First published 2021
Glenn Frankel chronicles the unlikely creation of Midnight Cowboy, the 1969 film that earned an X rating and won the Academy Award for Best Picture. Director John Schlesinger arrived in Hollywood after his previous film flopped spectacularly. He chose to adapt James Leo Herlihy's dark novel about a Texas hustler and a con man surviving in New York's underbelly. Schlesinger assembled a team of Hollywood outcasts: producer Jerome Hellman, blacklisted screenwriter Waldo Salt, and unknown actors Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight. They shot on location in a decaying New York City during a sanitation strike that filled the streets with garbage. Frankel traces the parallel stories of the novel's author Herlihy, who studied at Black Mountain College and knew Tennessee Williams but never achieved lasting success, and the filmmakers who transformed his transgressive material into cinema history. The book reveals how this controversial project overcame studio resistance, censorship battles, and urban chaos to create a film that captured American alienation and marked a turning point in Hollywood.
Genres: biography, american-fiction, historical-fiction, 20th-century, film
Vibes: atmospheric, dark, emotional, thought-provoking
Tropes: outcasts, underdog
Setting: Black Mountain College, Hollywood, New York
Period: 1960s
433 pages · Kindle Edition · Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Content warnings: drug-use, graphic-violence