num_pages: 415
description: The Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and New York Times-bestselling author of the behind-the-scenes explorations of the classic American Westerns High Noon and The Searchers now reveals the history of the controversial 1969 Oscar-winning film that signaled a dramatic shift in American popular culture.Director John Schlesinger's Darling was nominated for five Academy Awards and introduced the world to the transcendently talented Julie Christie. Suddenly the toast of Hollywood Schlesinger used his newfound clout to film an expensive Panavision adaptation of Far from the Madding Crowd. Expectations were huge making the movie's complete critical and commercial failure even more devastating and Schlesinger suddenly found himself persona non grata in the Hollywood circles he had hoped to conquer.Given his recent travails Schlesinger's next project seemed doubly daring bordering on foolish. James Leo Herlihy's novel Midnight Cowboy about a Texas hustler trying to survive on the mean streets of 1960's New York was dark and transgressive. Perhaps something about the book's unsparing portrait of cultural alienation resonated with him. His decision to film it began one of the unlikelier convergences in cinematic history centered around a city that seemed at first glance as unwelcoming as Herlihy's novel itself.Glenn Frankel's Shooting Midnight Cowboy tells the story of a modern classic that by all accounts should never have become one in the first place. The film's boundary-pushing subject matter--homosexuality prostitution sexual assault--earned it an X rating when it first appeared in cinemas in 1969. For Midnight Cowboy Schlesingerwho had never made a film in the United Statesenlisted Jerome Hellman a producer coming off his own recent flop and smarting from a failed marriage and Waldo Salt a formerly blacklisted screenwriter with a tortured past. The decision to shoot on location in New York at a time when the city was approaching its gritty nadir backfired when a sanitation strike filled Manhattan with garbage fires and fears of dysentery.Much more than a history of Schlesinger's film Shooting Midnight Cowboy is an arresting glimpse into the world from which it emerged: a troubled city that nurtured the talents and ambitions of the pioneering Polish cinematographer Adam Holender and legendary casting director Marion Dougherty who discovered both Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight and supported them for the roles of Ratso Rizzo and Joe Buck--leading to one of the most intensely moving joint performances ever to appear on screen. We follow Herlihy himself as he moves from the experimental confines of Black Mountain College to the theatres of Broadway influenced by close relationships with Tennessee Williams and Anas Nin and yet unable to find lasting literary success.By turns madcap and serious and enriched by interviews with Hoffman Voight and others Shooting Midnight Cowboy: Art Sex Loneliness Liberation and the Making of a Dark Classic is not only the definitive account of the film that unleashed a new wave of innovation in American cinema but also the story of a countryand an industrybeginning to break free from decades of cultural and sexual repression.
language: English
title: Shooting Midnight Cowboy: Art, Sex, Loneliness, Liberation, and the Making of a Dark Classic
publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux