On a brutally hot Texas day in the summer of 1968, near the end of filming “Midnight Cowboy,” the British director John Schlesinger had a sort of fit. Visibly shaking, stirred by grievous doubts, he asked his lead actor Jon Voight, “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 women?”
It wasn’t Schlesinger’s first anxious moment concerning the project. Even after the X-rated film became a box-office success, Schlesinger decided to forego the Oscar ceremony because he couldn’t bear the embarrassment of traveling all the way from London only to lose. It was somehow a fitting choice for a director and a movie that depicted dreams and desperation so memorably.
With “Shooting Midnight Cowboy,” Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Glenn Frankel completes an illuminating trilogy about men and their cinematic milestones that began with “The Searchers” (2014) and “High Noon” (2017). As with his previous two studies, the new book employs a wide lens, taking in not only Schlesinger’s role in getting the movie made but also those of producer, screenwriter, cast, crew, and an all-but-forgotten novelist. He also provides historical context for a tumultuous time in both the movie industry (teetering between the old studio system and Hollywood’s wilder next phase) and New York City (staggering in the midst of surging crime, unemployment, and unrest).
Frankel devotes substantial space to James Leo Herlihy, who wrote the book on which the movie was based, for good reason. Although his 1965 novel about Joe Buck didn’t gain much attention when it was published, Schlesinger deeply admired its portrait of an unmoored young man facing a “strange and new place.” Teaming up with producer Jerome Hellman, Schlesinger wanted to focus on Joe’s relationship with Ratso Rizzo, the consumptive small-time con man. After their first screenwriter sidelined Ratso, Schlesinger hired Waldo Salt, who showed great sympathy for both characters and was, Frankel writes, “happy to work with scenes and dialogue directly from [the novel’s] pages.” Delving into Herlihy’s restless life also allowed Frankel to shine a light on social changes taking place among gay men. Both Herlihy and Schlesinger hid their sexuality from the public, and Frankel details the many forces that denounced or denied homosexuality, including psychiatrists, religious leaders, the mainstream media, and law enforcement. A self-diagnosed manic depressive, Herlihy is also a case study in artistic ambivalence. “Writing is so lonely,” he once said. “It’s like sentencing yourself to solitary confinement.”
The shoot of “Midnight Cowboy,” by contrast, offered plenty of opportunities for rewarding collaboration. For Waldo Salt, who had been prevented by the Hollywood blacklist from writing under his own name for a decade, the experience was particularly liberating. As privately anxious as Schlesinger could be, he encouraged others to explore and experiment. He loved Salt’s ideas about broadening the focus of the film to show that “Joe’s illusions are in fact the absurd reality of our time.” Schlesinger empowered Adam Holender, a young Polish cinematographer, to capture Times Square without artificial lighting, in all of its garish glory. And although Schlesinger didn’t at first want either Voight or Dustin Hoffman for Joe Buck and Ratso Rizzo, he was convinced otherwise by casting director Marion Dougherty. A half-century later, her casting suggestions throughout the film seem crucial to its enduring power.
In creating his definitive account, Frankel has gathered memorable details about tight budgets, perseverance, and resourcefulness. As part of outfitting everybody in the cast, Ann Roth scoured sidewalk tables around Times Square and bought a pair of “white pants with a gray line of dirt along the crease of each leg” that Ratso could have easily stolen. She made Joe Buck’s suede jacket and cowhide suitcase herself. Frankel also seeks to dispel fables that have grown up around the film. He points out that the famous, supposedly impromptu scene in which Ratso fights back against a taxi was actually in a screenplay draft dating from the previous year. He also dismisses the widespread notion that the film’s initial X rating was a puritanical reaction from the MPAA’s new Code and Ratings Administration. In fact, Arthur Krim, a cochairman of United Artists, requested the X after the ratings board gave it an R. When “Midnight Cowboy” won three Oscars, including Best Picture, the studio requested that the rating be changed back to R, which was quickly done.
After digging deep into two unsettling Westerns, and explaining the connections to the Plains Indian Wars of the 19th century (“The Searchers”) and the Hollywood blacklist (“High Noon”), what drew Frankel to the urban miasma of “Midnight Cowboy”? As it happens, all three movies examine the heart and mind of a singular Western man, revealing the hero he aspires to be, but it’s the films’ fascinating backstories as much as their lonesome cowboys that animate Frankel’s trilogy. There are no tidy endings for anyone involved, least of all the guy riding off into the sunrise on a bus, alone again.
A former film editor of the Village Voice, Abby McGanney Nolan writes about American history, children’s books, and pop culture.
Shooting Midnight Cowboy: Art, Sex, Loneliness, Liberation, and the Making of a Dark Classic
By Glenn Frankel
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 432 pages, $30