What to Know About Dog Day Afternoon's True Story Before Seeing It on Broadway

Step back to the sweltering summer of 1972 in New York City. John Lindsay was the mayor. The Yankees and Mets were muddling through so-so seasons. Theatergoers lined up to see the thriller Deliverance at the movies and a new musical called Grease on Broadway. And two men attempted a robbery inside a Chase Manhattan Bank branch in Brooklyn. The ill-fated drama that ensued—including a 14-hour hostage standoff that played out on live television—led to headlines all over the world. Thanks to the classic Sidney Lumet-directed 1975 movie Dog Day Afternoon starring Al Pacino as Sonny Wortzik and John Cazale as Sal Naturile, the gritty urban saga was immortalized in our culture. Now it’s coming to the stage in a brand-new play.

Dog Day Afternoon, making its world premiere at the August Wilson Theatre on March 10, stars Jon Bernthal as Sonny and Ebon Moss-Bachrach as Sal, the accomplice. Both actors are Emmy winners for their work on FX's comedy-drama series The Bear... and Broadway rookies. They’re being directed by two-time Tony nominee Rupert Goold (King Charles III, Ink) with a script by 2015 Pulitzer Prize winner Stephen Adly Guirgis (Between Riverside and Crazy). So how and why has this true story of desperation proved so endlessly fascinating? The answer is a mix of dark humor, genuine heart and a bit of bite. The fact that the freewheeling film was mostly improvised—including its iconic “Attica! Attica!” rallying cry—can’t be discounted, either. Here’s a primer. Warning: Spoilers!

The Man With the Plan
Bernthal’s character is based on John Wojtowicz. A Brooklyn native, he worked at various banks in the city before deploying to Vietnam. Upon returning home in 1967, he wed a woman named Carmen Bifulco. The pair had two kids but separated after only two years. Then, in 1971, he met Elizabeth Eden (born Ernest Aron) at the Feast of Saint Anthony in Little Italy. Though he was still legally married at the time, Wojtowicz pledged his devotion to Eden in a vow ceremony that November at the Gay Activists Alliance’s headquarters in SoHo. This union, which eventually became volatile, served as the impetus for the robbery.

How It All Went Down
Just before 3 p.m. on August 22, 1972, Wojtowicz, Salvatore Naturile and Bobby Westenberg walked into the Chase Manhattan Bank in the Gravesend neighborhood of Brooklyn armed with shotguns. Per several accounts, the three men waited for the last customer to leave before taking over. As soon as a teller triggered the bank’s alarm that signaled for the police to arrive, Westenberg fled the scene. With several bank employees held hostage and the building surrounded by law enforcement, an increasingly frantic Wojtowicz started making demands—including pizza for the hostages. The siege carried on as day turned into night and ended in gunfire.

The Big Screen Comes Calling
One month after the robbery, Life published a tell-all feature about the ordeal titled “The Boys in the Bank.” It caught the attention of producer Martin Elfand, who took it to fellow producer Martin Bregman, who took it to Warner Brothers executive Richard Shepherd. They soon concluded that yes indeed, this tale about a man willing to risk it all had major cinematic appeal. Wojtowicz, serving time in Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary, sold the rights to his story for $7,500 and 1% of the movie’s net profits. Frank Pierson (Cool Hand Luke) was hired to adapt the story—and subsequently changed the names of all the main characters. Famed director Sidney Lumet, fresh off the intense 1973 cop drama Serpico, agreed to go behind the camera; Pacino, his Serpico star, signed on to play the lead.

A Godfather Reunion
There’s an excellent reason why Pacino and co-star Cazale share such a natural rapport in the film: The two were close friends, having started out together in theater in the late 1960s before famously playing two of the Corleone brothers (Michael and Fredo, respectively) in the 1972 epic The Godfather. They had just filmed the 1974 sequel The Godfather Part II when Dog Day Afternoon revved into production. Pacino—who said years later, “I learned more about acting from John than anybody”—immediately asked Lumet to let Cazale read for the part of Sal, even though it was written for a much younger actor. “Cazale read and my heart broke,” Lumet recalled in 2006. “He had a tremendous sadness about him.” Cazale died from lung cancer in 1978, just a few weeks after the release of his fifth and final film, The Deer Hunter. He was 42 years old.

Attica! Attica!
Lumet held three weeks of rehearsal with the cast at the actual Chase bank in Brooklyn and encouraged them to improvise their lines. He carried that same M.O. during production, which explains how Sonny ended up outside the bank and leading the crowd in a memorable chant of “Attica! Attica!” As Pacino later explained to NPR, the idea to reference the 1971 deadly Attica prison uprising came on the spot from assistant director Burtt Harris. “As I was going out, he said to me, ‘Listen, Al. Come here. Say Attica,’” he recalled. “I know about Attica because it was in the news…So I’m thinking—it’s in my head. And I’m going on with the cops, and all of a sudden, I just blurt it out. That just got the crowd, man. They just went with it. And the next thing you know, everybody is saying it.” The chant has since been heard in everything from Saturday Night Fever to the medical drama House to the Reese Witherspoon rom-com Home Again.

The Oscar and the Lawsuit
Released on September 21, 1975, Dog Day Afternoon received near universal acclaim and grossed more than $50 million at the box office on a $4 million budget. The film went on to be nominated for six Oscars, including Pacino for Best Actor and Chris Sarandon, who played his troubled love, for Best Supporting Actor. Pierson, meanwhile, took the gold for Best Adapted Screenplay. But following its release, Wojtowicz wrote a letter to The New York Times with his take on the final product. He soon took the studio to court for additional royalties with the help of George Heath, a fellow inmate whom he wed in a prison ceremony in 1974. By 2011, a New York appeals court finally ordered the litigation to stop.

Wojtowicz Speaks
Dog Day Afternoon fans got a chance to meet the real Wojtowicz by way of the 2014 documentary Dog. Directors Allison Berg and Frank Keraudren spent 10 years completing the project and interviewed their subject several times along with his first wife, his mother, Terry, and Heath. (Eden died in 1987 as a result of AIDS-related pneumonia.) In the film, Wojtowicz returns to the branch he robbed to sign autographs—sporting an “I Robbed This Bank” T-shirt—and applies for a job as a security guard using the film as a reference. He also contemplates life before, during and after the robbery. “I consider myself a romantic,” he said. “If I had a dream and in that dream I saw everything that happened, would I still go out and do it? You’re damn right I’d still go out and do it.” Wojtowicz died of cancer in 2006 at age 60.

Dog Day on Broadway
The stage adaptation of Dog Day Afternoon was first announced by Warner Brothers Theatre Ventures back in 2016, with only Guirgis attached. At the time, Bernthal was best known for his flashy turn in Martin Scorsese's The Wolf of Wall Street while Moss-Bachrach was a regular on the HBO series Girls. They’ve since become reliable screen presences and have teamed up on Marvel's The Punisher as well as The Bear. And though the two will be making their Broadway debuts, they are both experienced stage actors: Bernthal studied theater in Moscow, founded an upstate New York theater company and has performed off-Broadway; Moss-Bachrach has performed at the Williamstown Theatre Festival in Massachusetts and off-Broadway. In fact, just like Pacino and Cazale, they originally met in the theater... sort of? “Jon claims that he understudied me in a play 25 years ago,” Moss-Bachrach told Jimmy Kimmel in 2025. “I have no memory of him doing this play, which he also likes to say!” Surely Broadway audiences are in for a treat when the pair share the stage this spring.

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