Midnight Cowboy (1969) is one of the landmark achievements of the New Hollywood. As we wrote in an earlier consideration, the movie is “an exemplar of what the seventies film aspired to be: focusing on characters [that] the Old Hollywood wouldn’t touch, raising questions that were previously unasked, and searching for the truths that might be revealed by staring down grim realities.” Even today, far removed from its once-shocking provocations, it remains well worth viewing or revisiting (there is a spiffy Criterion Collection special edition, which we discuss in this 2018 essay for Cineaste).
The production, from before the beginning until after the end, is now the subject of an exemplary new book by Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Glenn Frankel, Shooting Midnight Cowboy: Art, Sex Loneliness, Liberation and the Making of a Dark Classic. This outstandingly researched effort combines scholarly immersion in the relevant archives with copious new interviews with producer Jerome Hellman (who also provided access to his unpublished memoir), Michael Childers and Ian Buruma (director John Schlesinger’s partner and nephew, respectively), cinematographer Adam Holender (from whom perhaps more could have been heard), and dozens of others, including on-screen participants Dustin Hoffman, John Voight, Bob Balaban, Brenda Vaccaro, and Jennifer Salt (who also shares reflections as the daughter of Cowboy’s screenwriter Waldo Salt).
Shooting Midnight Cowboy is distinguished by its laudable attentiveness to collaboration and contextualization. With regard to the latter, Frankel brings to the table the confidence and the ambition to introduce at some length indispensable considerations of the rise and decline of post-war New York City, as well as the largely underground, enormously fraught and perilous to its participants (and potentially career shattering) gay subculture in establishing the setting for the film. Midnight Cowboy as a novel is better understood when positioned among the works of the still semi-closeted gay New York literary lions of the day; as a film, the City itself – late sixties Gotham-on-the-rocks – is a central character in the narrative. As for collaboration, Frankel admirably takes a deep dive into the source material (and the biography of novelist James Leo Herlihy), as well as the backgrounds and crucial contributions of Hellman (a critical and fully engaged creative partner), Schlesinger (anxiously coming off a fiasco after a string of early successes), the once-blacklisted and still-struggling Salt, and the performers themselves, who routinely spoke up with ideas about their characters, many of which were embraced by Schlesinger. (Remarkably, it was Barnard Hughes who quietly told his director the effectiveness with which he could shed his dentures for what would become the film’s most chilling, controversial, and climactic scene.) This celebration of cinema-as-collaboration – which does not detract from Schlesinger’s central, orchestrating, and definitive influence – reaches further than most; the appreciation, for example, of the picture-shaping contributions of casting director Marion Dougherty are especially engaging and informative.
There are of course things in the book to quibble with, but there is much more to be gleaned, even for those familiar with many of the backstories. As an advocate of the “Joe and Ratso are not lovers/that’s not the point of the story” school of thought, it is gratifying to read from Salt’s notes on an earlier draft (he was brought in after the previous screenwriter was let go) his emphasis on Joe’s loneliness and desperate need to make a human connection. (Schlesinger responded with a cable to Hellman from London that he was “much impressed” with the treatment and they should “engage [Salt] immediately.”) Also of interest are dissections of Hoffman’s often inspired serial improvisations (though the evidence here is overwhelming that Ratso’s almost getting hit by a cab did not take the actor by surprise, and went through multiple takes); the routine interrogations by all participants regarding “what this scene is about”; an elaboration of the production’s engagement with the Andy Warhol crowd; and numerous small pieces of business, like Vacarro’s priceless (and successful) insistence that her on-screen nudity be strictly delineated: “it’s my screen debut . . . what if my mother sees my tits before she sees my face?”
Shooting Midnight Cowboy is not without its limitations. The book is at times repetitive (inexplicably, a late chapter seems to reprise everything that had just been so elaborately discussed), and a long series of postscript chapters add little, and might have been condensed or even discarded. And after a while Frankel’s insistence on continuously rehearsing the extent to which aspects of a fifty year old film and its production deviate from contemporary social-political sensibilities seem gratuitous at best and incessant virtue-signaling at worst. But these blemishes do not obscure the considerable accomplishments of this excellent book, which is highly recommended.
