For Sidney Lumet’s Birthday: A Personal Memory: or: What Dog Day Afternoon Means to Me

When I was 12 or 13, I saw Dog Day Afternoon one night while I was babysitting, and it changed the course of my life. This is not hyperbole. It is partially responsible for me being who I am today, for me making the choices I made, for me accepting the things I valued most, for me even RECOGNIZING what I valued. It all goes back to Dog Day Afternoon (and East of Eden, which I’ll get to). Dog Day Afternoon also represented an immensely painful – and even traumatic – growth spurt happening (in retrospect) when I was too young to handle it or process it.

I was in middle school. I was way too young to see that movie, and I didn’t understand a lot of it. The whole sex-reassignment operation thing went completely over my head, but what I do remember – and what struck me then – was the raw power of Al Pacino’s performance. It knocked me flat. I had never seen acting like this before. The parents of the kid I was babysitting came home that night, and had no idea that the girl sitting on the couch was totally altered from the girl who had arrived at their house 4 hours before. The father drove me back to my house. My mind was AFLAME with thoughts not of Al Pacino, but of Sonny, the real-life character he played. So this is KEY in explaining the power the film had on my 12-year-old brain.

I clearly remember, on that short drive home, not just considering writing a letter to the real Sonny in prison, but planning on doing it, and wondering how I could figure out which prison he was in, so I could make sure he received it. I thought to myself during that short drive, “Should I ask Dad if he can look into this for me? I need to know the prison and there isn’t any Internet yet.” I don’t know what I wanted to SAY to Sonny, but I just knew I wanted to reach out and tell him how much I loved and appreciated him, and how I really felt for the struggle he had gone through. Al Pacino’s performance made me want to find “the real guy”.

The soul does not grow in a linear way. There are events in life that catapult you forward, where your soul skips a step, and expands to three times its former size. It hurts. It seems we are meant to grow in a slower more gradual way so that you can’t actually feel the growth spurt. Watching Dog Day Afternoon was a growth-spurt for me. It hurt. I walked around for days, aching. Aching for Sonny’s desperation, for Sonny being in prison just because he wanted to help that person on the phone, whom I had no idea what was going on with anyway … it didn’t matter. Sonny wasn’t a bad person. I ached for him. And, looking back, I can see that what was born in me through that movie and performance was empathy. A stepping outside of myself and my experience, and feeling – HARD – for others.

My soul did a quantum-leap, in one evening, and I was no longer the same clueless self-centered girl I had been. After seeing Dog Day Afternoon, for weeks afterward, I would lie in bed at night and actually press down on my chest with my hand, trying to soothe whatever was going on in there. (It is also worth it to mention that I had my first nervous breakdown when I was 12, right on the heels of getting my period. My docs now think that this was bipolar, slipping through the door along with menstruation, which is the way it goes often for girls. Thanks a lot, Mother Nature. Anyway, I was already in a heightened state, but – as I would come to learn – heightened states like this – as painful as they are – do bring you closer to some essential truth.) I couldn’t get the image of sweaty Al Pacino’s face out of my mind. He haunted me. I understood totally why the hostages would choose to stay with this man. I understood it completely. No WAY would I have left that bank if I had been a hostage.

(Another movie I saw too soon, around this same time, was East of Eden. Dog Day Afternoon and East of Eden were the one-two punch to my childhood. Rebel Without a Cause came maybe a year later, again, seen when I was babysitting. Plato’s death was one of the worst things I had ever seen in my life. I could not believe it had happened. The first “too soon” movie is the real Big Kahuna and that was Stanley Kramer’s Bless the Beasts and Children, which I watched on the little black-and-white television in our den when I was around 9 years old. It was the era when children spent large chunks of their day completely unmonitored. I thought the movie was going to be about kids and animals. The movie wrecked me to such an extreme degree that my helpless parents were actually worried. They hadn’t seen the movie and they had no idea what I was reacting to. I remember hearing my mother say, as I thrashed around in my bed sobbing, “WHAT was in that movie, Sheila. Please tell us.” But I couldn’t! How could I tell them that the sight of a herd of STATIONARY buffalo had made me cease to be an innocent child? How could I make them understand?? Bless the Beasts and Children was a moment from which I never fully recovered.)

I didn’t even know what the hell was going ON when I first saw Dog Day Afternoon, that night babysitting. What was “Attica” and why was he screaming that at the crowd? I needed to find out about that, too.

I asked Dad. Imagine poor Dad, sitting at the breakfast table with his 12-year-old daughter, and she suddenly says, out of the blue, “Did something bad happen at a place called Attica?” To his credit, he explained about the prison riot. Ohhhh okay so now I understood Sonny’s screams. I was 12 years old, starting to be obsessed with Casey Kasum’s Top 40, and also my rainbow-striped leg warmers and my friends and going to dances and doing my homework. But I was also researching Al Pacino, the real “Sonny”, Attica, and Sidney Lumet, trying to put it all together in my head: How had anyone CREATED this movie? It felt like a real event, it felt like news footage. I knew enough to know that what I was watching was the result of hard work of some kind, but it still baffled me and obsessed me. How does one go about creating something like Dog Day Afternoon?

There was another aspect to this: As I said, I did have a conception that this thing was MADE, and so I became fascinated by the real people involved. The same thing with East of Eden. I worked in a library after school, and my dad was a librarian, so it didn’t take me long to figure out that Elia Kazan (director of East of Eden) and Al Pacino had the Actors Studio in common. And so I started researching the Studio and forget it I was hooked. And 15 years later, I was going to grad school at the Actors Studio, taking classes with Studio people, attending sessions at the Studio. I trace ALL of this back to Dog Day Afternoon.

I have a great affection for the things in my life that I encountered “too soon”. There is, as always, a loss of innocence connected to such moments, and that’s why it hurt so much. That’s why I lay in bed at night, eyes towards the dark ceiling, thinking about Sonny in his prison cell somewhere, wanting to reach out to him personally, and pressing my hand down on my chest to calm everything down in there. I had never seen a movie like that before. It marked me with indelible ink.

 
 
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