A Personal Memory: or: What Dog Day Afternoon Means to Me

Posted on June 25, 2026 by sheila

For Sidney Lumet’s birthday.

Update to the below: I got the opporunity to discuss all this on What About Al?, Mark Searby’s podcast dedicated to the career of Al Pacino.

When I was 12 or 13, I saw Dog Day Afternoon one night while I was babysitting, and it changed the course of my life. This is not hyperbole. It is partially responsible for me being who I am today, for me making the choices I made, for me accepting the things I valued most, for me even RECOGNIZING what I valued. It all goes back to Dog Day Afternoon (and East of Eden, which I’ll get to). Dog Day Afternoon also represented an immensely painful – and even traumatic – growth spurt happening (in retrospect) when I was too young to handle it or process it.

I was in middle school. I was way too young to see that movie, and I didn’t understand a lot of it. The whole sex-reassignment operation thing went completely over my head, but what I do remember – and what struck me then – was the raw power of Al Pacino’s performance. It knocked me flat. I had never seen acting like this before. The parents of the kid I was babysitting came home that night, and had no idea that the girl sitting on the couch was totally altered from the girl who had arrived at their house 4 hours before. The father drove me back to my house. My mind was AFLAME with thoughts not of Al Pacino, but of Sonny, the real-life character he played. So this is KEY in explaining the power the film had on my 12-year-old brain.

I clearly remember, on that short drive home, not just considering writing a letter to the real Sonny in prison, but planning on doing it, and wondering how I could figure out which prison he was in, so I could make sure he received it. I thought to myself during that short drive, “Should I ask Dad if he can look into this for me? I need to know the prison and there isn’t any Internet yet.” I don’t know what I wanted to SAY to Sonny, but I just knew I wanted to reach out and tell him how much I loved and appreciated him, and how I really felt for the struggle he had gone through. Al Pacino’s performance made me want to find “the real guy”.

The soul does not grow in a linear way. There are events in life that catapult you forward, where your soul skips a step, and expands to three times its former size. It hurts. It seems we are meant to grow in a slower more gradual way so that you can’t actually feel the growth spurt. Watching Dog Day Afternoon was a growth-spurt for me. It hurt. I walked around for days, aching. Aching for Sonny’s desperation, for Sonny being in prison just because he wanted to help that person on the phone, whom I had no idea what was going on with anyway … it didn’t matter. Sonny wasn’t a bad person. I ached for him. And, looking back, I can see that what was born in me through that movie and performance was empathy. A stepping outside of myself and my experience, and feeling – HARD – for others.

My soul did a quantum-leap, in one evening, and I was no longer the same clueless self-centered girl I had been. After seeing Dog Day Afternoon, for weeks afterward, I would lie in bed at night and actually press down on my chest with my hand, trying to soothe whatever was going on in there. (It is also worth it to mention that I had my first nervous breakdown when I was 12, right on the heels of getting my period. My docs now think that this was bipolar, slipping through the door along with menstruation, which is the way it goes often for girls. Thanks a lot, Mother Nature. Anyway, I was already in a heightened state, but – as I would come to learn – heightened states like this – as painful as they are – do bring you closer to some essential truth.) I couldn’t get the image of sweaty Al Pacino’s face out of my mind. He haunted me. I understood totally why the hostages would choose to stay with this man. I understood it completely. No WAY would I have left that bank if I had been a hostage.

(Another movie I saw too soon, around this same time, was East of Eden. Dog Day Afternoon and East of Eden were the one-two punch to my childhood. Rebel Without a Cause came maybe a year later, again, seen when I was babysitting. Plato’s death was one of the worst things I had ever seen in my life. I could not believe it had happened. The first “too soon” movie is the real Big Kahuna and that was Stanley Kramer’s Bless the Beasts and Children, which I watched on the little black-and-white television in our den when I was around 9 years old. It was the era when children spent large chunks of their day completely unmonitored. I thought the movie was going to be about kids and animals. The movie wrecked me to such an extreme degree that my helpless parents were actually worried. They hadn’t seen the movie and they had no idea what I was reacting to. I remember hearing my mother say, as I thrashed around in my bed sobbing, “WHAT was in that movie, Sheila. Please tell us.” But I couldn’t! How could I tell them that the sight of a herd of STATIONARY buffalo had made me cease to be an innocent child? How could I make them understand?? Bless the Beasts and Children was a moment from which I never fully recovered.)

I didn’t even know what the hell was going ON when I first saw Dog Day Afternoon, that night babysitting. What was “Attica” and why was he screaming that at the crowd? I needed to find out about that, too.

I asked Dad. Imagine poor Dad, sitting at the breakfast table with his 12-year-old daughter, and she suddenly says, out of the blue, “Did something bad happen at a place called Attica?” To his credit, he explained about the prison riot. Ohhhh okay so now I understood Sonny’s screams. I was 12 years old, starting to be obsessed with Casey Kasum’s Top 40, and also my rainbow-striped leg warmers and my friends and going to dances and doing my homework. But I was also researching Al Pacino, the real “Sonny”, Attica, and Sidney Lumet, trying to put it all together in my head: How had anyone CREATED this movie? It felt like a real event, it felt like news footage. I knew enough to know that what I was watching was the result of hard work of some kind, but it still baffled me and obsessed me. How does one go about creating something like Dog Day Afternoon?

There was another aspect to this: As I said, I did have a conception that this thing was MADE, and so I became fascinated by the real people involved. The same thing with East of Eden. I worked in a library after school, and my dad was a librarian, so it didn’t take me long to figure out that Elia Kazan (director of East of Eden) and Al Pacino had the Actors Studio in common. And so I started researching the Studio and forget it I was hooked. And 15 years later, I was going to grad school at the Actors Studio, taking classes with Studio people, attending sessions at the Studio. I trace ALL of this back to Dog Day Afternoon.

I have a great affection for the things in my life that I encountered “too soon”. There is, as always, a loss of innocence connected to such moments, and that’s why it hurt so much. That’s why I lay in bed at night, eyes towards the dark ceiling, thinking about Sonny in his prison cell somewhere, wanting to reach out to him personally, and pressing my hand down on my chest to calm everything down in there. I had never seen a movie like that before. It marked me with indelible ink.

 
 
Thank you so much for stopping by. If you like what I do, and if you feel inclined to support my work, here’s a link to my Venmo account. And I’ve launched a Substack, Sheila Variations 2.0, if you’d like to subscribe.

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Happy Birthday, Hediyeh Tehrani

Posted on June 25, 2026 by sheila

I first encountered Iranian actress Hediyeh Tehrani’s work when I covered the Tribeca Film Festival in 2006 (it was my first real “gig”). was assigned to review Fireworks Wednesday. This was my introduction to Iranian film. Fireworks Wednesday was intriguing enough for me to institute a crash course. I saw as much as I could get my hands on. Fireworks Wednesday was a good “way in” too: It was directed by Asghar Farhadi, who would go on to win the Oscar for A Separation – and finally, recently, About Elly (which I consider equal to A Separation) was rescued from obscurity for a long-delayed U.S. release. Fireworks Wednesday was also my introduction to Tehrani – as well as to Taraneh Alidoosti – (she was also the “Elly” in About Elly, as well as the wife in The Salesman). But Tehrani was the one who intrigued me first, who pulled me in, who made me sit up and pay close attention. “Okay. Focus. This actress is GOOD.”


Hedieh Tehrani, “Fireworks Wednesday”

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“All I actually wanted was for my work to be useful.”–Claudius Afolabi Siffre

Posted on June 25, 2026 by sheila

In troubled times, when the heart is weary or scared or tired, a voice like Labi Siffre’s doesn’t just comfort. It heals. Or, at the very least, it creates a space where healing can happen, where healing is possible. To talk more about it might take away some of its power. There’s a delicate almost fragile thing that happens with certain performers, who meet their audiences in an unmediated way. There’s nothing between them and us. The communication is pure. Watch how Labi Siffre performs “Bless the Telephone”.

He is speaking to the person on the other end of the line, but he speaks to them through us. He meets us openly. There’s no “attitude” whatsoever. This is a performance – obviously – but it feels like more than a performance. Something is being communicated.

Some singer-songwriters create almost a closed loop of associations: their work is so personal, so “gone over”, so “of themselves”, that you almost feel like you’re eavesdropping on something so private they’d hesitate to share it with you in a one-on-one interaction. I’d put Elliott Smith in that category. Nick Drake, too. Some of Billie Eilish’s stuff has this feel too. These people are “extroverts” in the sense that what was (is) inside of them – the sounds they hear – what they want to communicate – came out. They found a way to bring what is inside them OUT. Despite being shy and sensitive and perhaps introverted personalities, they didn’t hide from the world and write in their journals. They put themselves up there and out there for us to see, to feel what they felt. We are let into their private worlds.

Siffre isn’t like this. This might be a distinction without a difference, but the distinction seems important. He “meets us” in a pure and neutral space, and in that space is shared humanity. He knows we know what he’s talking about when he sings the telephone song. He knows we all know the feelings, we all go through this, we all have people we love, we love to hear their voices. What he’s doing is just as personal as what Elliott Smith did. But it doesn’t have a “closed loop” feel. (Because compare/contrast is, seemingly, dead – I must reiterate for those of you who didn’t learn about it in school: Compare/contrast is not “either/or”. It’s “this thing is like this and NOT like this other thing and here’s where it converges and where it differs, and comparisons are helpful to distinguish not just what a thing IS but what it ISN’T.” I hate that I even have to say this but the internet has made me realize that the value of compare/contrast has somehow not been transmitted.)

Siffre was mostly active in the 1970s, although a lot of people probably know him from his 1987 song “Something Inside So Strong”, written as a protest against apartheid.

When “Something Inside So Strong” came out, Siffre had been out of the business for about ten years.

In the 70s, he put out six albums, and was a regular presence on the Top 40. He is a heavily sampled (and covered) artist. I was introduced to him – although I didn’t know it at the time – in high school, through Madness, who covered “It Must Be Love”. I still know all the words.

I also was introduced to him again – although I didn’t realize it at the time – from the opening strains of Eminem’s first hit “My Name Is”. That’s a sample from Labi Siffre’s “I Got The …” The list is endless. The biggest names in the business continue to sample from Siffre. Here’s a fascinating clip of an interview with him about all of this.

What happened to Labi Siffre after the ’70s? Why did he stop recording? (This 2022 interview with the 76-year-old Siffre is excellent!)

He was openly gay and, according to that interview, his first goal in life was to find someone whom he could love for the rest of his life. He achieved that. Twice. Both of his partners died within two years of each other. He was a caregiver for one of them after a catastrophic stroke. The three men lived in Wales, and Siffre devoted himself to his home life. (I love how he speaks about it in that interview. To him, what is most important is what you have going on at home.)

The grief is intense and the communication remains pure. His voice, his lyrics, his storytelling, the feeling you get that he’s speaking about things we all know … (it makes me think of George Carlin’s funny bit about “our similarities“). Carlin’s bit is so funny but it’s also political. Because the powers that be don’t WANT us to realize our similarities. They want us at each others’ throats. Siffre, a black gay folksinger in the 70s, came out of the closet early, it sounds like even before he started singing professionally. He was out, and he was out early. He was not afraid. Love made sense to him, and he wanted love.

Asserting that a black gay man wanting love has the same experience as a white straight man wanting love … is political. The “belief” that something DIFFERENT happens with gay people, that their experience is somehow different from the all-hallowed heterosexual love – causes so much evil in the world, because it dehumanizes and other-izes. Siffre refused to use “he” or “she” in his songs, spoke instead to a very specific person – whoever it was – and in so doing, spoke to the shared humanity. We all have these experiences, we are not so different, you and I.

His work was quietly radical. Musicians and artists are certainly aware of him but his name should be much more well-known!

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“I knew that I had a facility with words and a power of facing unpleasant facts.” — George Orwell

Posted on June 25, 2026 by sheila

Orwell was born on this day.

When Animal Farm was released in a new edition, Christopher Hitchens wrote specifically about the quote from Orwell shown in the title above. Very few people can “face unpleasant facts”. Hitchens:

A commissar who realizes that his five-year-plan is off-target and that the people detest him or laugh at him may be said, in a base manner, to be confronting an unpleasant fact. So, for that matter, may a priest with ‘doubts’. The reaction of such people to unpleasant facts is rarely self-critical; they do not have the ‘power of facing’. Their confrontation with the fact takes the form of evasion; the reaction to the unpleasant discovery is a redoubling of efforts to overcome the obvious. The ‘unpleasant facts’ that Orwell faced were usually the ones that put his own position or preference to the test.

The “power of facing” will always be rare and therefore of extreme value, especially in a world awash in disorienting technology, nonstop calculated propaganda, lying rapacious politicians AIDED by said propaganda, not to mention intense pressure from all sides – right/left/secular/religious – to control language, to dictate which language is “allowed”: if you know your Orwell you know that limiting language means limiting THOUGHT. In fact, limiting thought is the whole point.

This is why “facing unpleasant facts” is a PRACTICE, like meditation, like any other regular mental training. You have GOT to be strong, even in times of peace, because you never know when you might need that “power.”

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“People are always asking me if I thought Elvis was a handsome man and my answer is ‘I am not blind you know’!” — Millie Kirkham

Posted on June 24, 2026 by sheila

Millie Kirkham had an unearthly high soprano voice, and recorded with some of the biggest stars of her era (and other eras and ours). Perhaps most famously, she provided the swoopy woozy soprano part on Elvis’ original recording of “Blue Christmas” in 1957.

Kirkham had appeared on songs recorded by Carl Perkins, Patsy Kline, Chet Atkins, Bob Dylan, need I go on? She sang on Bobby Vinton’s “Blue Velvet”, Roy Orbison’s “It’s Over,” and Brenda Lee’s “I’m Sorry,” to name just a few. She was an in-demand backup singer. Her contribution to Ferlin Husky’s song, “Gone” is unmistakeable. I don’t need to tell you to listen for her. She’s obvious.

Elvis heard “Gone”, and fell in love with her voice. When he was planning his Christmas album in 1957, he said, “Get me that woman on Ferlin’s song.” He had a vision in his head of what he wanted for “Blue Christmas” (Jerry Schilling, in his wonderful book, said that Elvis has never gotten proper credit for being a wonderful producer. He knew what he wanted, he know how he heard the song, he knew how to put the right people together to make it come out. The image of him as some dummy just doing what he was told is incorrect.)

Millie Kirkham was pregnant when she sang her part on “Blue Christmas”, and it was her first time recording with Elvis. She showed up at RCA’s Studio B in Nashville. Elvis was not expecting a pregnant woman to stroll into the studio and it took him aback. Kirkham tells the story:

When we were doing the Elvis Christmas album I was six months pregnant the time with my daughter at the time. So still I kid her and tell her she was at the very first recording session I did with Elvis but that she just doesn’t remember it! Elvis looked a little surprised when I came in and said, “Please someone get this woman a chair!” when he saw me.

Several months later when I was doing another recording session with Elvis and I came in – and at that time I thought I was looking pretty slim and trim – I came strolling in and Elvis asked, “Did you ever have that baby?!” He had a great sense of humour, he was a funny guy.

The day of the second recording session, she happened to have a camera with her. There was one shot left. She and the Jordannaires – they had all worked together elsewhere – gathered to take their picture together, and Elvis popped over, saying, “Let me be in it.”

Team player.

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She sang with Elvis on many of his recordings and was a featured part of his live shows in the early 1970s.

Here Kirkham is, reminiscing about her career. It’s long, but well worth it. The stories she tells!

In the interview, she says of the phenomenal eternal success of “Blue Christmas”: “If I was gettin’ royalties, I’d be a rich old woman.”

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Physical Media Booklet Essay: The Podcast

Posted on June 23, 2026 by sheila

The Physical Media Booklet Essay zine, brainchild of Sean Abley, now has an accompanying podcast, where Sean interviews each of the writers about their “booklet essay” (highlighting a film that does not exist). These episodes are so fascinating! We all took different approaches. I love this! There will be nine episodes of the podcast, where Sean interviews us. Episodes drop weekly. There are two out so far.

You can purchase the zine on Sean’s store.

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“And the role of the fatal chorus / I agree to take on” — Anna Akhmatova

Posted on June 23, 2026 by sheila

“This I pray at your liturgy
After so many tormented days,
So that the stormcloud over darkened Russia
Might become a cloud of glorious rays.”
— Anna Akhmatova, “Prayer”

Anna Akhmatova – born Anna Andreyevna Gorenko on this day – lived a life so epic – so tragic – the mind blunders around to even get a handle on it. She was a renowned poet in Russia prior to the Revolution, well-known in the cafe culture, and a major player in the bohemian Russian world. She was also a siren. Wives feared her, and they were right to. She drew people to her like moths to a flame. She had beauty, personality, self-possession – in short: personal charisma. You met her once, you never forgot her. There are a couple of famous “portraits” of her, which show her allure, the drive that male painters had to try to capture her. The first is by Nathan Altman:

But it is her liaison with Modigliani that was the most productive. He filled notebooks with sketches of her, sometimes using just one line to suggest her body. There’s an Aubrey-Beardsley-ish surreal-evocative quality to the most famous of these sketches:

You can look up the whole Akhmatova-Modigliani relationship – it was fascinating.

But it is not for all this she is known, primarily, although it’s part of her aura. She wrote about what was going on in Russia, poems about WWI, about death, about Russian life… and after the Revolution, with the good old Bolsheviks in charge, her work was suppressed. She struggled for years, writing poems that could never be published. Through all of this, her legend kept growing. Stalin “let her live,” mainly because she was too famous already to kill. (Similar to Mikhail Bulgakov’s experience.)

More about this extraordinary courageous woman after the jump:

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“The energy doesn’t end at the hands. I want such intensity that it feels like light is streaming from every finger.” — Bob Fosse

Posted on June 23, 2026 by sheila

It’s his birthday today.

His work as a director – in films as diverse as Cabaret, Lenny, All That Jazz, and Star 80 is getting a lot of chatter from film critics, and of course that makes sense. I love those films too. All That Jazz made a HUGE impact on me. I saw it when I was 13, 14, and was way too young for it (I was a young 13, 14), in fact much of it scared me to DEATH (which, considering the topic, is appropriate). I was already in love with show business. I already had dreams. So this opening number launched me into a fantasy world so intense I honestly didn’t come out of it until I was 35.

But it’s what he did as a choreographer that really interests me.

His style is a FINGERPRINT. It’s not an exaggeration to say he changed everything.

More after the jump:

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“There are points in your life, especially if you have creative ambitions, where selfishness is necessary.” — Kris Kristofferson

Posted on June 22, 2026 by sheila

He lived a long life and was beloved and productive almost up to the very end. His death is yet another snipped thread with the past. I wrote about him when he died for my newsletter.

 
 
Thank you so much for stopping by. If you like what I do, and if you feel inclined to support my work, here’s a link to my Venmo account. And I’ve launched a Substack, Sheila Variations 2.0, if you’d like to subscribe.

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“You don’t want to see ‘plots’. You want to see stories develop.” — Billy Wilder

Posted on June 22, 2026 by sheila

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Billy and Audrey Wilder

It’s his birthday today.

I love him for his humor, his cynical pessimistic view of human beings – which, honestly, just feels realistic, his versatility with material (noirs, melodramas, war movies, comedies). Sunset Boulevard, Stalag 17, Some Like It Hot, Double Indemnity, The Lost Weekend, The Apartment, the prophetic Ace in the Hole. His life spanned from pre-Hitler Vienna to the early 2000s. His entire family was killed in concentration camps. He emigrated to the US shortly after Hitler took power.

Here’s a letter to Wilder from Alfred Hitchcock after seeing The Apartment:

I love his tips for screenwriters (#6 helped me enormously when I was writing my own script and problem-solving the final scene.)

Billy Wilder’s Tips for Writers

1. The audience is fickle.

2. Grab ’em by the throat and never let ’em go.

3. Develop a clean line of action for your leading character.

4. Know where you’re going.

5. The more subtle and elegant you are in hiding your plot points, the better you are as a writer.

6. If you have a problem with the third act, the real problem is in the first act.

7. A tip from Lubitsch: Let the audience add up two plus two. They’ll love you forever.

8. In doing voice-overs, be careful not to describe what the audience already sees. Add to what they are seeing.

9. The event that occurs at the second-act curtain triggers the end of the movie.

10. The third act must build, build, build in tempo and action until the last event, and then —

11. — that’s it. Don’t hang around.

Taken from the essential “Conversations with Wilder“, by Cameron Crowe


These two are up to no good.

 
 
Thank you so much for stopping by. If you like what I do, and if you feel inclined to support my work, here’s a link to my Venmo account. And I’ve launched a Substack, Sheila Variations 2.0, if you’d like to subscribe.

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