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ID: 527596
Title: Shooting Midnight Cowboy: Art, Sex, Loneliness, Liberation, and the Making of a Dark Classic
Author: Glenn Frankel
Narrator: John Pruden
Format: Unabridged
Length: 13:53:01
Language: English
Release date: 03-16-21
Publisher: Blackstone Audiobooks
Genres: Non-Fiction, Social Science, Art & Music
Summary:
A history of the controversial Oscar-winning film that signaled a dramatic shift in American popular culture
The director John Schlesingers 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 Eastmancolor adaptation of Far from the Madding Crowd. Expectations were huge, making the movies complete critical and commercial failure even more devastating, and Schlesinger suddenly found himself persona non grata in the Hollywood circles he had hoped to join.
Given his recent travails, Schlesingers next project seemed doubly daring, bordering on foolish. James Leo Herlihys novel Midnight Cowboy, about a Texas hustler trying to survive on the mean streets of 1960s New York, was dark and transgressive. Perhaps something about the books 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 Herlihys novel itself.
Glenn Frankels Shooting Midnight Cowboy tells the story of a modern classic that, by all accounts, should never have become one in the first place. The films boundary-pushing subject matterhomosexuality, prostitution, sexual assaultearned 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 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 Schlesingers 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 the legendary casting director Marion Dougherty, who discovered both Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight and supported them for the roles of Ratso Rizzo and Joe Buckleading 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 theaters of Broadway, influenced by close relationships with Tennessee Williams and Anaïs 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 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 country (and an industry) beginning to break free from decades of cultural and sexual repression.