeth Eden has her own complications in those areas of her life that we don't need to get into here, but you'll get a little bit of a glimpse of if you watch that documentary. But I think what the documentary does ultimately do is it shows John is still a person. Again, he's a strange person, he's a complicated person, and I'm not even talking about his sexuality.

• 1:26:38Lizzie Bassett?

  No.

• 1:26:38Chris Winterbauer?

  He's just an unusual, braggadocious, in-your-face personality, but as you watch him in this film, and then eventually, candidly, you watch him die, he just feels more and more human and real, and I agree with you. I think Pacino does a very good job finding the humanity behind somebody who is so larger than life, you know what I mean, in the way he presents himself.

• 1:26:57Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:58Chris Winterbauer?

  And I really appreciate that. So check out the documentary. It's very much worth your guys' time. And if you're interested in supporting this podcast, Lizzie, can you let the folks know at home a few easy ways they can do so?

• 1:27:08Lizzie Bassett?

  I sure can. You can leave us a rating or review on whatever podcatcher you're listening to this on. You can tell a friend or a family member about what went wrong. You can also, as we said at the top of this episode, you can now subscribe on Apple and Spotify, where you can get bonus episodes as well as an ad-free feed. You can also, of course, for $5 a month, join our Patreon, where you will get all of that, plus access to our fan community. We really enjoy engaging with you guys there. We do polls, we do newsletters, we do a lot of things over there. There will be some live streams coming up, which we will announce a little later. So please, if you want all that and more, join Patreon. And then if you want all that and more and more in a bag of chips, for $50 a month, you

• 1:27:52Lizzie Bassett?

  can get a shout out, just like one of these.

• 1:27:55Speaker 04

  We interrupt your regularly scheduled programming to bring you a bizarre and rapidly evolving situation. A 37-year-old podcast host has locked himself in his studio with 50 civilians and is demanding $50 from every one of them, or he is going to, quote, "Stop making this podcast." Let's go to Bill on the scene. Thanks, Mike. What we're seeing here honestly defies explanation. Not only does this man demand $50, he claims to have captured awarded thespian and national treasurer, James McAvoy, inside. I'm sorry to cut you off there, Bill, but we've been informed that this Mr. Winterbauer is on the line with us now. We are going to him live in three, two. Mr. Winterbauer, when will you release the hostages? What are you talking about? What? Thank God, send the police in. They won't let me leave.

• 1:28:38Speaker 04

  Are you telling me that these people are willingly listening to your podcast? They're paying me $50 a month to keep doing it. I don't understand why. Well, you heard it here first. Stockholm syndrome, definitely a real thing. Okay, look, I need to start reading their names. If I don't read their names, we are never going to get through this. So just to be clear, this is not a self-serving exercise. You are doing this at the behest of these people. In fact, one might say that you, sir, are a hostage of your own success. Yes, to be clear, this isn't for me. This is for them. Well, I guess the proof will be in the pudding. What's the first name? It's, I have the biggest man crush on Chris Winterbauer. We're cutting it off there. Our station has a policy against promoting cults on the air, but I've just been told

• 1:29:20Speaker 04

  that we did get a list of the hostages, in case any friends or family would like to speak to them about this complete waste of $50. Adrian Pang Korea, Alex Barrett, Angeline Renee Cook, Ben Schindelman, Blaze Ambrose, Brian Donahue, Brittany Morris, Brooke, Cameron Smith, C. Grace B., Chris Liel, Datam3, David Friskelanti, Darren and Dale Conkling, M. Zodiac, Evan Downey, Felicia G., Filmityourself, Frankenstein, Galen and Miguel, The Broken Glass Kids, the cast and crew of Win a Trip to Brown Town, Half-Grey Hound, I Have the Biggest Man Crush on Chris Winterbauer, that one was clearly written by the hostage taker, awarded thespian and national treasurer, James

• 1:30:00Speaker 04

  McAvoy, Jason Frankel, J.J. Rapido, John D. Wilchire, Jory Hillpiper, Jose Emiliano Salto Del Giorgio, Karina Kanaba, Kate Ellington, Amy Orgasaga McCoy, Lena, LJ, Lousy Susan, Lydia Howes, Mandy Rarleson, Mark Bertha, Matthew Jacobson, Michael McGrath, Nate Ashley, Nate the Knife, Pete Re Peterson, Rosemary Southwood, Rural Juror Sadie, Just Sadie, So Man Chinani, Suzanne Johnson, The Provost Family, The O's Sound Like O's, oh, oh goodness, and it looks like he has his own father in there with him, Steve Winterbauer. Sir, you should have done better with that young man. And we'll conclude this segment with an announcement from our mayor.

• 1:30:41Speaker 04

  They have pledged to make podcasting equipment far more expensive so that tragedies like these do not occur moving forward.

• 1:30:50Lizzie Bassett?

  All right. Well, thank you so much for that, Chris. I really, I loved watching this movie. I loved learning about this. This was fascinating. Next week.

• 1:30:58Chris Winterbauer?

  We got another crime buddy comedy.

• 1:30:59Lizzie Bassett?

  We do.

• 1:31:00Chris Winterbauer?

  That we're jumping into.

• 1:31:01Lizzie Bassett?

  We're staying on the outlaw train and covering one of my favorite movies of all time. Chris, what is it?

• 1:31:07Chris Winterbauer?

  I was looking at his filmography. I think this is Ridley Scott's best movie of the 90s and maybe of a 15-year run.

• 1:31:14Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, definitely of the 90s, I think.

• 1:31:16Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, Thelma and Louise.

• 1:31:17Lizzie Bassett?

  Thelma and Louise, can't wait.

• 1:31:19Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. Gina Davis month continues, Sarandon month continues. We're very excited to dive into it with you guys. Thank you so much for listening, and we will see you next week with Thelma and Louise.

• 1:31:30Lizzie Bassett?

  Bye.

• 1:31:31Speaker 05

  What Went Wrong is a Sad Boom Podcast, presented by Lizzie Bassett and Chris Winterbauer. Post-production and music by David Bowman. This episode was researched by Jesse Winterbauer and edited by Karen Krebsaw.