Shooting Midnight Cowboy: Art, Sex, Loneliness, Liberation, and the Making of a Dark Classic (Preview)
by Glenn Frankel. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 415 pp., illus. Hardcover: $30.00.

Reviewed by Michael Sandlin

“Honestly…do you really think that anyone in their right mind is going to pay money to see this fucking rubbish?” So went a typically pessimistic outburst from maverick British New Wave director John Schlesinger, this frustrated remark coming just before his first American-financed project, 1969’s Midnight Cowboy, prompted a standing ovation in its inaugural screening. As documented in film historian Glenn Frankel’s impressive but flawed behind-the-scenes treatise Shooting Midnight Cowboy, Schlesinger had managed to make a commercially viable X-rated male-hooker movie that “surprised and shook the cultural arbiters” of its day.

The notoriously insecure Schlesinger probably envisaged Cowboy—with its then-risqué scenes of (implied) fellatio, flashes of nudity, sexual assault, prostitution, casual drug use—as provoking similar moralist pushback to the outcry that financially sunk 1968’s X-rated The Killing of Sister George (its open lesbianism attracting the kind of bad publicity that fails to equal good publicity). But this was, after all, 1969, not 1968: grind-house sleaze was becoming art-house chic, sexually explicit (what would become “porn chic”) films, art-house and otherwise, were beginning to go mainstream, even attracting curious celebs, from late-night talk show king Johnny Carson to royal adulterer Princess Margaret.

Of course, people did pay money to see Midnight Cowboy, the seedy little dramedy about an intellectually challenged West Texas dishwasher/aspiring male prostitute’s unlikely big-city bromance with a club-footed, tubercular street grifter named after a rodent. On a measly United Artists budget, the film made $44 million in 1969—a third-place box office draw just short of The Love Bug (but not as far ahead of The Stewardesses 3-D as you might expect). And in 1970 Cowboy would become the first (and last) X-rated movie to win an Academy Award for Best Picture, much to the chagrin of Hollywood’s resident homophobe John Wayne, who mistakenly thought Schlesinger’s film was promoting gay liberation. As consolation, Wayne had a Best Actor Oscar tossed in his direction for playing a big, dumb cowboy who wasn’t a male prostitute. 

Although gossip hound Peter Biskind covered similar terrain when he feted Cowboy in a 2005 Vanity Fair article, his romantic-sounding assertion that the film was “created by a handful of lavishly talented people who had all bottomed out” is somewhat corrected and elaborated upon by Frankel’s much rangier book-length study. True, Schlesinger was reeling from the pompous costume-drama failure of Far from the Madding Crowd (1968), which had foolishly tried to bring Swinging London to Thomas Hardy’s Wessex. Producer Jerome Hellman was down to his last dime, throwing a last desperate career dice roll on the chance that an obscure novel about a lonely Texan turned Times Square stud for hire (written by an openly gay writer, James Leo Herlihy) would bring solvency. And formerly blacklisted barfly screenwriter Waldo Salt, then fifty-something, was well into life’s second act and desperate for creative redemption. 

But the creative personalities behind the film weren’t all long in the tooth. Frankel’s panoramic bird’s-eye view of Cowboy’s production process shows that the collaborative effort to make this once-thought-unmakeable film was a nuanced convergence of both up-and-comers and down-and-outers. Alongside the last-chancers was a heady mix of young, brilliant upstarts who would make indelible marks on both Cowboy and the industry at large: behind the scenes, you had Ann Roth, costume designer extraordinaire; Adam Holender, a supremely talented but as-yet untested Polish cinematographer; and Marion Dougherty, the tenacious casting director responsible for placing relative unknown Jon Voight as Joe Buck and getting Graduate star Dustin Hoffman cast as Ratso Rizzo. Also not to be underestimated was the contribution of young singer Harry Nilsson: his spirited rendition of folkie Fred Neil’s wistful countrypolitan tune “Everybody’s Talkin’,” just happened to be the perfect accompaniment to Joe and Ratso’s doomed escape from urban blight.

And let’s not forget the true star of the film: New York City. Under Mayor John Lindsay, Manhattan was becoming the scuzzy slough of despond that would later drive civic-minded New Yorkers like Paul Kersey and Travis Bickle to embark on psychotic killing sprees. But Lindsay, to his credit, made it easier to obtain filming permits for the Cowboy crew, who could then indulge in completely uninhibited location shooting and capture the perfect shabby-chic backdrop for Joe and Ratso’s badly managed urban entrepreneurial schemes…

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Cineaste, Vol. XLVI, No. 3