Rainbow with Egg Underneath and an Elephant

Dog Day Afternoon

Cinema Papers in Australia.
FRANK PIERSON ON DOG DAY AFTERNOON

Question: How did you come to write Dog Day Afternoon?

Frank Pierson: Al Pacino's agents were looking for a movie for him to star in, and they saw the newspaper articles about this event that as it actually happened.  They noticed that the guy who did it, bore a startling similarity to Al Pacino.  They went to Warner Brothers and asked them if they would put up the money to write a screenplay based on that event as a professional vehicle for Al Pacino.  Warners said, `Yes, but bring us back legal releases from everybody, so we won't get sued.'  So they went to John Wojtowicz, who by then was in prison and made an agreement with him, whereby Warner Brothers would pay him $7,500, plus a percentage of the film to be agreed upon at some further negotiation.

He was most anxious to get the $7,500 because that was the price of a sex change operation in New York City at that time.  The money was paid to him and he instantly gave it to Leon, (Chris Sarandon in the movie) who became Liz Eadon, courtesy of Warner Brothers.

Then, having got that legal waiver, they went around and got legal waivers from everybody else involved, all the bank tellers, members of the families.  Some of those waivers they got for as little as $10.00, and the waivers gave the studio the right to do a film that would portray them as real characters, but not using their actual names, and with the understanding that nothing we did in the film would touch upon their love lives at all.  Legally everything was ready to go ahead.  They also bought the motion picture rights to a Life Magazine article which has been published about this event, and that established an overall legal umbrella over the thing, to frighten off any competing producers because when anything like this happens, instantly everybody is registering titles and starting to prepare screenplays.  It was equally important to the producers to establish a kind of proprietary claim on the news event, so that nobody else would crowd them out and beat them to the screen with it.

Then Warner Brothers put up the money to hire a screenwriter to write a screenplay.  That was when they came to me and asked me to write it.  I think they came to me mostly on the strength that I had written Cool

Hand Luke. I don't know what it proved.  It was a successful film and it was about criminals.  I guess I had a reputation as a writer of hard nosed action, more than anything else.  A criminal mind!

I read the material and it was one of those things that you instantly said, `Yes!' to, there is a movie in this.  I got terribly excited about it and agreed to do it.  Then I finished up some other work and I seriously started on the project sometime in July. 

Q: Did you go back to the people involved for material?

A: The first thing I did was go back and reinterview everybody. The key F.B.I. Investigator involved and one of the key New York Police Officers had committed suicide in the short period of time of eighteen months which had elapsed, so I was unable to get to them obviously. 

I spent a lot of time with Leon, the homosexual wife in the story who was one of the most hilariously obscene people I think I have ever met in my life.  He was as a man, is now as a woman, the kind of person who cannot ask for a cigarette without putting some obscene spin on the question.  It just makes you laugh, and there is no getting around it.  It never stops and I made extensive tapes of him/her.  In the original writing I used a lot of that material. 

I was never able to meet with John Wojtowicz. The lawyer who was trying to negotiate the unstated percentage that was supposed to be negotiated with Warner Brothers was not a showbusiness lawyer.  He was very suspicious of Warner Brothers but he was out of his depth and he should have gone to an agent or should have accepted the offer while it was on the table.  Finally it got to the point where Warner Bros. said "Look, we gave you the $7,500.  We were offering you whatever the percentage was (maybe half - three quarters of a point - it would be worth a lot of  money to him) in good faith.  You have to say yes or no, take it or leave it."  The lawyer said, thinking they were bluffing.  "Leave it." So Warner Brothers said, "Stuff it." So he was in the middle of those arguments with Warner Brothers and every time I presented myself at the prison gate to interview him, he refused to see me, so I never got to meet him. 

By now having all the interviews and reinterviews and all the reseach material in hand which weighed 65 or 70 pounds altogether, all the tapes and paper work, I got seriously down to the business of writing the screenplay. 

In this instance you knew where it was going to begin.  I knew I was going to tell the story in the time span of the real event, so it would begin with the robbers coming into the bank, the robbing of the bank, and it would go right to the end and end at Kennedy Airport with Sal (John Cazale) being shot and Sonny being carted away, and going off to gaol.  So I wasn't presented with what is usually my first writing decision, and that is finding a first image, and thinking of finding my way to an end image that defines the difference between the two which defines what the story is about.  

In thinking what it was about, it seemed to me that it was about the media event, because this was the first time in the history of television where television networks were tied together in a way that allowed them to cover a news event with coverage all over the country.  It was an event that everyone was tuning into because it was one of those hot sultry afternoons in New York City. If you've ever lived there in August, you know how awful it is, when you just beg for anything, no matter how terrible, to happen to take your mind off the weather. 

So that's what is happening that afternoon.  From all around New York City, thousands of people were racing over to the bank, including by the way, some 1100 off-duty New York Police officers who all brought their guns.  They had to set up two police lines.  There was one police line inside another police line. Inside were the people who were actually negotiating over the hostage issue and dealing with the real issue. Outside that was like the privileged persons area, where there were some 1,000 of these N.Y. police officers with their guns drawn, begging to have the chance to shoot a homosexual. 

Outside also were the general public who, because of the inexperience of the police at that time, were allowed to be close enough to the bank that they could actually, in effect, participate in the action.  They were within yelling distance of the robber in the bank.

Partly as a result of this particular instance, by the way, the N.Y. police and police all over the United States radically revised their way of dealing with crowd control in situations like this, and what they do now is simply swarm in all over it.  They put up barriers that are so far back that the public really can't effectively see.  They keep the media back, the television is not allowed on.  They certainly don't let the bank robbers and the hostages talk on television or show them on television, the way they did in this case.  It was a first in that sense. 

Q: But Dog Day Afternoon was more than a documentary of that event!

A: If the movie is just about that, then it is just a documentary.  You are standing back and detailing what happened here, so it would be vaguely interesting, but it is not a dramatic work in that sense.  It is a story about a character, John Wojtowicz, who became the character we called Sonny in the picture.  It was clear to me that I wanted to tell the story from his point of view, so I had to find some way of getting into it, so that we knew what it was that he was up to.  It is important to understand what he is about and he is such a paradox it was very difficult to identify him as a character.  As I say, I never got to meet him.  And everybody who had anything to do with him, all of his loved ones especially, those who were closest to him gave an utterly different view of who Sonny was.  They were all kind of angry and irritated and disappointed with him in one way or another, but they all described him in an utterly different way. 

Some said he was a loving, sweet kind man, but they had their difficulties with him.  Some said that he was a brutal, underhanded, mean son of a bitch.  Some said he was homosexual.  Some said he was not.  Even in the homosexual community, where he spent a lot of his time, there were people who said he wasn't really a homosexual and that his reasons for involving himself in homosexual relationships derived from some psychological problem, but certainly not homosexuality. There was some other neurotic thing that drove him to involve himself in these situations, where he really didn't belong.  The descriptions of him are so widely disparate, that I couldn't get any fix on what sort of person he really was.  What was he doing in that bank that day?  Why was he doing it? 

It was clear also that he had changed in character over the years because not so long before that he had been a very conservative man who worked in a bank, wore a three piece suit and was a Goldwater delegate at the Republican Convention in 1964, but gradually as his life deteriorated he became a much scruffier, freer living and much more confused, and occasionally violent person.  Some said he was violent, some said he was not.

This confusion over the character absolutely began to freeze me up.  I could not see what drove the story or him.  I didn't know how to write him.  I've got him in the bank and the policeman comes to the front door.  How does he react to that situation?  I need to know that before I can write the scene. 

When they start the robbery and he started to lock all the hostages in the safe and the head teller needs to go to the bathroom.  How does he respond to that?  That was an actual incident, so I knew that in fact what he had done was he said reluctantly he would let her go.  When he took her to the toilet he looked inside and discovered that there was one of the other girls who had been hiding there, and he flew into a fury.  In fact in real life he beat her up rather badly.  I didn't want to use that.  It was one of the things about a character that I couldn't get a handle on.   I didn't know how to write it.  I got gloomier and gloomier and finally got to the point where I actually tried to quit the project.  I decided I couldn't do it.

Before I did that I resorted to the most labourious kind of process that  I have evolved for myself over the years in approaching solving story problems, which is just simply to ask the stupidist and simplest kinds of questions of the characters involved in the action. Questions like, What is going on here?  Who is he?  Why does he do these things?

I literally make lists of things, and questions to ask.  I erased them out of my computer, because I didn't want anybody to see that stuff on my screen and see how stupid I am.

Why does everybody describe him as an utterly different kind of character?  What is the common denominator?  Is there one?  If so, what is it that runs through all these things?  So then I could go back with that question and re-examine all these statements and descriptions of him and say what do these things have in common?  I realised finally it was the relationship they each had with him that was the common factor. 

In every case they loved John and he loved them, and at some point those words had been said between these people.  "I love you."  "I love you too."  But that opened the way to perceive something else.  Not only had all these people loved him at one time or another, but they all had a sense that they had been betrayed by him.  So now we are beginning to see what is in common amongst all these disparate statements begins to emerge into the foreground, and I am beginning to ask myself, `Why'?  What happened in these relationships?  Specifically, why does his heterosexual wife feel betrayed by him? 

I didn't even have to go back and reinterview her, now I found it in the interview that I conducted with her, in which she was saying, "He was always talking about things that (she spoke just as she was portrayed on screen, a New Yorker,) my God, my heart fell onto the floor, I don't know, I mean everything.  I can't deal with this man.  He talks.  He has got a man - I think he wants to kill me and the children and flush us down the toilet.  I did everything for this man." she said.  "The only thing I couldn't do, I couldn't go on top because I am afraid of high places!"  She actually said that.

She weighs about 300lbs and somewhere buried in all this torrent of language, she said.  "He wouldn't let me go on a diet because if I was going on a diet it was admitting that I was fat, and he said, "No you are not fat."  "And I said, Johnny, I am fat. I'm a fat, fat woman! Look at me, why can't you accept that?"  He was saying,  "You are not fat, it's alright.  I love you because you are really and truly a thin person, you are not fat.  Don't say you are fat."

I began to realise that the trail through this was that he simply would refuse to recognise the reality of the situation. His way of following through on a wish of hers to be thin, was to simply deny she was fat, which was so unreal that she was unable to diet because that would be a violation of his insistence that she wasn't fat in the first place, and so all that happened was she got fatter and fatter, and angrier and angrier.  That's where her sense of betrayal came from.   I began to find that there was a similar strain in all of his other relationships. 

It was as though what was embodied in all of them was a promise; his form of loving was to make a promise to people - to her that she wasn't fat - the promise to Leon that he was going to get a sex change operation - the promise to his mother that he was going to hold down a regular job and not have any more children, because his mother felt that he was having too many kids.  All these promises were made and all of them were violated.

I ask myself another stupid question, `What is the nature of the promise or commitment that he makes to them?'  The commitment was that in every case he was going to make them whole.  That Carmen was going to be thin, that Leon was going to be happy as a woman, that his mother was going to be also happy, but that's a promise that we cannot make in life on any level.  You can't make other people happy, and especially he couldn't, given his social and economic class, and a lot of the promises he made involved money. 

So you began to see a pattern emerge that he is a man who is terribly loving in a nurturing but immature way, and also very compulsive about it.  In a loving relationship he would take these people over and promise in a sense to make them whole.  Of course he was never able to do that, but he was very persuasive at the same time and they all believed him and that's why they loved him.  But it is also why when he failed in the bank robbery itself he's going about getting Leon the sex change operation and goes to rob a bank and winds up with Leon saying in effect, "For Christ sake, what are you doing?  Yes, I wanted a sex change operation, but what a way to go about it, to go and rob a God-damn bank!  Is that idiotic, or not?  My mother has to see me on television in these circumstances?"

Then I knew what I needed to know to write the character, because you could say, "O.K.! In any given situation, this guy is going to try to do the nice thing."  If he sees a bag lady in the street, who is struggling to cross the street, this is the guy who is going to go over and say.  "Here, I will get you across the street, it is alright."  He is going to do everybody else's business for them, and for the first time I had a clear understanding of how to write the character.  

I could write the scenes in the bank now, because I knew how he would respond to almost any given situation that he would get into.  Of course if the chief teller says at the most critical moment, when he should leave the bank.  

"Get the hell out of there before the police come", and he is locking them all up in the safe, so that they can't raise the alarm before he gets out, and the head teller says "I have to go to the toilet".  You know this character, and you know why.  He is going to say.  "Oh for Christ sake ...O.K., don't worry about it, you go."  It is because of that delay that the police come before he is done with the robbery, and these two are a total disaster. 

Then I knew how to write it.  After that time it was very easy going.  But it all derived from finding the key to that character, which came sometime towards the end of August.  I started in July, but for the first six weeks I didn't write a word, I was just sitting there and I was spending all my time on it, because I needed money.  I was getting divorced and needed a lot of money very fast right then, and I didn't have anything else to do, so I was just working. 

Q: How extensive was the research you had to do?

A: A lot of my research had been done, because they had done so many interviews, and even though I went back and reinterviewed most of the key people, I only wanted to go back and confront the people involved, because you learn so much about somebody in the first 30 seconds of meeting them face to face, and talking.  After that I could interpret what I was hearing on the tapes, or seeing on the transcripts so much more easily because I had already met the person and could visualise who was saying the words.  I knew their style and tone and tempo, and their attitude towards things.  Whether they were kind of angry and threatening or whatever.  So I didn't have to spend much time on it, because the hard work, the time consuming work, just sitting there and asking all the questions you need to ask had already been done.  So I did rather short interviews with them, altogether maybe 4 - 5 days of that actual interviewing.  As I say I had the benefit of literally weeks of tapes and research material that had already been done before.  So it was a very highly researched film.  All I had to do was sit there and digest it.

I usually start from there.  Once I have got hold of the character in my mind that I can understand the general shape of the story, and of course there were a lot of the concrete events already in place, because they were the things that actually happened.  

There was the moment that he comes into the bank, the moment that we realise we the audience are going to be made aware that this thing is not your usual bank robbery, and that was a very important moment to spend time on, reflecting on how you give the audience permission to laugh?  It is a critically important thing, when you are dealing with highly melodramatic or tragic situations, which have a comedic side to them, and audiences need to know that it is alright to laugh, otherwise they are very uncomfortable.

The piece I found in the general research that I did was in an F.B.I. report of another bank robbery in which the robber comes into the bank and he sticks the gun in the head teller's face and uses the usual obscene dialogue, "Give me your money or I'll blow your fuckin' guts all over the God damn wall." and so on, and she, just by shear reflex action, you know that little triangular sign that says "NEXT WINDOW PLEASE", she pushed it. I stuck that piece of business in for the laugh.

Later on when we got down to rehearsing the action and the actors were doing their first stumbling through, finding their way, Pacino comes over with a dummy gun and puts it down on her and she reached over and pushed the sign over and Sidney Lumet the director, came running over and said "No, no darling, that's not right, you wouldn't do that.  You push that aside and then he will put the gun ..."  Then I stepped forward and said, "No wait a second Sidney, that's wrong.  The right way to do it is he puts the gun on her and she pushes the sign over." Sidney said.  "But that would be funny."  I said.  "Yeh, it would be funny."  He said.  "Have you been talking to the actors?"  I said, "No, it is in the screenplay."  He said.  "I didn't see it in the screenplay, where is it?"  So I pointed out to him where it said in the stage direction and he said.  "Oh, oh, alright."  Then he went ahead and did it very well. 

Then when we actually shot the scene, we got down to dress rehearsal of the scene, the real rifle was contained in a long box in which we ship what we call `long stem roses' and wrapped with satin, and when the actor, Pacino, tried to get that rifle out of the box, every goddamn time it got tied up in the ribbon and there was so much thrashing around.  That was the laugh and it worked.  It was totally spontaneous. It served the purpose of the sign.  Now my problem was to talk Sidney out of using the sign, because you can't do both.  You can only do one joke there, otherwise it gets to be too much. 

So I went over to Sidney and said.  "You are going to ditch the business with the sign, aren't you?"  He said.  "Well why?"  I said.  "You don't want to do two things."  He said.  "I know, it is getting a little jumbled."  I said.  "Take it out."  He said.  "But you thought of it." I said.  "I don't care.  The only point I care about is that we get a laugh at this point, because it gives permission, it tells the audience what it is that is happening to them, very early on in the picture. There is rather a prolonged beginning where we have that opening sequence with music and various scenes, painting in New York City and so on.  That goes for quite a long time.  Then you go to the three guys who are sitting in the car talking to each other.  They get out.  Audiences are pretty well trained.  They know when a bank is going to be robbed! What they are asking themselves is what kind of bank robbery is this going to be?  Are we going to see Godfather 4, or what?  They go inside and Sal, the John Cazale character, goes way inside and sits down by the bank manager to talk. 

Preparing all of that probably takes six, seven minutes before - just when the audience is thinking bank robbery, Cazale's got a gun in that case back there - then we cut to Sonny, the Pacino character, and the other boy that they bring with them who is saying.  "Sonny, I have got to get out of here.  I can't go through with it."  That gets a little laugh from the audience.  He says.  "If you are going to go, go."  So we are probably ten minutes into the picture before that actually happens.  It provides a certain amount of comic relief.  The guns have already been brought out, the robbery is in progress, so there is jeopardy.  Innocent people are threatened and all those elements are in place.  Then you spring a little joke like that.  You take the edge off it, especially since it is a joke on him.  It says incompetence and right away we know something about it. 

The important thing to me about beginning a film is not necessarily looking for that melodramatic hook, or some event that is going to anchor us or tell us what the plot is going to be.  The issue is, you have got to do something on screen. This came from a playwrite that I was once asking for advice.  I was planning to write a play and discovered I didn't know anything about it.  He said the most important thing is, when the curtain goes up and the show begins, make something happen, and preferably immediately.  No matter what it is - a note of music.  That is what overtures are for.  What it says is this is the way we are going to spend the next two hours of our lives together.  If you have got the right audience, they are saying.  "Ah, now I understand."  But if they are mystified about what

is happening, and not knowing if it is a comedy and thinking they don't like that, you're alienating the audience and they get very angry, but as long as you let them know that they are in good hands, it is going to be alright.  They know what to expect and the people who don't like that kind of a movie can get up and walk right out and get their $5.00 back, so they are happy too.

That is my thought about the beginning of the thing.

In any case, I was at the stage where as I am writing now in September and am working on my outline.  I have my character firmly in mind, so I know the outline scene by scene. Any scene that I can imagine I put him in and I know how he is going to act. From what I know about the other characters, I know how they are going to react to him too.  He is very pursuasive and likeable, and they trust him, and that is important in terms of constructing this story, because in part what it is about is the fact that the hostages come to identify with him.  In a sense all his hostages and he and Sal are united against the police.  There is that moment when that head teller is out there and yelling at the police, yelling.  "Leave him alone.  He is the only one who knows what this whole thing is about, he knows what he is doing, and you are screwing things up.  Look, you almost killed the bank guard.  Give him what he wants."

That is the way you get through that relationship between him and those characters.  I eventually worked out about a seventy page outline for a screenplay that is going to be 115 - 120 pages, no longer.  In that was contained every major scene that finally ended up in the picture, but an awful lot of stuff that did not, including some devices.  I kept thinking I wanted a time device which tells you all the way through.  Every shot, I wanted a clock in the picture, so that we know that time is spinning out, and there is always  a deadline.  That helped in creating a sense of urgency in the writing of things, but then in the end as I worked from the outline into the first draft, I actually discovered that I didn't need that to begin with, and I think that it would have been a very annoying and intrusive device to have used, so I abandoned it. 

It has been so long now and I haven't reviewed the material, so I can't tell you what other kinds of things I put in to that outline that I didn't use, except certain elements which I will come to later on down the line when we talk about the rehearsal process, which is where the rewrite business really began and ended.

All of the action of the thing was plotted out then.  Since I had already solved my principal character's motivation problem, what he was going to be like, before I started writing the screenplay, This is what I generally do and not everyone works this way. 

Tom Rickman and Alvin Sargent for example write in a totally opposite way.  They just sit down and let the scenes come and let them come.  Alvin just keeps on writing scenes at random, anything that comes into his head that seems to bear some relationship, and he keeps putting them in a box until he has got a big stack of scenes, then he takes them out and sort of moves them around to see if he can assemble them in some form that will make a story. I once rad a first draft of his that was over two thousand pages long.  Needless to say he didn't turn that into the studio, but I can't work that way. 

Once I have found my characters in this way, I can work out what the scenes are and what is needed.  For example, take the entrance of his homosexual wife.  Leon is brought in from the hospital where he has tried to commit suicide, which was the reason why John, the original character, robbed the bank in the first place.  I didn't want the audience to know that.  I was trying deliberately to play a trick on them so they don't know anything about the homosexuality of the other man.  Whenever he speaks about the wife I want the audience to think that what he is talking about is his heterosexual wife, who we have seen already. 

That was all very carefully calculated, page by age, scene by scene as to how I would introduce the theme of the wife, the idea of the wife as being brought down.  I carefully structured the dialogue so that without being artificial about it, the ambiguity never gets explained.  It makes perfect sense.  If you read the dialogue afterwards when the cops say, "We are bringing your wife down."  He knows what wife they are referring to, and reacts with a certain reacion of disgust.  We think it is because of the big silly fat fool.  It is only later that we learn it is because Leon (Ernie - Chris Sarandon) is an embarrassment to him, under the circumstances even more so. Those things have to be planned out in the most mechanical way, so that I can spring that surprise as the second act climax, the moment that Leon is brought on stage, and we the audience and in effect the cops and the hostages all see that the wife who is coming down is actually a man, all at the same moment.  So that is all mechanical plotting.  That is what I am doing in the process of the whole outlining, is trying to get all those things in order. 

It is management of time and information, ecause when we tell a story we know the ending of it all, and yet the audience must not, ever.  So what we are really doing is planning out. 

You could look at the working out of a story or a screenplay as planning the leaking of information.  You find out just a little bit more, and a little bit more, and a little bit more all along the way.  A very mechanical process at that point.

Then once I got through with the outline my contract required me to turn it in to the producers, and the studio.  They had no comment at all, just said they liked it and to go ahead.  Then I started to write the first draft sometime in mid-October.  At that stage I forget about the outline.  I try not to go back and look at it.  In fact what I do is make an outline of the outline.  What we call in the States, and maybe you have them here too, is a `one-line'.  It simply says, Scene 1, Sony and Sal go into the bank.  Scene 2, Sal goes to the bank manager.  Scene 3 & 4 - just one line descriptions, simplest things so that I don't forget something and skip past it, because I like to write sequentially. 

This is another thing that drives Tom Rickman and Alvin Sargent mad at me, in the most pleasant way of course.  They refuse to discuss screenwriting with me on this basis.  They will go around and any day they feel funny or sad, look for a funny or sad thing to write that day.  I can't do that.  I have to build it architecturally, bit by bit, as I go along.  I like to ram through to the end of it as quickly as I can and not get hung up. Alvin and Tom will not walk away from a scene or a moment until they have got it as perfect as they can make it, and until it is fully realised emotionally. 

I reach a point where I say, `I know something here has to happen'.  I know the crux of it is that so and so says this to so and so, and that had to be done in that scene, but I can't figure out how to do it now. 

So I bypass that one and go onto the next scene.  By the time I get to the end I have the information and feeling.  I have learned so much more about my characters and my story, and the world in which they live that the probability is that the ideas to fill in that blank scene are going to appear spontaneously, then I don't have to waste time staring into space.  It is not only wasting time, it is really wasting energy to just sit there and it is very discouraging and dispiriting as well, and I'm trying to become a happy writer instead of an unhappy one.  I just try to avoid as many of those stumbling places as I possibly can.

Q.  While you are on that point of craft, do you find that experience takes forward your strategies from one project to the next project, you are using similar strategies, or do you change?

A.  Writing every screenplay is a different experience.  In fact if there is anything that I have learned from a lifetime of experience is that somewhere along the line I will figure out how to write the screenplay.  But the process of writing it is also finding the way to write it.  Although I usually write outlines, sometimes I have worked without doing an outline first.  None of these rules are absolutely hard and fast, but I do know one thing is constant and I have grown a little cleverer about executing it over the years, and that is to begin with knowing the character very well.  Knowing just what he will do in every circumstance. 

In a less structured story than this, which was a real event, with its own beginning, middle and end.  For example, suppose we started this whole storymaking process from a different point and it was totally fictional, and I had the idea of a guy who robs a bank to raise the money for a sex change operation for his homosexual wife who is ungrateful and angry about it, and in the end his best friend gets shot, and it is all a disaster.  Suppose he just robs a bank.  That would be enough for me to start to evolve the story, but I wouldn't try to `invent' that ending.  I would sit down and start writing the character, and try to find out who that character is, hopefully evolve him into the character that we are describing now, the kind of nurturing guy who falls in love easily, makes them love him and then he disappoints in love. Then I would get him in the bank and say what would happen here `if' this happened?  It's the old reliable `what if'  proposition. What would happen here `if' that happened?  Gradually that character will evolve his own story.  He will tell his own story to me.  

Through these improvisations that I make by putting him into all kinds of circumstances he takes on definite form.  If the worst comes to worst, I can't even think of what he is going to do in the bank that morning.  I never not write anything.  I put something in that computer.  I will say, "How will this guy have a fight?"  Supposing he was on a freeway and he honks his horn at somebody, and the guy runs him off the  road and starts yelling at him.  What would he do in that situation?  Or, what if he gets arrested for smoking grass at some friend's apartment.  What will he do?"  It is amazing how often even these kinds of aimless, arbitrary improvisations will evolve into something that goes straight into the screenplay.

If you have been involved in acting at all you will recognise that they are the equivalent of the Stanislavsky method, but it is simply applied to writing.  This is what actors do, in exploring the `truth' of the character, and finding a way.  You improvise all kinds of scenes, in addition to the ones that are in the text that you are going to do.  It is a way of getting in touch with the character and exploring for the truth of it.  In this instance you can go a step further and use it to actually let the story evolve out of that.  All of a sudden some wonderful scene will happen in your mind. Instead of trying to do the story and try to think of the story as events, you can think of the character in improvised situations and you begin to see the character beginning to come to life and act out things that you just grab.  It is not as though you are making it up, it is who the character is, acting it out for you.

Q: And the character is always seeking his own resolution then?

A: Exactly! Because the dramatic action is driven by the will of the character.  The character has a will to do something, and he `does something'.  We must always remember that these are texts to be performed.  They are not a literary event that happens on the page.  It is also significant that we call them `actors'.  We don't call them orators, or singers, or speakers, we call them `actors'.  That's what it is, acting.  It is the action that we can photograph.  It is the only thing you have to work with.

Q. Did you have a picture of Pacino in your mind, his body language and so on?

A: No I didn't.  I have done another movie where the star was already part of it, Cool Hand Luke.  It was done for Paul Newman in a sense, but neither one of them were tailored for them, and the actors resent it like hell if they are any good.

I tried to forget that Pacino was in it, in the same way that I tried to forget that Newman was in it.  Because the minute you start to think what Newman would do with it, how can I write to help him?  You are taking away his work.  In fact Newman asked me several times after he got the screenplay.  He said "Were you thinking of me when you wrote this scene?"  I could honestly say "No!" and I wasn't.  If I had invented that for him to do, then I am doing his work for him.  He's a good enough actor that he wants to find that truth inside himself and bring it out, rather than just simply standing up and playing my imitation of Paul Newman playing Cool Hand Luke.  

The best advice under those circumstances - you know the picture is probably going to get made, but forget who is going to be in it.  I literally didn't think about Pacino playing any of these scenes until afterwards.  Then you solve the problem later on if you have written something that for some reason or other is  unsuitable for an actor because of his looks or his body rhythms, or because, as Gig Young used to say, his tongue is too long for the speech!

Q.  Do you find that after having written your outline and start writing your first draft that some changes in characters have taken place in your mind and make you write something quite different?

A: That's why I write the one-line outline. So I can remind myself of the simple sequence of scenes and forget the detailed outline. The detailed outline is in my head somewhere, now I want to forget it and let the characters find their own way.  All of a sudden they are in a scene and somebody says something that is totally unexpected.  I didn't know he was going to say that. 

You suddenly realise that once he said that back in the second act, it doesn't work further on any more so you are going to have to take bits out and everything changes all the way through.  You have to allow yourself to be free to make those changes and adjustments, that's where the spontaneity of the story comes from.  Otherwise you can plod through  with one goddamn scene after another.  Yeah, there are a lot of surprises along the way and you hope there are.

It so happened in Dog Day that there were relatively few, and the screenplay tracks very closely to the outline, except in the way in which I will get to shortly.

October, November, December, then the first week in January I finished the first draft which was much more than a first draft in the sense that it probably took me maybe three weeks to just ram through, skipping through things that I couldn't think of, getting to the end of it, somehow. 

Then you can breathe a sigh of relief and you can begin to look at it with the exact equivalence of an artist doing a sketch.  Maybe it's a little analagous to a painter's first working of a canvas. Some parts of it are probably complete and some are not. The painter then works over it picking bits out here and there for attention. You go back over it and change things, change colours and so on. 

By the time I get the first draft in a condition to show to anybody it is probably more like the fourth or fifth draft, or the fourth or fifth time I had put it through the computer, starting with page one and going straight on through four or five times at the very least, and each time you get faster and faster, and more things are discovered.  You tighten it and great gobs of dialogue come out.

Then the question is when are you done with the first draft or any draft for that matter?  And I don't know.  That is one of the hardest answers that I have to come to.  Again I think it bears some resemblance to painting.  I don't know whether it was Picasso who said that nothing is ever finished, but there is a time to just walk away from it and that's the best answer I can give.  I reach a certain point and I can't think of anything more to do with it and I know that there are some things in it that need fixing and things that make me unhappy, but I just can't think of anything more to do.  The rehearsals will find those things for me.

If I had the luxury it would be wonderful to lock it away for some weeks or a months and then come back to it later.  The other way is to do what you wind up doing, which is to turn it in.

I also have a circle of friends, most of them writers.  Tom and I trade screenplays, some directors are involved.  I will give them to Sydney Pollack.  He will give me something of his.  We trade them around a lot amongst our friends and you get a lot of good feedback from those really professional people. People who understand the mechanics and the structure of a screenplay. You have to pick people with whom you are not competitive, obviously.  You can also use people who are not sophisticated in terms of story telling or scriptwriting, because one of the difficulties about using professionals for this purpose is that they tend to come back to you with suggestions about how to rewrite your screenplay. Writers that do this to me don't get to see my stuff again because it just doesn't help.  That is not what I want as a response. 

What I want is somebody who would say that they loved the first part but somewhwere about in here it seems to go flat, and they may throw out a couple of suggestions to me.  I am not listening to the suggestions that they are making as a something to do; but I'm saying to myself, `If that's what they think the solution is, what is the problem they are defining for me?' Then I go looking for specific things.

Other people can misread the thing at first reading and they might also give a response a bit like an audience seeing the finished film for the first time.  So you listen to them very carefully.  But you can't expect somebody to sit down and study it with the intensity that you are putting into the writing of it, so you really must take their ideas as nothing more than just that, `ideas'.  I try to get a couple of friends at least to read it before I do my final write-through on the first draft, but in any case on January first or so I turned the screenplay in.

Pacino was in New York.  One of the producers was in New York, one of the other producers and I were in California and Sydney Lumet was in London preparing Murder on the Orient Express.  We had to all fly to London with the screenplay, so we left Friday night or Saturday morning.  We got into the Dorchester Hotel on Saturday night, had a meeting with Lumet in his suite.  He said "What is the screenplay about?" He hadn't read it at this point.  The producers had and said that they liked it and now we were going to find out what Pacino and Lumet thought. 

I heard myself say a version of what I was talking about earlier, but I was never able to articulate it with this kind of succinctness, until this moment, which is after I wrote the screenplay, which is what I mean by the screenplay being the means by which you discover what the story truly is and what it is about.  The writing of it is the process of finding that out. 

I didn't know it going in and I was astonished to hear what I heard myself saying to Sidney, which was, `It's a story about a magician who believes he has the magic power to fulfil peoples' goals and aspirations and dreams, but he does not have the power, so consequently he betrays and disappoints them and instead of getting back the love that he expects from them for having given them this great gift, he gets waves of anger and betrayal and one thing and another.  So he is constantly bewildered'.  Sidney said, "Jesus, I'd better read the screenplay."

So Sunday, the next morning, we met at breakfast and discovered they were all sitting there with long, long faces and I said, "How did you like it?" and one of the producers said, "Well, Al liked it so much that he just quit!"  I said, "Is that true?"  Pacino said "Look you have got to understand something, this is a wonderful screenplay, and I really want to do it and I am not bullshitting you about that," but he said "I just finished The Godfather No. 2.  If you had seen that you would know how infinitely depressed I am." Because Pacino is an actor who tends to carry a role around with him, and if you remember that last image at the end of Godfather 2, where he is sitting there and he has just had his own brother murdered, who was the last person on earth that he had any ties to, and his wife has left him and he has lost his children, and he has lost and destroyed everything in his life worth living for, and he is just sitting there, staring into space.  That was who I saw sitting in the Dorchester Hotel.  He said "I can't work."  I said, "Does it have anything to do with the homosexuality in the story.  He said "No, it is not that, I just can't work."

So we got on an airplane and flew back to our various cities.  I think we were in London altogether a little over twelve hours.  In any case, what we did then was send the screenplay to Dustin Hoffman, and when Pacino heard it had gone to Dustin he asked to read it again, and declared himself back in again, so Sydney was hired again.  Hard work!  

So then there was nothing to do until Sidney had finished his picture in London, so everything was on hold until summer. I guess we got started sometime in June with the actual pre-production, casting and one thing and another.  We all met in New York and I had a couple of script meetings with Lumet and the film editor who had already been hired, Dede Allen, who was very helpful and is very knowledgeable about writing, as a film editor really ought to be, because film editing is a form of writing.  It is like the last stage of writing the movie.  When you have got all those materials back you can still reorder the structure and change things.  It is amazing what you can do with dialogue in making it play when it didn't play, you can do everything with editing, it's amazing.

It was very useful because Dede is a very logical person, highly organised, as most film editors are.  By nature they are people who are extremely orderly and able, and they want to have everything controlled, organised and structured, and they take all this, this ... stuff, I didn't want to say `shit' that the director sends them and it is chaos.

What they are doing is finding the order in chaos. Film Editors as a character study are remarkably alike. Some of them may look crazy on the outside, but somewhere inside of them is that organising principle that holds it all together, like musicians whose lives are absolutely chaotic, they can perhaps survive lives that would destroy the rest of us, because the centre of their existence is that music which provides the ordering principle of their lives.

In any case there were some minor changes, really and truly minor changes, some for clarity, some for legal reasons.  We changed names, we did some shortening in editing and found a tighter way to say some of the speeches and one thing and another.  I also want to say that it is relatively rare in Hollywood for a writer to be so intimately involved in the production process as I was on Dog Day.  I had been on most of my pictures, because I forced my way in.  A more retiring or shy writer has considerable amount of difficulty staying around.  They don't really want you around, but you find out where they are meeting and just show up and walk in, and they don't have enough guts to tell you to leave.

Once you are there they get comfortable that you are not going to really be subversive and so on, and that you are really listening to them, but it can be very difficult.

Q:  Is this principally a learning experience for you for future use - to be there.

A:  It is, because the whole process of making the film is one to me.  The screenwriter's work shouldn't end after the writing of the screenplay.  The learning experience is terribly important.  We have a whole class of writers in America, younger writers who have made damn good livings for years and never had a picture produced, and have never heard actors rehearse their lines, never seen a Director stage a scene. 

The majority of screen writers in America have never actually seen the process. They turn in the screenplay and do some re-writes.  The next thing that happens is they get invited to the premier or preview.  Then they look up there and say "Why did they do that"?  They have no way of knowing. It is a terrible terrible system.  So in order to write better, yes, intrude, get yourself in there.  But also because it ought to be at its best, a collaborative process.

Q:  Does this collaboration extend to casting?

A:  It is worth speaking about the impact of casting on writing at this stage of the game. A writer can have an important impact on casting - there is a mutual interdependency between casting and writing.  The character of Sal, Pacino's cohort in the bank, was played by John Cazale  who was then about 35 years old.  I had written him to be played by a fourteen or fifteen year old kid, which in real life he was. 

This was important to me for this reason. There is a moment when the Sonny character, at last fully realises how morally corrupt, how horribly wrong his whole life, his whole existence has gone.  I mean, somewhere in the back of his mind he knows this is the end for him.

There is a moment when he understands that this is the end of his life in a sense, and that this moment sums up the whole meaning of his life and it is meaningless - it's awful.  I wanted to see that moment where you saw a man fully confront the fact that his life has been a total mistake in a sense. 

I felt it would come in that very quiet moment and this kid (imagine being a 14 year old kid) comes over to the Pacino character and sits down next to him and says "Sonny, you know back there when you told them about shooting the people and throwing the bodies out the front of the bank?"

And Sonny starts to say to him, "Sal, listen you don't have to worry about that, I'm not really going to do that", or something reassuring, because that's the nature of Sonny to be that way and he is doing it again.  Now imagine Sal cuts right across him and this fresh-faced kid is saying, "No, no, you don't worry about it. I'll kill them and throw them out. You won't have to do that."  Then he realises he has corrupted this innocent kid.  That was an exceedingly important thing for me. That changed the whole complexion of the movie.  

So when we came right down to the casting sessions, Pacino was the one who controlled that.  Sidney had very little to do with the casting.  Pacino staffs his movies with his friends.  Most of them are very good but nonetheless he controls that.  He says, "I want John Cazale to do this."  I said, "Look, I think John is absolutely marvellous, but I am totally against it and I want for this reason that I will describe, the fourteen year old."  He said, "John Cazale could do that."  I said, "No, wait a minute Al, look at the difference, there is no way that John Cazale could be innocent.  In this situation he is going to come across as a homicidal maniac, which is threatening.  It pushes the plot along, it works for the story, but it undercuts a value which I think is important to me and the story."  He said, "I agree with you.  Let's see if we can't find a fifteen year old kid to play this role."

He went out and tried - every fifteen year old kid who had the right accent, anywhere between Boston and Washington D.C. was brought in and interviewed for the role by Al.  But very early on you realised that none of these kids, no matter - you could have brought in Olivier as a fifteen year old, he was not going to get that role.  Pacino was nice enough to me to go through the motions, but he wasn't going to find a 15 year old.  I gave up on it, you can only fight so far.

I found that that was a very substantial writing value that went out of the picture, because of a casting decision, without a word being changed.

They started pre-production.  I went away to finish something off I had to do in Hollywood, and then we started rehearsals in September.  Now we are a little over a year away from where I actually started writing the screenplay.  Because of the nature of the piece, and because we were all playing in one location, we were able to hire the cast for the run of the picture.

The Screen Actors Guild rules in the States say that if you hire an actor, let's say for three days work and you have one day's work on the first day of shooting and the other two come at the end, you have to pay them for all the days intervening. The reason for that being that he  presumably cannot take any other work to fill in that period, so he is effectively taken off the job market and that costs a lot of money. Consequently in most pictures you wind up not being able to get your cast together, because you bring somebody in for rehearsal and it counts for a shooting day and you have to pay them all.  In this case the whole cast was present for the entire thing.  Because of the nature of the piece, everybody was visible in almost every shot, so it wasn't going to cost us any more to hire them for the run of the picture, and add on a week or two for the rehearsal. 

We had the whole cast available for three weeks of shooting.  Which, by the way saved three weeks and three quarters of a million dollars on the cost of the picture, three weeks on the schedule and three quarters of a million bucks under budget.

Sidney Lumet was terribly fast. He has got a mind that just operates like a machine gun, which tends to mean that he often goes for the obvious.  Whereas Sidney Pollack will sit there and agonise over a better way to do it, and he will have already thought through eighteen different ways of doing it before he makes a decision, which drives everybody crazy, but look at his work.

They had rehearsed for about a week when I came back to the set. When I arrived there was this collection of all the producers and the director and Al, all with very long faces.  I said, "What is going on"?  and they said, "Well, Al has quit".  

One of the producers hastily said, "What Al is talking about, he just needs a dialogue rewrite.  I think this could be done with changing dialogue and so on." 

Al's answer to that was to get down on all fours and run around the room, barking like a dog, and then he ran out of the room.  I didn't have the presence of mind to ask him if he needed a walk in the park, or what! 

You know it is very hard work to dig down inside yourself and find the truth of a role, or for the director to get inside the text.  It’s what is called the tyranny of the text. It is a hell of a lot easier to change the screenplay, get rid of the writer, bring in a new writer to rewrite it and all those things. 

They tend to get very arrogant in dealing with writers in that respect, it sort of rationalises it for them.  Al would never deal with another actor on the set in that way.  In an odd kind of way I didn't feel that it was aimed at me.  It was aimed at his producer, because the producer simply was not understanding the depth of the problem.  By doing what he did he got his attenion.

It developed that he had decided not to play a homosexual, and I asked him why.  He said, "Look, I have built my career to the point that a lot of people are dependant on me and if I play this role they are going to laugh me out of the business and I am just not going to do it."

The producer said "What do you think we should do?" to me.  I said, "I don't see anything else to do except send the script to Dustin."  Al said, "Look! Let me talk to you about something.  You have to understand something."  I said earlier that Leon was this screaming drag queen and hilariously funny - I had written him in exactly that way.  I had used a lot of his actual lines. I wrote as well as I could to get my stuff to express the same kind of thing.

He couldn't tell a story about going to the beach and getting into an argument, without getting into how they took a hot tub together, and what they did with each other, and how they soaped each other down, and then he tried to kill him...  It was all very funny and terrific, and some of it was very moving as well. 

I managed to get the existing tapes of the marriage where the two men had gotten married in a ceremony in a Catholic Church in Greenwich Village.  I wanted to recreate those tapes and play them on television.

It is one of the things that they see in the bank. I managed to get a lot of those elements of their life together on screen by one stratagem or another.  Al Pacino said that he would have none of it and furthermore he wouldn't appear in a scene with the man face to face.  He would have to be separated completely.  There would be no sexual references of any kind, no fleshy references, no jokes of any kind.  All that stuff would have to go.  I said I couldn't see how to do this. 

Al said, "Let me put something to you.  You have had lovers and you have had wives and you have had your fallings out and your problems and fights.  Whenever you have had a real crisis scene in your relationship with somebody else, how often has sex come into it?" 

He said, "You can't take away the fact that a man married a man because he loved him."   He said, "Why can't you just write that relationship and leave all the rest of the bullshit out?"  I saw instantly that he was absolutely and totally right.  I said, "You're totally right. Why didn't you say that four months ago, when I could have written it when I had the time to do it right."  He said, "Well, I wish you would try."

So I sat down and it took about 24 hours to go through the body of the screenplay and get most of the stuff out.  It turned out to be astonishingly easy on that level, but the critical thing was the scene that plays in the movie on the telephone between the two men.  I mean, here is a scene where two people who love each other, can't live together, have to say goodbye, and you know and they know it is going to be goodbye forever.   

I had written it so that it happens inside the front door of the bank, with Ernie standing outside with a cop standing behind him and holding onto his belt, so that Sonny can't pull him into the bank and make him another hostage.  Here they have to play this one single scene of their  life together that most cries out for some privacy, and they have got to play it in front of 2000 armed cops and people screaming epithets at them, and all the rest of it.  At the end of it they kissed each other goodbye on the lips.  I must say it was a very good scene too.  But Al would not play a scene with the two of them actually confronting each other.  It had to be on the telephone. 

So I had to rewrite that scene.  You could not just take the dialogue from the scene in the door of the bank and do it as a telephone scene.  It simply wouldn't work.  Since we had no time then, what I did was write a monologue for each one of them.  

For the Sonny character I wrote what must have been a four page monologue and a similar one for Chris Sarandon to use, using in part the dialogue elements that I had removed from other scenes, but there was also new stuff.  And it was sort of postulating a situation that if you asked one of these characters, "Why is it that you love this person but you can't live with him, why?"  They just vomit up all the good and all the bad.  They just start talking and it all comes out, as though they are making a big long historical statement to their psychiatrist under the influence of a truth serum.

I set up a tape recorder and I gave each of them their monologue and they spent a few minutes just reading it through and I pressed the start button on the tape recorder and said "Go! Either one of you say anything you want to because I don't care."  One of them started talking and all of a sudden the other one interrupted and said "Wait a minute, every time you say that it makes me so mad, because ..." and up come some thoughts and they get into this terrible argument, using the materials  of the monologue, improvising some stuff of their own.  It is wonderful, the stuff that is coming out.  I let them run for about three quarters of an hour.  That is a hell of a lot of material.

So then I stopped the tape recorder and said.  "You guys go and play with the rest of it."  I took that away and we had a whole fleet of stenographers turn that into a transcript, and then I took that material and used it to write the scene that eventually appears in the movie on the telephone.  That was the only piece of rewrite that was required. 

And again it was a perfect example of a creative collaboration between actor and writer.  It was wonderful and I have been grateful to Pacino ever since.

They then got that rehearsed and by the time they finished the rehearsals there was nothing for me to do.  The screenplay was done, so I just went down the first day of shooting and kissed everybody goodbye and left.

The writer's work is finished at this point.  The next thing I know I get a furious call from the head of the studio who has seen the dailies of the telephone scene.  He said, "What happened to the scene in the door of the bank?"  So I told him what had happened.  They had not told the studio that we were doing that rewrite and he was appalled and absolutely furious and was making mad noises about shutting down the film, which we knew damn well that he wouldn't do. He said, "God dammit, they threw away an $8 million kiss."  It was his estimate that the picture would gross $8 million more if the two men kissed each other in the door of the bank than if they didn't.  He said, "I guess there is nothing we can do but wait and see the thing cut together.

They flew me from Hollywood to New York to see a rough cut of the picture which Sidney Lumet was screening as part of a test screening for some film students.  It was rough.  It needed some work, but it was clearly recognisable as a winner, right from the word go.  It was just terrific, except again in the area of editing, which is related to writing. 

I had written into the piece, a kind of musical rhythm that had to do with this.  All the way through the first part of the film the Pacino character in the bank is saying, "Come on God damnit, let's get going." 

And the police are saying, "No, no, it takes time."   He is pushing and they are trying to slow everything down. You can find those rhythms written in to the screenplay.

Suddenly the rhythm revearses itself, because the moment the cops come and say, "O.K., everybody out of the bank.  We are going to go now. Get on the bus."  And is saying, "Wait a second. It's not supposed to be this easy.  What's going on here?" Now he's afraid that they might be going to entrap him and he wants to move slowly, so he can watch everything happen. And fundamentally he knows he is not going anywhere. Even if they get on the airplane and go to North Africa; as his mother says, he doesn't know anybody in North Africa, so his life is over.

So the rhythmic editing of the thing, and the way the dialogue is written absolutely reverses itself and now they are the ones that are driving the action.  He is the one who is trying to slow it down, from there to the end of the piece. 

I don't know whether Sidney didn't shoot it that way so it couldn't be edited that way, or whether it just turned out in any case, that the rhythm just continued on.  That differentiation was not made.  It irritated the hell out of me. 

I lobbied very hard with the studio to let DeDe do it or let me take a work print and go in the editing room for a few days and just do it the way I wanted to see it done.  Sidney got very angry and still hasn't forgiven me.  He said, "There is some worm right in Hollywood burrowing right into the heart of my picture, and I'm not sure that I know who it is."  I said, "It's me, I really think you are wrong about this, and I wish you would at least look at an alternative version of it."  He said "Look, I have made sixty pictures and had my ups and down and ins and outs, and for the first time I have reached a point in my career where by God I can have everything my way, and I am going to."

The powers that be at the studio had by then seen the results.  The last word on the subject to me was "You know you may be right.  I understand the logic of what you are saying, and it might be an improvement, but I am not sure that anybody would really see it. The main thing is that it works the way it is. 

For God's sake let's all walk away from it while it is still working, before we do something to it in some imperceptible way that is going to diminish its impact.  It really works for the audience so let's not screw around with it.  The time has come to walk away."  So we did.  

I don't know whether or not all the anger and argument that I did about that has any importance at all now.  It still feels too long for me in the end, and I think that that's because of that editing rhythm, but it works, so why argue with success.  That is how "Dog Day Afternoon" got written.

It was released in 1975. Three years after the actual event. It cost $3.5 million to produce and has earned about $23 million since release.

It was nominated for the 1975 Oscars for Best Actor (Al Pacino), Best Supporting Actor (Chris Sarandon), Best Director (Sidney Lumet), and Best Screenplay (Frank Pierson). The National Board of Review named it on its Ten Best list.

Wojtowicz got 20 years and was paroled in 1978. His percentage earnings from the film were handed over to the hostages. 

In 1975 Wojtowicz's wife, Carmen, filed an Invasion of Privacy lawsuit against Warners and Dell Publishing. The Author's League filed an Animus Curiae brief in favour of the defendants and the case was dismissed in 1978.