Thanks to the classic 1975 film “Dog Day Afternoon,’’ everyone knows that three years earlier John Wojtowicz (played under a slightly altered name by Al Pacino) unsuccessfully held up a Brooklyn bank and tried to barter hostages to pay for a sex-change surgery for his transgender “wife.’’
Allison Berg and Frank Keraudren’s documentary fills in many fascinating details of Wojtowicz’s life before that incident, such as how a married father of two, Goldwater Republican and Vietnam veteran became a gay rights activist — by his own admission, partly because it gave him an opportunity to have sex with many, many newcomers to the cause.
The money Wojtowicz got from “Dog Day Afternoon’’ paid for the surgery, but as we see in archival interviews, ex-lover Liz Eden wanted nothing to do with him when he got out of prison. Wojtowicz was a folk hero thanks to the movie, and he cashed in on his celebrity by signing autographs in front of the bank he tried to rob. He also retained the love and support of his wife and his doting mother, both of whom are interviewed with him in “The Dog,’’ until his death in 2006.