Remembering Dog Day Afternoon

A marvelous post about the film.

I’ve written before about that movie just after Marlon Brando died. The post was about Brando – but I can’t write about Marlon without referencing Dog Day Afternoon, they are very closely linked in my personal history.

I saw On the Waterfront in junior high school, when I first started getting serious about being an actress.

My passion was the Actors Studio. The characters of that place were as real to me as my contemporaries. Elia Kazan was real to me. James Dean. Shelley Winters. Harold Clurman. Marlon Brando. I read everything I could get my hands on.

I was 15 years old and read Harold Clurman’s great book The Fervent Years, about the Group Theater in the 1930s. I read both of Shelley Winters’ hilarious autobiographies, which are basically one long name-drop, gossipy, fun. I read Carroll Baker’s autobiography (merely because she had been in one notorious Kazan film: Babydoll, and I wanted to hear her anecdotes about him).

I watched all of those old movies (and this was before we had a VCR, so my watching involved scouring the TV Guide on a weekly basis, looking for what would be on), wishing I could seep my way into the screen, and be on those sets, live in that time. I watched Rebel without a Cause – literally checking TV Guide every week to see if it would be on. I watched Streetcar Named Desire. I was obsessed with East of Eden.I watched Place in the Sun .

Mike Nichols says that when he is getting ready to shoot a new film, one of the ways he prepares, is to watch Place in the Sun. It is obvious why. You must remind yourself constantly of the greatness of others, and learn from their greatness. Standing on the shoulders of giants, I suppose.

Place in the Sun is generally described as a “perfect film”. Not too many films are. There might be a great movie, with one boring extraneous scene. Or some great performances with a so-so script. There might be a great story, with mostly great acting, but one actor who is not so good throws off the whole thing. Standards for perfection are set very high, as they should be. Mike Nichols wants to be in the company of those who did everything right. George Stevens did everything right in Place in the Sun. Nichols wants to look at Place in the Sun and remind himself of what WORKS on film. A film where every note is in tune, where every element also contains the super-structure of the whole, where every smaller part works together with the larger part, where nothing goes wrong. The music is right, the script is right, the acting is right, the telling of the story is right, the production value is right (and not just right, but part of the theme of the piece), and … above all of that, is the “magic” factor. Which you can never plan for or manufacture. Everything may be in place, everything may look right and perfect, but there is no magic. Everything, while very well done and appropriate, somehow does not add up to a magical whole. This is the Holy Grail for film directors, Mike Nichols included.

Anyone who wants to work in film (actors, directors, writers, cinematographers, costume designers) should study that movie. Obsessively. If you do not, then … I would say that you’re not as serious about your work as you should be. Mike Nichols taught me that.

All of these anecdotes LIVED in my mind as a hungry ambitious adolescent actress. I didn’t care as much about contemporary actors. My real gods were back in the 1940s and 1950s.

Then, when I was 13, I saw Dog Day Afternoon while I was babysitting. (I was probably way too young to have seen that movie! I didn’t get a lot of it. The sex-change operation thing went completely over my head. But what I did get was the power of Al Pacino’s performance.)

Now how can I talk about this … I don’t need to fear hyperbole, because the impact Dog Day Afternoon had on me was so profound that I truly was a different person after seeing it. It was that big. That film changed my life forever. One indication of how the film affected me is: I actually considered writing a letter to the real guy – Sonny – the guy Al Pacino’s character was based on, now in prison. I wanted to write to him. I don’t know what I wanted to say, but I just knew I wanted to do something. That character LIVED for me. I was IN that story.

The soul does not grow in a linear step-by-step way. There are events in life that quantum-leap you forward, skipping steps, skipping phases, your soul suddenly expands to three times its former size. Watching Dog Day Afternoon was one of those moments for me. A soul-growth moment. It actually hurt. I walked around for days, aching. Now I look back on it and see that that was a growing pain. My soul had done a quantum-leap, in one evening, and it hurt. I would press down on my chest with my hand, trying to comfort my own heart.

Al Pacino was new to me at that point. I, of course, had not seen The Godfather films. I would have been 10 years old. So I watched his performance in growing … horror. And identification. I could not believe my own eyes. I immediately went out and did a little research on the guy, and learned that he was also from the Actors Studio. I felt myself nod like a wise sage, when I got this information: “Of course that’s where he’s from. Of course.” His background was the same mythical background as my other idols: Marlon Brando, Elia Kazan, James Dean.

Dog Day Afternoon marks, for me, the moment when I got serious about acting. As a life-choice. As a life’s work. As an art-form. As a craft to devote my entire life to. This was not just having fun in the high school play, and loving applause. This was what I wanted for my future. I wanted, someday, to be able to act like Al Pacino in Dog Day Afternoon. And for that, I needed to get my ass to the Actors Studio. I want to do THAT kind of work. It seemed of a piece with Brando in On the Waterfront, James Dean in Rebel, Montgomery Clift in Place in the Sun. It was the same kind of acting. It looked like life. But not in a boring every-day-life kind of way. It looked like life lived large. It was unpredictable . It was never just about the words being said. It was all about what was going on underneath. It was intensely theatrical. And so real it could clutch at your heart and make it difficult for you to breathe.

I wanted to be in the ranks of those people so badly that it ruined my appetite. I had never before experienced need like that, ambition, ruthless ambition.

Dog Day Afternoon was the spark.

ATTICA! ATTICA! ATTICA!

I didn’t even know what the hell was going ON when I first saw it, that night babysitting … Attica? Huh? All I knew was – it meant SOMETHING and it blew the top of my head off.