PF Kluge, film

I don’t travel to Hollywood and, since moving to rural Ohio, I haven’t seen more than twenty films a year, many bad. But I like films. Some, I love: The Blue Angel and The Wild Bunch. When I return to those two, and some others I could name, it’s as though I’m revisiting a world that has a life of its own that goes on whether or not I’m watching. It’s like re-reading a book. I’ve seen my own work turned into movies. And, though writers are fashionably leery about Hollywood, I’m not: a certain amount of magic, and money, has come into my life from films.

In August, 1967, two reporters from LIFE Magazine—Thomas Moore and P.F. Kluge—were assigned to reconstruct a bank robbery that had just occurred in Brooklyn. It was a botched enterprise which evolved intoa tense and occasionally comic hostage situation. One of the robbers was a gay male who wanted to finance his lover’s sex change operation. By now, I need not add that all this—and our article, “The Boys in the Bank”—led to Dog Day Afternoon, with Al Pacino, Jonathan Cazale and Chris Sarandon. I was on Saipan when the film came out. I flew to Guam to see what had become of a story that began as a magazine assignment. The film was not my work; it had evolved and mutated into something else. But there’s an old saying I like—writer to movie producer: “Where were you when the pages were blank?” Dog Day Afternoon is a film I respected without especially liking, at least that first time. The years have been kind to it, though, and it holds up well.

Rock and roll, oldies but goodies, youth and age, then and now: all these figured in my second novel, Eddie And The Cruisers. And more: the power of memory, the importance of memory, the tenacity of music. Eddie And The Cruisers is a cult classic, a likeable film. It generates far more mail—and far less money—than Dog Day Afternoon. But a lot of people love it.When movie interst comes along, you know your work will change. “If you sell a cow to a butcher,” I wisecracked, “will it change?” But I’m not really that cynical. The measure of a novel is in thousands of readers; a movie reaches millions. So there’s magic, more in Eddie than in Dog Day. And money—more in Dog Day than in Eddie. And money buys freedom and freedom is time to write.