Publishers Weekly
★ 11/23/2020
Pulitzer-winning journalist Frankel (High Noon) delivers a vivid chronicle about the classic 1969 movie Midnight Cowboy, the only X-rated movie to win the Academy Award for Best Picture. Frankel covers the film’s main contributors: James Leo Hurlihy, whose 1965 novel was the basis for the movie; director John Schlesinger, who took a chance on a novel “so bleak, troubling and sexually raw no ordinary film studio would go near it”; formerly blacklisted screenwriter Waldo Salt; actors Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman (whom Frankel interviewed); and casting director Marion Dougherty, who convinced Schlesinger to take a chance on then-unknown Voight. Frankel offers behind-the-scenes anecdotes, notably about the challenges of filming in New York City during a garbage strike, and in Texas, where the film crew needed protection from a den of rattlesnakes. Frankel also renders the social upheaval of the era—the Stonewall riots, antiwar protests, racial unrest—and the window between the collapse of old Hollywood’s heavy censorship and the rise of the profit-oriented blockbusters when Midnight Cowboy was made. This enthralling account of a boundary-breaking film is catnip for film buffs. Agent: Gail Ross, Ross Yoon Agency. (Mar.)
From the Publisher
"This tremendous volume offers the most detailed explication of how a movie is made that I have ever read . . . When Frankel praises [director John Schlesinger] for his 'natural curiosity, humor' and 'keen eye for quirky stories and intriguing characters,' he could be talking about himself . . . What takes this book from good to great is his graceful writing and the intelligence [Frankel] brings to everything he examines." —Charles Kaiser, The Guardian
"Frankel does a remarkable job telling the story of how [Midnight Cowboy] happened. He's such a gifted storyteller that you don't even have to be familiar with the film to find the book fascinating . . . A must-read for anyone interested in cinematic history, and an enthralling look at Schlesinger's 'dark, difficult masterpiece.'" —Michael Schaub, NPR
"With Shooting Midnight Cowboy, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Glenn Frankel completes an illuminating trilogy about men and their cinematic milestones . . . As with his previous two studies, the new book employs a wide lens, taking in not only John Schlesinger’s role in getting the movie made but also those of producer, screenwriter, cast, crew, and an all-but-forgotten novelist . . . [A] definitive account." —Abby McGanney Nolan, The Boston Globe
"Frankel is both exacting and tender in his depiction of [his subjects] . . . He is that increasingly rare and precious thing: a commentator who recognizes that people and their relationships are infinitely complex . . . This book is indispensable . . . At once addictively readable and profoundly humane." —Hannah McGill, Sight & Sound
"Frankel’s book is generous with context . . . [it shows] us the 'what if's and the 'but for's hiding in the backstory of the finished product." —Louis Menand, The New Yorker
"Through rich accounts of the movie’s creators and analysis of its cultural context, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Frankel makes clear why the film mattered, and still does. Electrifying reading—and the gold standard for what film writing should be." —Library Journal
"[Shooting Midnight Cowboy is] doggedly reported and researched, built around collision courses between ambitious artists working in this most collaborative of mediums . . . Frankel puts it all together with narrative verve, telling a propulsive tale about creativity, commerce and loss." —Chris Vognar, USA Today
"[Frankel] is a smooth writer and sure-footed narrator who uses this volume to excavate the cultural landscape of postwar America . . . He uncovers the rich details that gave the movie its texture and authenticity . . . [Shooting Midnight Cowboy] will satisfy anyone interested in how a long-shot movie about two underdogs became an American original." —James S. Hirsch, The Washington Post
"In this outstanding work . . . [Glenn Frankel] covers every facet of [Midnight Cowboy's] creation . . . In a canny move, Frankel places the film in historical context, detailing major world events at the time of the shoot, including the Vietnam War, New York’s ‘downward path to seemingly terminal decline,’ and the Stonewall riots . . . Interviews with the film’s surviving principals add immediacy, and descriptions of small production details enhance the book’s power . . . A rare cinema book that is as mesmerizing as its subject.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“A vivid chronicle . . . Frankel offers behind-the-scenes anecdotes . . . [and] also renders the social upheaval of the era—the Stonewall riots, antiwar protests, racial unrest—and the window between the collapse of old Hollywood’s heavy censorship and the rise of the profit-oriented blockbusters when Midnight Cowboy was made. This enthralling account of a boundary-breaking film is catnip for film buffs.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Tackling questions of censorship and the MPAA ratings, bravura performances by Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman, the costumes, the soundtrack, and the film's coronation at the 1970 Academy Awards, Frankel expertly brings it all together . . . An in-depth, exquisite biography of a legendary film, and a must-read for cinephiles." —Peter Thornell, Library Journal (starred review)
“From the author of the splendid The Searchers (2013) comes another making-of book that transcends the genre. This is no mere story of the production of [Midnight Cowboy]; instead, it offers in-depth portraits of the man who created the characters of Joe Buck and Ratso Rizzo . . . and the men who gave them cinematic life . . . Frankel, who won a Pulitzer in 1989 for international reporting, brings a reporter’s eye to the story.” —David Pitt, Booklist (starred review)
"Through the prism of a compassionate, taboo-busting movie, Glenn Frankel has given us a master class in filmmaking that doubles as a rich cultural history of a tumultuous epoch. Shooting Midnight Cowboy takes us from Swinging London to gritty late sixties New York to the creative ferment of the New Hollywood, in a consistently entertaining tour full of vibrant, indelible characters. I loved this book." —Margaret Talbot, staff writer at The New Yorker and author of The Entertainer: Movies, Magic, and My Father's Twentieth Century
"The 'biography' of a film—how it got made, the background of everyone involved, what we made of it then and what we make of it now—may be my favorite genre, and Glenn Frankel is unexcelled as a master of the form. Here with his usual meticulous research he outdoes himself with Midnight Cowboy, a film particularly resonant for the taboos it broke and its surprising success at a transitional moment in our cultural history. All the backstories provide rich reading, unearthing little-known facts that illuminate whole careers. Shooting Midnight Cowboy is many things, but most thrillingly it is the story of how three outsiders—gay novelist, gay director and blacklisted screenwriter—furthered the acceptance of gay themes in books and movies by making a film about human loss." —Molly Haskell, author of Steven Spielberg: A Life in Films and From Reverence to Rape
"Midnight Cowboy was one of my favorite movies ever—dark, soulful, with an odd couple of 'losers' who won at the game of friendship. But Glenn Frankel's book goes far beyond doing the epic film justice. Creating a compelling narrative of a vibrant, roiling, unexpected chain of creatives that spanned from Black Mountain College in 1947 to the movie's release at the tail end of the desolate sixties in Manhattan, Frankel has done that rare, great thing: shown us a world within a world of literary, filmic, and human longing and linked singular gems of history into a fresh and truthful mosaic." —Sheila Weller, New York Times bestselling–author of Girls Like Us and Carrie Fisher: A Life on the Edge
"In Shooting Midnight Cowboy, Glenn Frankel illuminates the cultural forces that fed the creation of an iconic 1960s classic. This perceptive work elegantly captures how a movie can embody a moment in time." —Julie Salamon, author of The Devil's Candy and An Innocent Bystander
Library Journal
★ 12/01/2020
One of cinema's most daring and widely acclaimed films, Midnight Cowboy has long deserved this kind of focused consideration. Frankel (High Noon), a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, paints the story of the film with a wide and holistic brush, encompassing the unsettled and divided nature of America in the late 1960s, the shift in cinema toward more realistic depictions of adult themes, and the lives of director John Scheslinger, a gay man who always struggled to fit in, and novelist James Herlihy, a gay man with similar feelings toward finding his place in his life and career. The film is a document of life in a dark and unforgiving New York City for two apparent castaways, and the living conditions endured by Joe Buck and "Ratso" Rizzo, as well as the constant sexual undertones, are drawn directly from Herlihy's novel, whose story is as essential to Frankel's book as Schlesinger's. Tackling questions of censorship and the MPAA ratings, bravura performances by Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman, the costumes, the soundtrack, and the film's coronation at the 1970 Academy Awards, Frankel expertly brings it all together. VERDICT An in-depth, exquisite biography of a legendary film, and a must-read for cinephiles.—Peter Thornell, Hingham P.L., MA
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2020-10-10
An inside look at the making of an American cinema classic.
“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 old women?” That’s the question John Schlesinger, the British director, asked Jon Voight, who played dumb Texan Joe Buck. Did they ever. Midnight Cowboy, the director’s first American feature, was the third-highest-grossing movie of 1969 and became the only X-rated film to win the Academy Award for Best Picture. In this outstanding work, following his worthy excavations of The Searchers and High Noon, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Frankel covers every facet of the film’s creation, from James Leo Herlihy’s original novel about the unlikely friendship between a “handsome but not overly bright dishwasher from Texas” keen to make his mark as a male hustler and Ratso Rizzo, a “disabled, tubercular con man and petty thief,” to the hiring of screenwriter Waldo Salt, who began each day’s work with “a joint as fat as a small cigar,” to Schlesinger’s daring decision to adapt “a novel that was so bleak, troubling, and sexually raw that no ordinary film studio would go near it.” In a canny move, Frankel places the film in historical context, detailing major world events at the time of the shoot, including the Vietnam War, New York’s “downward path to seemingly terminal decline,” and the Stonewall riots and competing attitudes toward gay people in general—Herlihy and Schlesinger were gay—and their depictions in cinema. Interviews with the film’s surviving principals add immediacy, and descriptions of small production details enhance the book’s power. For example, Dustin Hoffman (Rizzo), put stones in his shoes to perfect the character’s limp, and the filmmakers hired a dentist to make a false set of Rizzo’s bad teeth, which “looked really horrible,” said the dentist. “I was pleased.”
A rare cinema book that is as mesmerizing as its subject.
