Sonny Wortzik
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Dog Day Afternoon is a 1975 American biographical crime drama film directed by Sidney Lumet and produced by Martin Bregman and Martin Elfand. The film stars Al Pacino, John Cazale, James Broderick, and Charles Durning.
Jun 26, 2024 · Dog Day Afternoon is based on the attempted robbery of a real Brooklyn bank by John Wojtowicz, Salvatore Naturile and Robert Westenberg just two years before the movie was shot. Unfortunately for these real-life participants, their story ended the same way the film does, with one of the two main protagonists dead and the other arrested.
Dog Day Afternoon: Directed by Sidney Lumet. With Penelope Allen, Sully Boyar, John Cazale, Beulah Garrick. Three amateur robbers plan to hold up a Brooklyn bank. A nice, simple robbery: Walk in, take the money, and run.
- (276K)
- Biography, Crime, Drama
- Sidney Lumet
- 1975-12-25
When inexperienced criminal Sonny Wortzik (Al Pacino) leads a bank robbery in Brooklyn, things quickly go wrong, and a hostage situation develops. As Sonny and his accomplice, Sal Naturile (John ...
- (116)
- Sidney Lumet
- R
- Al Pacino
- Its Original Title Was The Boys in The Bank.
- The Real Bank Robber Looked A Lot Like Al Pacino.
- Sal Was Supposed to Be A Beautiful 18-year-old, Not, Uh, John Cazale.
- It Has No Musical Score.
- Sidney Lumet Was Adamant About Not Shooting The Film on Studio Sets.
- It Was Filmed During A Cold Autumn.
- The Extras Hired For The Crowd Scenes Were Outnumbered by Actual bystanders.
- It Was Shot in Sequence ... Sort of.
- They Lost A Day’S Work Because of Pacino’s Mustache.
- It’S The only Time Lumet Ever Incorporated Improvisation Into One of His Movies.
That was the name of P.F. Kluge’s Life magazine articleabout the real robbery. Somewhere along the way, director Sidney Lumet expressed dislike for the title as it applied to his movie, and came up with one that suggested a hot, stuffy day near the end of the summer.
Fluge’s magazine article described John Wojtowicz as “a dark, thin fellow with the broken-faced good looks of an Al Pacino or Dustin Hoffman,” so naturally the screenplay found its way into both actors’ hands. (Pacino was Lumet’s first choice, but Hoffman was reportedly approached when Pacino, seeking to take a brief break from movies, initially tu...
The real bank robber’s accomplice was Salvatore Naturale, an 18-year-old delinquent who’d been in trouble with the law for most of his life. Screenwriter Frank Pierson envisioned the Sal character as a handsome kid that Sonny had picked up in Greenwich Village, and described him in the scriptas “medium height, also good-looking in an intense boyish...
Lumet was all about authenticity. Except for the Elton John song that plays over the opening credits (which turns out to be coming from Sonny’s car radio) and a couple of snippets heard elsewhere on radios, there’s no music in the movie. “I could not reconcile trying to convince an audience that this really happened—which I felt was the first oblig...
Most of the movie takes place in three locations: inside the bank, on the street outside the bank, and in the barbershop across from the bank. Standard procedure would be to shoot the street scenes on location, and then film the bank and barbershop interiors on sets constructed at a studio (where it’s much easier to control lighting, sound, etc.). ...
The movie takes place in late August, and the makeup department did fine work making everyone look appropriately sweaty. But it was actually shot in the fall, and a particularly chilly one at that. When they were filming outdoors, you could see the actors’s breath, which obviously wouldn’t do. The highly scientific workaround: ice chips in the mout...
Lumet’s team hired about 300 extras to play the crowd that gathers outside the bank during the standoff. But when you film a hostage crisis on a real, functioning city street, people notice. Lumet said the crowd would swell every day they filmed, especially in the late afternoons, and that the professional extras did a great job of getting the civi...
You probably know that most movies are not filmed chronologically. First you shoot all the scenes that use location A; then you move to location B and film whatever scenes take place there, and so on. But with Dog Day Afternoonbeing set in one spot, it was almost feasible to start on page one of the script and just shoot the whole thing in order (w...
One of the things the actor did as a means of getting into character was grow a mustache—not because the real robber had one, but because the character was gay, and in the mid-’70s, many gay men had mustaches. In Lumet’s words, however, Pacino’s mustache “looked terrible.” And after the first day of filming, Pacino agreed. Watching the footage, Pac...
Sidney Lumet’s first film was 1957’s 12 Angry Men. He made 20 more between that and Dog Day Afternoon (and 22 more afterward), and by his own account, he never used improv. “I don’t like actors to improvise, to use their own language,” he said in the Dog Day AfternoonDVD commentary. “They are not going to come up with something ... better than a re...
On one of the hottest days of August 1972, three amateur bank robbers plan to hold up a Brooklyn bank. A nice simple robbery: Walk in, take the money, and run. Unfortunately, the supposedly uncomplicated heist suddenly becomes a bizarre nightmare as everything that could go wrong does.
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Overview. Based on the true story of would-be Brooklyn bank robbers John Wojtowicz and Salvatore Naturile. Sonny and Sal attempt a bank heist which quickly turns sour and escalates into a hostage situation and stand-off with the police.
