I was reading a book called Making Movies by Sidney Lumet and I have problems with it.

Also, my usual caveat. I am boringly cis and straight white male, so I always need to be careful about what I say, because I am naturally going to be ignorant of many things, because I don’t have to or have a chance to experience them myself. I am in many ways shielded from the world. I am not trying to get angry on anyone’s behalf. I’m just basically thinking out aloud.

Also, Pride Month is supposed to be celebratory and this isn’t.

First of all, there is a section where he talks about giving a female actor a smack to get her into her role. He immediately states that he regretted it and never did it again, but soon after he mentioned pushing Katharine Hepburn to do the same to another actor. Again, this was supposedly for her benefit. In another part he uses the r-word when describing a role.

But we’ll get to ther part on why this is a Pride Month thing.

Now, many of you might not know who Sidney Lumet is. Born in 1924 and dying in 2011, he was a very known and aclaimed director with a 50 year career starting with 12 Angry Men in 1957, which always remained his best known movie. His movies garnered over 50 Oscar nominations in total, five of them for himself for directing, even though he never won one before receiving an honorary award in 2005. His directorial nominations were the aforementioned 12 Angry Men, Network, The Verdict, shared one for Prince of the City and, our topic for today, Dog Day Afternoon.

Dog Day Afternoon is based on a real-life bank robbery. A man called John Wojtowicz planned out the heist in order to pay for his wife’s, Elizabeth Eden, gender-affirming surgery (which he calls sex-change operation, but I’m pretty sure that would have been the official term at the time). Now, Lumet does call both of them “freaks”, but he does explain that he is trying to show the world that people who we might feel are “freaky” are actually just normal people.

What I do have a problem with is that he calls the couple gay and keeps using male pronouns when talking about her and deadnames her on at least two occasions that I can remember.

The book originally came out in mid-90s and while my copy doesn’t say when it was printed, I doubt I found a book printed almost 30 years ago just last week in a pretty busy bookshop in a section I’ve scoured thoroughly previously, so it hasn’t been updated (you can also see from the font and such that it has not been updated in any way).

My question is that is this excusable? Should this over 70-year-old man have understood the situation better in mid-90s?

Part of me wants to say yes. I mean, my 18-year-old self wouldn’t have known how to approach that in the mid-90s, because it just wasn’t something that was discussed in Finland. At least not in my circles. I was very ignorant on these matters for a long time after that and probably still am in ways I can’t even fathom. At the same time, Lumet made a movie about these people. If he really had as altruistic an intent as he claims, would he not have tried to learn more about them? Or would Al Pacino, being a method actor, not have figured this out and told Lumet?

On the other hand, was there information available back then? We are talking about mid-70s for the filming of the movie. Wojtowicz and Eden did have a a bunch of queer guests at their wedding (I couldn’t find the part in the book, but I think Lumet called it a “mock wedding”, which is true in the sense that they did not have a wedding license and they weren’t legally married, but at the same time, how much should the law come into play when discussing relationships?), but one might easily assume that because of the risks involved, these people would often come together secretly and might not have much of an outside influence to their understanding of themselves and their queer nature.

I mean, I don’t even know if Wojtowicz would be considered queer today, as he was married to a woman, but in those days the feeling on this were very different. Did studies regarding transfolk even progress that much after the Germans burned most of the existing research in the 30s until the 70s? I can’t say, because I don’t know and I don’t even know where to check.

My verdict on this would be that Lumet was trying his best to understand and just couldn’t really figure it all out because of the context and his own background. I think his heart was in the right place and, with that, I would advice him to read more on the topic, although he has been dead for 14 years, so it’s too late.

On the other hand, not my place to say. If you have worked hard for your gender, being misgendered must be painful, even if you are used to it and noone should need to get used to it.

One more note: In Lumet’s writing, whenever he talks of anyone in the abstract, he always uses male pronouns. He explains this away early on in the book saying that he is used to movie sets being very male-oriented. My question here would be “who’s fault is that, Sidney”? You can’t exactly brush that away when you are the one in charge of the set.