SHOOTING MIDNIGHT COWBOY

An inside look at the making of an American cinema classic.

“Do you really think anyone’s going to pay money to see a movie about a dumb Texan who takes a bus to New York to seek his fortune screwing rich old women?” That’s the question John Schlesinger, the British director, asked Jon Voight, who played dumb Texan Joe Buck. Did they ever. Midnight Cowboy, the director’s first American feature, was the third-highest-grossing movie of 1969 and became the only X-rated film to win the Academy Award for Best Picture. In this outstanding work, following his worthy excavations of The Searchers and High Noon, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Frankel covers every facet of the film’s creation, from James Leo Herlihy’s original novel about the unlikely friendship between a “handsome but not overly bright dishwasher from Texas” keen to make his mark as a male hustler and Ratso Rizzo, a “disabled, tubercular con man and petty thief,” to the hiring of screenwriter Waldo Salt, who began each day’s work with “a joint as fat as a small cigar,” to Schlesinger’s daring decision to adapt “a novel that was so bleak, troubling, and sexually raw that no ordinary film studio would go near it.” In a canny move, Frankel places the film in historical context, detailing major world events at the time of the shoot, including the Vietnam War, New York’s “downward path to seemingly terminal decline,” and the Stonewall riots and competing attitudes toward gay people in general—Herlihy and Schlesinger were gay—and their depictions in cinema. Interviews with the film’s surviving principals add immediacy, and descriptions of small production details enhance the book’s power. For example, Dustin Hoffman (Rizzo), put stones in his shoes to perfect the character’s limp, and the filmmakers hired a dentist to make a false set of Rizzo’s bad teeth, which “looked really horrible,” said the dentist. “I was pleased.”

A rare cinema book that is as mesmerizing as its subject.