Menand writes: "When it was released, in May, 1969, 'Midnight Cowboy' seemed as fresh, as startling, and as 'must-see' as 'The Graduate.' But it is not mentioned once in Robert Sklar's 'Movie-Made America: A Cultural History of American Movies.'"
Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight in Midnight Cowboy. (photo: Getty)
10 April 21
The 1969 film has become famous for being ahead of its time, but it may be most revealing as an artifact of its time—a turning point in the history of movies.
n December, 1963, Life published a special issue on “The Movies.” The United States, the magazine asserted, had fallen behind the rest of the world. Hollywood was too timid, too worried about the national “image.” Meanwhile, Swedish, Japanese, Italian, and French filmmakers were making movies that people talked about. “While the whole film world has been buzzing with new excitement,” the magazine concluded, “Hollywood has felt like Charlie Chaplin standing outside the millionaire’s door—wistful and forsaken.”
Exactly four years later, which, in feature-film production time, is virtually overnight, Time, the sister publication of Life, ran a cover story on “The New Cinema.” “The most important fact about the screen in 1967,” it announced, “is that Hollywood has at long last become part of what the French film journal Cahiers du Cinema calls ‘the furious springtime of world cinema.’ ” How this happened, how Hollywood suddenly went from losing millions on bloated spectacles like “Mutiny on the Bounty” (1962) and “Cleopatra” (1963) to producing smart, talked-about pictures like “The Graduate” (1967) and “Bonnie and Clyde” (1967)—how Old Hollywood became the New Hollywood—is a popular subject for movie historians.
One film that’s often left out of the story is “Midnight Cowboy.” When it was released, in May, 1969, “Midnight Cowboy” seemed as fresh, as startling, and as “must-see” as “The Graduate.” But it is not mentioned once in Robert Sklar’s “Movie-Made America: A Cultural History of American Movies.” It comes up a few times, but only in passing, in Peter Biskind’s “Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock-’n’-Roll Generation Saved Hollywood” and in Mark Harris’s “Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood.”
Glenn Frankel’s new book, “Shooting ‘Midnight Cowboy’: Art, Sex, Loneliness, Liberation, and the Making of a Dark Classic” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), aims to change all that. “More than fifty years later,” Frankel believes, “Midnight Cowboy remains a bleak and troubling work of novelistic and cinematic invention, floating far above most other books and films of its era.” Frankel’s book is generous with context, but it is, essentially, the biography of a movie. He has also written books on “The Searchers” and “High Noon.” These have the same interest that biographies of famous people do: they show us the “what if”s and the “but for”s hiding in the backstory of the finished product.
Many more movies don’t get made than get made: there is so much that has to go right, and so much that can go wrong. Movie production requires the collaboration of creative people working under constant pressure to control costs and turn a profit. With dozens of egos in the game and millions of dollars on the table, it is inevitable that things won’t go entirely as planned.
So it is not too surprising to learn that the director of “Midnight Cowboy,” John Schlesinger, had difficulty getting studio financing, which wasn’t helped by the fact that his previous movie, “Far from the Madding Crowd,” with Julie Christie, had bombed. Or that he initially considered the novel that the film is based on to be unreadable. Or that he did not want to cast either of the actors who became the movie’s stars: Dustin Hoffman, as the Times Square lowlife Rico (Ratso) Rizzo, and Jon Voight, as Joe Buck, the Texas innocent who comes to New York seeking to make his fortune servicing rich women and ends up taking care of Ratso.
Robert Redford (who had also hoped to get the role Hoffman played in “The Graduate”) and Warren Beatty both lobbied to get the part of Joe Buck. Someone at M-G-M, which declined to produce the picture, suggested Elvis Presley, and the role was offered to Michael Sarrazin, but the deal fell through, when the studio that he was under contract to asked for more money. The name of the casting director responsible for getting Hoffman and Voight onto the project, Marion Dougherty, was left off the credits.
What most people remember from the movie, after Hoffman’s and Voight’s performances, is Harry Nilsson singing “Everybody’s Talkin’.” Frankel says that Nilsson actually disliked the song, and had recorded it on one of his albums only as a favor to his producer. What might have been: Leonard Cohen pitched “Bird on the Wire” by singing it to Schlesinger over the phone, and Bob Dylan wrote a song for the movie, probably “Lay Lady Lay,” but it didn’t make the cut, because he submitted it too late. Another thing everyone remembers, a line eternally implanted in every New Yorker’s head, “I’m walkin’ here!,” is not in the screenplay. Hoffman ad-libbed it.
The screenwriter hired to adapt the novel, Waldo Salt, was another gamble. He had been blacklisted, and for eleven years he seldom wrote under his own name. He was fifty-two years old and had not worked on a notable Hollywood movie since the nineteen-forties.
The film’s editor was Hugh Robertson. Schlesinger didn’t get along with him; the producer, Jerry Hellman, called him “a catastrophe.” Robertson, for his part, was contemptuous of what Schlesinger had shot. He thought it was ignorant, a tourist’s idea of New York City. (Schlesinger was English.) Eventually, Schlesinger brought in a film editor he had worked with before, Jim Clark, to fix the mess he thought Robertson was making of his movie.
“The Graduate” had made Hoffman a matinée idol. Female fans mobbed him. But he felt that people thought he was just playing himself in that picture, and he badly wanted the part of Ratso in order to show off his range as an actor—even though Mike Nichols, his director on “The Graduate,” warned him that it would ruin his career. Hoffman got top billing, but he was annoyed when he realized that Voight was the movie’s center of interest. He complained that Schlesinger had cut a scene he was especially proud of. He was a no-show at promotional events. The producer denied him points.
And yet it all worked out. “Midnight Cowboy” made almost forty-five million dollars on a budget of under four million. It won Academy Awards for Best Picture and Best Director. Hugh Robertson was nominated for film editing, and Waldo Salt won for best adapted screenplay. “Everybody’s Talkin’ ” made Harry Nilsson famous, went to No. 6 on Billboard, and sold a million records. And the movie did not ruin Dustin Hoffman’s career. He and Voight both received Academy Award nominations for Best Actor. The Oscar, however, went to John Wayne, who called “Midnight Cowboy” “a story about two fags.”
Of course, “Midnight Cowboy” is not a story about “two fags.” But, somehow, it very quickly became associated with a new era of frankness about homosexuality, an association enhanced by the fact, completely unrelated, that the Stonewall riots, which conventionally mark the start of the gay-liberation movement, broke out a month after “Midnight Cowboy” opened.
Frankel thinks that the association is important. He sees the movie in the context of “the rise of openly gay writers and gay liberation.” And Mark Harris, in the liner notes for the Criterion DVD, says that “Midnight Cowboy” is, “if not a gay movie, a movie that at least helped to make the notion of a gay movie possible.” They’re right, but it’s a tricky case to make.
It’s true that “Midnight Cowboy” is the story of two men who develop an affectionate relationship under trying circumstances, but so is “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” which came out the same year and was its principal rival for Best Picture. You can read an element of homoeroticism into buddy pictures like these, in which the women are often treated as expendable accessories. But no one imagines that such films give audiences a more enlightened way to think about homosexuality.
Frankel believes it’s important that Schlesinger was gay. But, as he concedes, this was not common knowledge. Schlesinger did not come out publicly until the nineteen-nineties, and he said that he did not consider “Midnight Cowboy” a “gay” picture. His next movie, “Sunday Bloody Sunday” (1971), had a sympathetic gay character, played by Peter Finch. But there is no one like that in “Midnight Cowboy.”
Joe and Ratso are shown to have little sympathy for homosexuals, and they use John Wayne’s F-word often. According to Schlesinger’s biographer, William Mann, Hoffman thought his character should also use the N-word, but Schlesinger was horrified and refused to let him. Still, he was fine with homophobic slurs. Many years later, he claimed that the use of the word by the characters was “a sign of overprotestation,” but this seems a justification in hindsight.
There are few gay characters with speaking roles in the movie. One is a sad-sack teen-ager, played by Bob Balaban, who goes down on an obviously grossed out Joe in a Times Square movie house and afterward confesses he has no money to pay him. Another is a self-hating middle-aged man (Barnard Hughes) who takes Joe to his hotel room and gets beaten up, which excites him.
Women characters are given much more screen time; almost all of them are played as sexually voracious. A party sequence supposed to resemble scenes at Andy Warhol’s Factory (and filmed the same month, June, 1968, that Warhol was shot) devolves into a trippy montage of louche-looking characters doing louche-looking things (and a lot of drugs). The sexuality is clearly meant to be repellent.
This is true to the novel—whose author, James Leo Herlihy, was also gay, but who did not want people to think of his book, which was published in 1965, as gay fiction. There is no suggestion in the book that Joe and Ratso are gay self-deniers. The major influence on Herlihy’s fiction was Sherwood Anderson, who called the characters in his most famous work, the collection of linked stories “Winesburg, Ohio,” “grotesques.” That is how Herlihy saw the world. “It seems to me that the fundamental experience of being alive on this planet is a gothic and grotesque experience,” he said, in an interview that Frankel quotes. “It’s really a frightening place. None of us feels that he’s entirely normal.”
This is the world view Schlesinger and Salt set out to capture. With the exception of the story’s Don Quixote/Candide character, Joe Buck, everyone in “Midnight Cowboy” is creepy. When Pauline Kael (who hated Schlesinger’s work) complained that “the satire is offensively inaccurate,” she was maybe looking at the movie through the wrong end of the telescope. Of course it’s not accurate. This is how life looks from the bottom of the barrel.
Whatever effect “Midnight Cowboy” might have had on attitudes toward homosexuality, one thing it had a negative effect on was attitudes toward New York City. The movie was shot on location, in Texas and New York. (Schlesinger had originally intended to make it in black-and-white—another big “but for.”) The cinematographer was a serendipitous discovery, too. He was a twenty-nine-year-old Pole named Adam Holender, recommended by Roman Polanski. It was his first feature film. To the annoyance of the veteran crew, Holender insisted on shooting as much of the movie as he could in natural light. The result is a kind of gritty realism that we don’t see in films like “Bonnie and Clyde” and “The Graduate.” In 1969, this was still a powerful cinematic experience. It made Times Square look like a scene from Dante’s Inferno.
This seems to be what Robertson found objectionable in Schlesinger’s direction. But New York in 1968, the year the movie was shot, was not all Fun City. As Frankel reminds us, it seemed to many people to be dying. Crime tripled between 1960 and 1970. In 1968, there was a teachers’ strike, a sanitation workers’ strike, and a strike by fuel deliverers and oil-burner servicemen. And the city was deeply in debt; in 1975, it almost went bankrupt. The symbolic center of urban decay was Times Square—“the Worm in the Apple,” as Dick Netzer, a financial adviser to several of the city’s mayors, called it.
Times Square began to enjoy a reputation as a bohemian enclave a decade or two after it was named (for the newspaper), in 1904. That was where the Beats—Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Herbert Huncke—hung out in the nineteen-forties. In the nineteen-fifties, when the movie theatres stayed open late and admission was cheap, people would go there to sit through multiple screenings. Broadway was still thriving.
By 1960, though, the area was in unmistakable decline. “Life on W. 42d st.: A Study in Decay” was the headline on a Times story that year. (The paper had moved to Forty-third Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues in 1913, but kept a close, and usually disapproving, eye on the neighborhood.) Major upscale establishments began disappearing. The Paramount Theatre closed in 1964, the Hotel Astor in 1966. The next year, the old Metropolitan Opera House was demolished, a desecration that for some New Yorkers was equivalent to the demolition of the original Penn Station, which began in 1963.
“By the early sixties, Times Square had become New York’s capital of male prostitution,” James Traub says in his history of Times Square, “The Devil’s Playground” (2004). The area filled up with peep houses, massage parlors, and pornographic bookstores, all accompanied by a rise in crime. The most notorious parts were toward Seventh and Eighth Avenues, but even Bryant Park was crowded with hustlers and drug dealers. People avoided walking down those blocks, day or night. (A Save the Theatres campaign started in the nineteen-seventies and eventually rescued several Broadway theatres from being razed. The Disneyfication of the Times Square area did not really get under way until the nineteen-nineties.)
What happened? The decline of Forty-second Street had something to do with changes in the movie industry (fewer feature films were being released, because of competition from television, and movie houses shut) and in Broadway theatre (there was a slump in box-office receipts, which closed theatres). But Traub thinks a crucial factor was the relaxation of legal restrictions on pornography and sex work.
Obscenity has always been (and, technically, remains) unprotected by the First Amendment. But, in a series of Supreme Court decisions starting in 1959 with Kingsley Pictures v. Regents—a dispute over a French film adaptation of “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” that had been banned in New York State—the definition of obscenity began narrowing. It became more and more difficult to prove in court that things like pornography or nude dancing should be suppressed.
There were raids and there was police harassment, but they did not drive away the grind houses, peepshows, and pornographic bookshops or their patrons. The latitude provided by the obscenity decisions, along with the social currents they aligned with, helped widen the scope of legally protected, or officially ignored, behavior. The riots outside the Stonewall Inn, a West Village bar, were the result of a routine exercise in police harassment. To the astonishment of the cops, this time the patrons fought back. They must have felt that they now had history on their side.
That is only half the story, though. The other half is what happened in the culture industries. In 1963, when Life lamented Hollywood’s timidity and excessive concern for the national image, it was really referring to the Production Code, the highly restrictive rules, dating back to the nineteen-thirties, that governed what Hollywood movies could show. The Supreme Court decision in Kingsley, followed by decisions in Grove Press v. Gerstein, which permitted the publication of “Tropic of Cancer,” and Jacobellis v. Ohio, another movie case, made it clear that the Code was an albatross for the industry. The movies were losing audience. They were becoming unhip.
So when Jack Valenti became the president of the Motion Picture Association of America, in 1966, practically the first item on his agenda was replacing the Code. This was formally accomplished in 1968, when the M.P.A.A. adopted the ratings system. No studio would have released “Midnight Cowboy” five years earlier. For decades, the Code had effectively banned even the use of the word “homosexual.” Schlesinger and Hellman were betting that by the time their movie was slated for release the rules would have changed.
And they bet right. So did Mike Nichols and Arthur Penn, the director of “Bonnie and Clyde.” And this is why, as the turtle said after it was attacked by a gang of snails, it all happened so fast. Moviemakers could see as well as Life could that the conditions for a new kind of Hollywood movie were on the horizon. When the moment arrived, they were ready.
“Midnight Cowboy” is often cited as the only X-rated movie to win Best Picture at the Academy Awards. To the extent that this implies that the M.P.A.A. still resisted certain subject matter in 1969, the statement is misleading. The real story, which has been known at least since Stephen Farber published “The Movie Rating Game,” in 1972, is that the board assigned the film an R (which is almost certainly what it would get today), but Arthur Krim, the head of United Artists, which produced the film, had it changed to an X. Krim worried that young moviegoers might get the wrong idea about sex. That was the attitude Life was referring to.
From a business point of view, this was a dumb move on the studio’s part. The X rating reduced the number of theatres willing to exhibit the picture—although, from the start, people lined up to see it. After the Academy Awards, United Artists asked the ratings board to review the movie again, and it was assigned an R—again. More theatres were able to show it.
In other words, the changes in the movie business and in the legal environment for artistic expression that led to the decline of Times Square also led to the rise of the New Hollywood. As Frankel and Harris suggest, once Hollywood saw the success of “Midnight Cowboy,” a movie that treated homosexuality frankly, even if as a sordid pursuit, you could more easily sell a movie that treated homosexuality as another way of being normal. Whatever John Schlesinger intended to do, he helped to open up a new cultural space.
