Wyoming

From this WIP

Inspired by an scene from the movie Dog Day Afternoon, 1975. A film I saw several times along the years as the Al Pacino and true crime stories fan I am

During a hot summer afternoon in 1972, three men hold up a Manhattan Bank. One of them flees the scene as soon as he realizes trouble is at sight while the other two stay inside and are surprised by the police, holding a bunch of the office workers as hostages in a bizarre situation in where the kidnapped seem more annoyed by the fact that the authorities take more time than expected to successfully negotiate with the robbers, rather than the fact they are held there against their will.

Boisterous Sonny (young Al Pacino), the leader of the pack is the negotiating one, a somewhat inexperienced criminal he is also a desperate man that does not want to kill anybody and wonders how to get away without hurting the hostages, while shy and withdrawn Sal (John Cazale) is the loyal, yet scared and trigger-happy sidekick who holds his rifle tight and prefers to go down shooting rather than surrendering and going to jail; a dark, silent figure, who gets more and more nervous and dangerous as time goes by as Sonny struggles both to negotiate and maintain his companion under control.

Both are doomed from the beginning, but while there is hope and future (albeit a jailed one) for Sonny; Sal, the one that worries the authorities the most, will end with a bullet to his head right before the end of the siege.

The title makes reference to a conversation the robbers have inside the building when Sonny realizes the only way to get away is demand a plane who would take both out of the country for good, and asks a naïve Sal where he wants to go. His reply "Wyoming", a sentence actor John Cazale adlibbed and was not in the script, but was maintained for the movie.