Shooting Midnight cowboy : art, sex, loneliness, liberation, and the making of a dark classic
(Book)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Glenn Frankel's Shooting Midnight Cowboy tells the story of a modern classic that, by all accounts, should never have become one in the first place. The film's boundary-pushing subject matter-homosexuality, prostitution, sexual assault-earned it an X rating when it first appeared in cinemas in 1969. For Midnight Cowboy, Schlesinger-who had never made a film in the United States-enlisted Jerome Hellman, a producer coming off his own recent flop and 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.