“Were you Al Pacino in the movie?” a man on the street asks John Wojtowicz, whose botched robbery of a Brooklyn bank in August 1972 was dramatized in Dog Day Afternoon. “I’m the bank robber—fuck Al Pacino!” replies Wojtowicz. Questions of identity reverberate through The Dog, a documentary by Allison Berg and Frank Keraudren that chronicles Wojtowicz’s storied and terribly sad life. If you’ve ever seen Dog Day Afternoon, you surely remember its head-turning midmovie plot twist, when the Wojtowicz character is revealed as a gay man who wants money to finance his partner’s sex-change operation. The Dog tells the story of a seemingly average guy who spent his early adult years wrestling with his sexual identity, eventually becoming a pioneering advocate of gay rights and same-sex marriage in the U.S. But after escaping from one social straitjacket, Wojtowicz stumbled right into another when his caper became an international news story and an Oscar-nominated film. For the rest of his life, he would be defined as the protagonist of Dog Day Afternoon.
Berg and Keraudren interview Randy Wicker, a gay reporter from that era who owned one of the earliest commercial video cameras, and The Dog includes fascinating black-and-white footage of the GAA’s early meetings and political actions. Wojtowicz, who had renamed himself “Littlejohn Basso,” takes part in a mock engagement party at the New York Marriage License Bureau in June 1971, and two days after this event he would meet Ernest Aron. The two were married by a Catholic priest (who was later defrocked), with Aron clad in a wedding gown and Wojtowicz’s supportive mother, Terry, in attendance. Unfortunately this marriage also went south, and Aron, who didn’t want to live as a man, attempted suicide. According to Wojtowicz’s account in The Dog, he planned the bank heist to help realize Aron’s dream of becoming a woman. “Love is a very strange thing,” he remembers telling the judge at his sentencing a year later. “Some feel it more deeply than others do.”
Directed by Allison Berg and Frank Keraudren
