The Bank Job That Became Dog Day Afternoon

On the afternoon of August 22, 1972, John Wojtowicz and Salvatore Naturile walked into a Chase Manhattan Bank branch at 450 Avenue P in Gravesend, Brooklyn, planning a fast, clean robbery. A third man, Robert Westenberg, spotted a police car outside and turned around and left before the doors locked. The two who stayed found almost no cash in the vault and instead found themselves holding seven bank employees hostage while television crews and a crowd of onlookers filled the block outside. The standoff ran fourteen hours before an FBI agent shot and killed Naturile; Wojtowicz was arrested, convicted, and sentenced to twenty years, though he served only five. Three years later, Sidney Lumet and Al Pacino turned the whole strange afternoon into Dog Day Afternoon, which won Frank Pierson the Oscar for best original screenplay.