By Louis Menand
Translator: Yi Ersan
Proofreader: Qin Tian
Source: The New Yorker (April 5, 2021)
In December 1963, Life magazine published a special issue on "Movies". The magazine asserts that the United States has fallen behind the rest of the world. Hollywood is too timid and too worried about the "image" of the country. Meanwhile, Filmmakers from Sweden, Japan, Italy and France are making films that people would talk about. The magazine concluded: "While the entire film industry is busy with new excitement, Hollywood is like Chaplin standing outside the millionaire's door, losing it."
Exactly four years later— presumably after the production cycle of a feature film passed— almost overnight, Time, Life's sister magazine, published a cover story about the "new movie." "The most important fact about the screen of 1967," it declared, "is that Hollywood has finally become part of what the French film magazine The Film Handbook calls 'the spring of world cinema rage.'"
How did all this happen? How Hollywood lost millions of dollars from pompous blockbusters like "Rebel Blood" (1962) and Cleopatra (1963) to suddenly turn to making impressive films like The Graduate (1967) and "The Hermaphrodite" (1967) — how "Old Hollywood" became "New Hollywood" — is a hot topic among film historians.
The Hermaphrodite (1967)
Midnight Cowboy is often left out of this discussion. When it was released in May 1969, Midnight Cowboy seemed as fresh, as startling, as "must-see" as The Graduate. But in Robert Skla's book Film Creates America: A History of American Cinema Culture, it is not mentioned once.
In Peter Biskin's Runaway Rider, Angry Bull: Inside The New Hollywood and Mark Harris' Film in a New Trend: Five Movies and the Birth of New Hollywood, the film appears several times, but only in passing.
Midnight Cowboy (1969)
Glenn Frankl's new book, Shooting Midnight Cowboy: Art, Sex, Solitude, Liberation and the Making of a Black Classic, aims to change all that. "More than fifty years later," Frankl argues, "Midnight Cowboy is still a gloomy and disturbing work of both fiction and cinematic temperament, far more than most other books and films of its time."
Frankl's book has a rich background, but is essentially a biography of a film. He also wrote books on The Searcher and High Noon. These works share the same interest as celebrity biographies: they show us the "ifs" and "ifs" hidden behind the finished product.
There are far more films that have not been made than films that have already been made: it takes too many elements to make a thing, and there are too many elements that can go wrong. Filmmaking requires creative people to collaborate under constant pressure to control costs and make a profit. In this game, where everyone has their own ideas and millions of dollars are constantly being poured in, it's inevitable that things won't go exactly as planned.
So it's no surprise that Midnight Cowboy's director, John Schlesinger, had trouble securing funding for a studio, and the failure of his previous film, Far Away, with Julie Christie, was even worse. Including the two actors he initially thought were difficult to read, and he did not originally intend to play these two actors: Dustin Hoffman, who plays Rizzo, a low-class man who lives in Times Square, and John Walter plays Joe Barker, a naïve Texas kid who tries to come to New York to hook up with a rich woman and finally takes care of Rizzo.
Robert Redford (who had also hoped for Hoffman's role in The Graduate) and Warren Beatty both lobbied for the role of Joe Barker. An MGM executive refused to make the film, but recommended Elvis Presley, who was later offered the role, but when he signed the contract and asked for an increase in salary, the collaboration fell through. The name of Marion Doherty, the casting director responsible for involving Hoffman and Walter on the project, did not appear on the credits.
Aside from Hoffman and Walter's performances, most people remember From the film is Harry Nelson's "Everybody's Talkin." Frankl said Nelson didn't really like the song and covered it while recording the album just to help the producers.
There could have been other outcomes at the time: Leonard Cohen sang "Bird on the Wire" to Schlesinger on the phone, and Bob Dylan also wrote a song for the film, probably Lay Lady Lay, but didn't make it because he submitted it too late. One more thing that everyone remembers, this phrase is remembered by every New Yorker — "I'm walking here!" It wasn't written in the script, it was Hoffman's improvisation.
Waldo Schoet, the screenwriter hired to adapt the novel, was another gamble. He was blacklisted, and for 11 years he rarely wrote under his own name. He was 52 years old at the time and had not appeared in any famous Hollywood film since the 1940s.
The editor of the film was Hugh Robinson. Schlesinger didn't get along well with him; producer Jerry Herman called him a "disaster." And Robinson was dismissive of what Schlesinger photographed. He thought the photographs seemed foolish, like a tourist's view of New York. (Schlesinger was British.) Finally, Schlesinger hired Jim Clark, an editor he had worked with, to deal with the chaos That Robinson had caused for his film.
"The Graduate" made Hoffman a female icon. Female fans surrounded him. But he felt that the audience thought he was just playing the role of Rizzo in that movie, so he really wanted to play the role of Rizzo as a way to show off his broad path as an actor — even though "Graduate" director Mike Nichols had warned him that it would ruin his career.
Hoffman took the first spot on the cast list, but he was angry when he realized that Walter was the center of gravity of the film. He complained that Schlesinger had cut a scene he was particularly proud of. He did not attend the campaign. The producers denied his claims.
However, the end result was great. Midnight Cowboy grossed nearly $45 million with a budget of less than $4 million. The film won the Olympic Award for Best Picture and Best Director. Hugh Robinson was nominated for Best Editing and Waldo Schott was nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay.
"Everybody's Talking" made Harry Nelson famous, reaching number six on the Billboard charts and selling millions of copies. The film didn't ruin Dustin Hoffman's career, and both he and Walter were nominated for the O'Aulturea award for Best Actor, however, the award was given to John Wayne, who called Midnight Cowboy "a story about two fags."
Of course, Midnight Cowboy is not about "two guys." But somehow it quickly became associated with a new era of candor with homosexuality, reinforced by a completely unrelated fact of the stonewall riots that erupted a month after midnight cowboy — often seen as a sign of the beginning of the gay liberation movement.
Frankl felt the connection was important, and he saw the film in the context of "the rise of openly gay writers and the liberation of homosexuality." Mark Harris said in a note on a CD from Standard Collections that Midnight Cowboy was "at least a gay movie, at least a film that makes the concept of gay movie possible." They're all right, but it's a tricky case.
Admittedly, "Midnight Cowboy" is the story of two men developing a relationship under difficult circumstances, but the same is true of "Tiger and Leopard" released in the same year — it is also a strong competitor to the Best Picture Award. You can decipher the gay element from brother films like these, where women are often seen as appendages. But no one thinks that such a film would allow viewers to look at homosexuality in a more enlightened way.
Tiger and Leopard (1969)
Frankl believes Schlesinger's own homosexuality is important. But, as he admits, this is not common sense as we all know. Schlesinger didn't come out publicly until the 1990s, saying he didn't think Midnight Cowboy was a "gay" movie. In his next film, Bloody Sunday (1971), Peter Finch played a sympathetic gay character. But there is no such character in Midnight Cowboy.
Bloody Sunday (1971)
Joe and Rizzo have little sympathy for homosexuals, and they often use the word in John Wayne's mouth. According to Schlesinger's biographer William Mann, Hoffman thought his characters should also use profanity, but Schlesinger was so frightened that he refused to let him do so. Still, he didn't mind the insulting remarks of homophobia. Many years later, he claimed that the character's use of the term was a "symbol of excessive protest," which in hindsight seemed to be a valid reason.
There are few gay characters in the movie who have lines. One is an adventurous teenager played by Bob Baraban who has a relationship with an apparently disgusted Joe at a time square movie theater, after which he admits he has no money to pay him. The other is a self-hating middle-aged man (Barnard Hughes) who takes Joe to a hotel room and offers to be beaten, which excites him.
Female characters are longer, but their images are almost always sexually hungry. The scenes of a party in the film were supposed to resemble scenes from Andy Warhol's Factory studio (Midnight Cowboy was shot in June 1968, when Warhol was shot), but later evolved into a group of scruffy-looking characters doing sloppy things (and taking a lot of drugs) of psychedelic montages. The presentation of sexual desire in the film is obviously intended to arouse people's disgust.
The same applies to fiction — the original author, James Leo Herrihan, is also gay, but he doesn't want people to think that his book, published in 1965, is gay fiction. There is no hint in the book that Joe and Rizzo are self-denying homosexuals.
The greatest influence on Herrihan's novel was Sherwood Anderson, who called the characters in his most famous work, Ohio, Winsburg " " grotesque" . This is also the way Herrihan sees the world. "Living on this planet seems to me to be a gothic and grotesque experience," Frankl quoted him as saying in an interview. "It's a terrible place. Neither of us thought he was perfectly normal."
This is the worldview that Schlesinger and Schouter want to capture. With the exception of don Quixote/The Kiddish character Joe Barker, everyone in Midnight Cowboy is creepy. When Pauline Kyle (who hates Schlesinger's work) complains that "irony is inaccurate and unpleasant," she may be watching a movie from the other end of the telescope. That's what living at the bottom looks like.
Whatever effect Midnight Cowboy has had on gay attitudes, it has a negative impact on Attitudes toward New York City. The film was shot in Texas and New York. (Schlesinger was originally going to shoot a black-and-white version —another "if not" left for reverie.) The photographer was also a stumbling block — Adam Holland, a 29-year-old Pole, was recommended by Roman Polanski. It was his first feature film.
To the annoyance of experienced filmmakers, Holland insisted on shooting as many films in natural light as possible. The result is a gruff style of realism that we don't see in films like The Hermaphrodites and The Graduate. In 1969, it was still a shocking cinematic experience. It makes Times Square look like a scene from Dante's Inferno.
This also seems to be the part of Robinson's opposition to Schlesinger. But New York in 1968, the year the film was shot, wasn't exactly "Getaway." As Frankl reminds us, to many, it seems to be dying. From 1960 to 1970, crime tripled. In 1968, there was a strike of teachers, sanitation workers, fuel deliverers and fuel suppliers. The city was heavily indebted; in 1975, it was on the verge of bankruptcy. The symbol of the city's decay is Times Square, which, as Dick Nezer puts it — who was the financial adviser to several New York mayors — was "the bug in the Big Apple."
One or two decades after Times Square was named after The New York Times in 1904, it began to enjoy its reputation as a bohemian enclave. In the 1940s, the Beat generation— Alan Ginsburg, Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Herbert Hank— haunted here. In the 1950s, when cinemas were open late and admission fees were cheap, people would go there to see multiple movies. Broadway is still thriving.
By 1960, however, the region's population had decreased significantly. That year, a New York Times story was headlined "Living on 42nd Street: A Study of Recession." (In 1913, the newspaper moved to 43rd Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, but kept a close eye on the neighborhood, and was often critical.) Important upscale venues began to disappear. The Paramount Theater closed in 1964 and the Astor Hotel closed in 1966. The following year, the old Metropolitan Opera was demolished, which for some New Yorkers was the equivalent of the demolition of the old Penn Station in 1963.
James Traub writes in his book On the history of Times Square, The Devil's Playground (2004): "In the early '60s, Times Square became a center of male prostitution in New York." The area is full of voyeuristic houses, massage parlors and pornographic bookstores, and crime rates are on the rise.
The most notorious places are Seventh and Eighth Avenue, but even Bryant Park is packed with pimps and drug dealers. Whether it's day or night, people avoid walking through these neighborhoods. (A rescue theater movement began in the 1970s and eventually saved several Broadway theaters from being razed to the ground.) It wasn't until the 1990s that the Disneying of the Times Square area really began. ）
What the hell is going on? The decline of 42nd Street has been linked to changes in the film industry (fewer feature films were distributed and theaters closed due to competition for television) and changes in broadway theaters (which declined box office receipts, leading to theater closures). But Traub believes a key factor is the relaxation of legal restrictions on pornography and sex work.
Obscenity has always been (strictly in the legal sense, and still is) not protected by the First Amendment. However, from the 1959 kingsley Pictures v. (New York) State Government case kingsley Pictures Corp. v. Regents) case began, and in a series of Supreme Court decisions, the definition of obscenity began to narrow. It's becoming increasingly difficult to prove in court that things like pornography or nude dancing should be banned.
There were raids and police harassment, but they did not evict mill cinemas, voyeur houses, pornographic bookstores or their patrons. The scope of tolerance for decisions on obscenity, and the social trends they follow, has helped to broaden the scope of acts protected by law or officially ignored. The riots outside the stone-walled bars in the West Village were the result of routine police harassment. To the surprise of the police, this time the customers resisted. They must feel that history is on their side.
However, this is only half the story. The other half takes place in the cultural industry. In 1963, when Life magazine bemoaned Hollywood's timidity and excessive focus on the image of the nation, it was actually criticizing the Hayes Code — a highly restrictive rule dating back to the 1930s that dictated what Hollywood films could show.
The Supreme Court decision in Kingsley, as well as the grove press v. Gerstein (which allowed the publication of the Tropic of Cancer) and Jacob Bliss v. Ohio (another film case), make it clear that the Hayes Code is a major burden on the film industry. Movies are losing audiences. They have become unfashionable.
So when Jack Valenti became president of the Motion Picture Association of America in 1966, his first task was to replace the code. This was officially completed in 1968, when the Motion Picture Association of America adopted a grading system. If the time were set back five years, no company would be able to release Midnight Cowboy. For decades, the code even banned the use of the term "homosexuality." Schlesinger and Herman made a bet that by the time their film was released, the rules had changed.
They were right. Mike Nichols and Arthur Payne also made the right bet. That's why, as the turtle said after being attacked by a swarm of snails, things happen so "fast." Filmmakers, like Life magazine, saw that a new Hollywood movie was about to be born. When that moment comes, they are ready.
Midnight Cowboy is often considered the only X-movie to win the Austrian Award for Best Picture. In a way, this means that in 1969, the Motion Picture Association of America still resisted certain subjects, a misleading claim. In fact, in Stephen Farber's 1972 book The Movie Rating Game, it was mentioned that the jury gave the film an R rating (almost the same level as today's R), but Arthur Kerim, the owner of United Arts, who made the film, classified the film as X. Kerim worries that younger audiences may have the wrong view of sex. That's the attitude that Life magazine refers to.
From a business perspective, this is a stupid move for United Arts. The X-grad reduced the number of theaters willing to show the film — though from the beginning, people lined up to see it. After the awards ceremony, United Arts asked the ratings board to re-evaluate the film, which was rated R. Since then, more theaters can show the film.
In other words, changes in the legal environment regarding the film industry and artistic expression led to the decline of Times Square and also to the rise of New Hollywood. Like Frankl and Harris say, when Hollywood sees the success of Midnight Cowboy — a film that treats homosexuality frankly, even if presenting it as a dirty pursuit , you can more easily sell a film that portrays homosexuality in the normal way. Whatever John Schlesinger intended to do, he helped open up a new cultural space.