Dear New York Times...

In 1975, after viewing the movie Dog Day Afternoon, John Wojtowicz, the “real” Sonny, wrote an unpublished letter to the New York Times critiquing the film although the beginning was about how Warner Bros. had cheated him out of his share of the profits of the movie which I suspect is his real motive. Wojtowicz claims he likes the movie; the director and the cast did a superb job but after viewing it, he believed it left the audience too many unanswered questions that he needed to clear up.

The first thing Wojtowicz wanted to confirm is that his motive for robbing the bank was indeed for his lover’s sex change operation. His lover has attempted to commit suicide many times and Wojtowicz said he could not bear to see his lover like this therefore pushing himself to rob the bank. Although this is exactly how the movie portrayed it, the interesting point is that the New York Times rejected this very letter because they do not believe this was his real motive. I wonder if the New York Times refused to publish this because they didn’t want the audience to sympathize with his justification for his actions or because they simply didn’t believe it.

The next thing Wojtowicz wanted to point out was the murder of his 18 year old partner, Sal Naturale. “It was not necessary for then to murder him, because he had been immobilized and unable to do anything, but yet the F.B.I. murdered him before my eyes…The movie never shows this as it truly happened, as it does with so many other scenes in it…All through the movie they take facts that were true but then present them differently,“ Wojtowicz writes. I totally agree with his last state of how movie take facts and present them in different ways; it’s like taking things out of their contexts, changing the whole meaning behind it while not changing the “fact” itself. I wonder again if this is another conspiracy as to why the New York Times did not publish this letter. We’re they trying to discourage this detail from becoming a big event in the press?

But the best part of this letter that Wojtowicz writes is when he calls the director out for making it seem as if he had set his partner up for death. “In it they hint very dramatically that I made some kind of a deal to betray my partner, Sal. It hurt me that the same F.B.I. who cold-bloodedly killed an 18-year-old boy can be depicted as having me help then. This is not true and there is no human being low enough in this world who would let the F.B.I. kill his partner in order for him to survive. It can be labeled as just Hollywood trying to sell a movie or just to increase the drama, but I call it sick,” says Wojtowicz. This is the most passionate part of his letter and “coincidentally,” the part of the letter that is trying to fix his reputation. I find it sicker that he cares more about his reputation than the “cold-blooded” murder of his partner; he would fight to death over his reputation rather than for the justice over his partner’s death. I guess it was more important to him to remain as hero in the media than to start a fight over something unjust in the media…

http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/onlinessays/JC15folder/RealDogDay.html