The Boys of Summer

On this summer day in Brooklyn I watched a documentary about a summer day in Brooklyn 37 years ago. Based on a True Story, Walter Stokman's 2004 film about the real-life bank robbery that inspired Dog Day Afternoon, played to acclaim at festivals in 2004 and '05, but legal problems have kept it out of theaters and off DVD. Fortunately Stokman has posted the whole movie online. (He narrates the film in Dutch; all the interviews are in English.)

Dog Day Afternoon is probably my favorite movie, one that has haunted me since I saw it on TV when I was 10. (That was in 1980, five years after the film's release.) It's certainly the best movie ever made about New York City—and being a native New Yorker, I don't say that lightly. The mix of humor, tragedy, suspense, and asburdity is just right, and Al Pacino's performance as Sonny Wortzik, the bank robber who gets in over his head, is the finest he's ever given. What's most compelling about the movie is how anguished and sympathetic Pacino makes Wortzik. The character treats his hostages with respect, and he commits the crime for a selfless reason. I guess I shouldn't have been surprised to learn what the real Wortzik was like.

The real Wortzik was John Wojtowicz, who served seven years of a 20-year sentence for the robbery and was in his 50s and living in Brooklyn when Stokman tracked him down for his film. (He died of cancer in 2006.) Based on a True Story is about the circumstances leading to the robbery and the ways the movie version differed from the real thing; the interview subjects include Sidney Lumet and Frank Pierson, Dog Day's director and screenwriter; Wojtowicz's ex-wife, Carmen Bifulco; some of the bank tellers who were held hostage; the detectives who were on the scene; and the G-man who shot and killed Wojtowicz's partner, Sal Naturile. But it's mostly about Wojtowicz, a charismatic and intelligent but clearly unhinged guy whom you can hear threatening Stokman in recorded phone calls about their negotiations over payment for his participation. "It's my documentary, not yours," Wojtowicz says. "You want to make a documentary, you do it my way, or you don't make it." He even says, "I know where you live."

As in Dog Day Afternoon, he really did attempt the robbery with the intention of paying for his male lover's sex-change operation. One of the most powerful moments of the documentary is a clip from a 1978 interview Wojtowicz did in prison with the TV host Jeanne Parr. She asks, "What was so special about Ernie? Why did you fall in love with him in the first place?" (Ernie being Ernest Aron, Wojtowicz's male lover and second wife; they were married in a civil ceremony in 1971.) He replies, sounding exactly like Joe Pesci: "My wife Carmen always asks me that question. And I said I don't know. Because if I knew why I loved him, then maybe I could stop loving him. But when you don't know why you love somebody—because he's lousy in bed, so it's not the sex thing, it's just him." That statement, with its romance, wit, and coarseness, is Wojtowicz in a nutshell. But by the end of the documentary, you get the sense that Wojtowicz was using Parr just as he tries to use Stokman—to sell his version of the story and make himself come off better. (Of course, one can legitimately ask—as with Perry Smith and Truman Capote, or Jeffrey MacDonald and Joe McGinnis—who's using whom.) In Dog Day, all the elements of the story are the same, but as Pierson tells Stokman in his interview, the Wortzik character he created is simply a caring version of Wojtowicz.

Watching Based on a True Story led me to all sorts of great material online. There's the article by P. F. Kluge and Thomas Moore from the September 22, 1972, issue of Life, "The Boys in the Bank," that inspired Dog Day (it's here and here; scroll down). There's Harry Reasoner describing the robbery and its aftermath on ABC News the day after it happened. There's the absolutely fascinating self-aggrandizing 1975 article by Wojtowicz that was rejected by The New York Times. There are vivid descriptions of the artist Pierre Huyghe's 2000 work The Third Memory, in which Wojtowicz acts out his recollection of the robbery in a French TV studio. And there's the website of the writer P. F. Kluge, co-author of the original Life article, where he says, "I don’t travel to Hollywood and, since moving to rural Ohio, I haven’t seen more than twenty films a year, many bad. But I like films. Some, I love: The Blue Angel and The Wild Bunch. When I return to those two, and some others I could name, it’s as though I’m revisiting a world that has a life of its own that goes on whether or not I’m watching." A world that has a life of its own: that's my view of Dog Day Afternoon.

But reality is always stranger than fiction. In Based on a True Story, Wojtowicz's first wife says that their son eventually changed his name and wanted nothing to do with his father. Yet his favorite actor—the man he emulates, the missing father in his life—is Al Pacino.

Comments

[Brendan]

Terrific piece! Can't wait to watch the doc...