Cinephilia and Beyond

Dog Day Afternoon screenplay by Frank Pierson [pdf]. (NOTE: For educational purposes only)

“In the screenplay, Cazale’s role was written to be a smart-ass street kid. But Al came to me and said, ‘Sidney, please, I beg you, read John Cazale for it.’ And when John came in I was so discouraged and thought ‘Al must be out of his mind.’ This guy looks thirty, thirty-two, and that’s the last thing I want in this part. But Al had great taste in actors, and I hadn’t yet seen him in The Godfather. And Cazale came in, and then he read, and my heart broke… One of the things that I love about the casting of John Cazale was that he had a tremendous sadness about him. I don’t know where it came from; I don’t believe in invading the privacy of the actors that I work with, or getting into their heads. But my God — it’s there — in every shot of him. And not just in this movie, but in Godfather II also. When Al asked him during a scene, ‘Is there any country you want to go to?’ Cazale improvised his answer by saying, after long thought, ‘Wyoming.’ To me that was the funniest, saddest line in the movie, and my favorite, because in the script he wasn’t supposed to say anything. I almost ruined the take because I started to laugh so hard… but it was a brilliant, brilliant, ad lib.” —Sidney Lumet

What a wonderful documentary on John Cazale, who co-starred with Pacino in Dog Day Afternoon, I would highly recommend it to everyone (you can purchase your copy on Amazon). Here’s to one of the greatest actor’s of a generation. Still missed and a gift to all who’ve seen him, here’s to the great, John Cazale.

The name John Cazale doesn’t mean much to most people. If they do remember him, they might think of the odd-looking guy in The Godfather and Dog Day Afternoon. But Cazale is a patron saint to Al Pacino, Meryl Streep, Robert De Niro and the generation of character actors who came after him. The reasons for his exalted status are as entangled with nostalgia for a lost era in filmmaking as they are with respect for the brilliant performances this shape-shifting actor gave during his short tenure as a movie star. Cazale made just five films before he died of lung cancer in 1978 at 42. But they happened to be five of the greatest films of the century, each nominated for Best Picture Oscars, two of them winners. He was the heartbreakingly weak Fredo Corleone in The Godfather and its sequel, the trigger-ready Sal in Dog Day Afternoon, Gene Hackman’s dogged assistant Stan in The Conversation and the goofy Stanley in The Deer Hunter. Meryl Streep had never spoken so publicly about Cazale. And if her emotional interview in the film is any indication, it wasn’t especially easy.

Though Cazale never won an Oscar nomination himself, the actors playing opposite him did. And they all credit their early success with Cazale’s idiosyncratic work style. He knew how to improvise, how to lead a fellow actor into a state of mind, how to goad them into their best performances. A new HBO documentary, I Knew It Was You: Rediscovering John Cazale, debuting Tuesday, erases any doubt of Cazale’s influence. Indeed, it’s evident that he helped groom the young actors who went on to become de-facto sovereigns of Hollywood. “I learned more about acting from John than anybody,” Pacino says in the film. The documentary is short on details about Cazale’s life. And there’s no footage of him speaking out of character. But it is compelling to see the emotion this relatively obscure man with the vast receding hairline and pain-filled eyes inspires among such high caliber talent.

“John’s life was such a mystery,” said the documentary’s director-producer Richard Shepard. “He liked to drink. He liked to smoke. He liked beautiful women and he liked to act. His personal story was what it was. Once Meryl Streep said she’d learned about acting from John and Pacino said the same thing, I realized that, ultimately, this movie would be about acting in the guise of—John.” Streep had never spoken so publicly about Cazale. And if her emotional interview in the film is any indication, it wasn’t especially easy. Streep was at Cazale’s bedside as he lay dying. During the film, her eyes are sometimes red and slightly swollen as if she’d broken down, recovered and soldiered on. But here she is, the most Oscar-nominated actress in history, humbly crediting Cazale for inspiring her career. “We would talk about the [acting] process endlessly and he was monomaniacal about the work,” she says in the film. “I think I was more glib and ready to pick the first idea that came to me. He would say, ‘There are a lot of other possibilities.’ That was a real lesson. I took that to heart. I always think about it.” —Gina Piccalo, John Cazale, A Godfather of Acting

Al Pacino talks about his acting partner, John Cazale: “I learned more about acting from John than anybody.”

Previously on Cinephilia and Beyond:

An early Christmas present. Michael Horton from the LACPUG has found the tapes from a 2006 interview with the film editor Dede Allen. Two hours of industry insight behind the editing of some big Hollywood films, including Dog Day Afternoon.