Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Copyright © 2021 by Glenn Frankel. All rights reserved.
In December 1963, a front-page article in the New York Times began with the newspaper’s equivalent of hitting the panic button: “The city’s most sensitive open secret the presence of what is probably the greatest homosexual population in the world and its increasing openness has become the subject of growing concern of psychiatrists, religious leaders, and the police.”
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The article explored what it characterized as the two conflicting viewpoints in the contemporary discussion of homosexuality. On one side was the “organized homophile movement a minority of militant homosexuals that is openly agitating for removal of legal, social, and cultural discriminations against sexual inverts.” They argued that gay people should be treated like any other minority group because homosexuality was “an incurable, congenital disorder” although the Times hastened to add th
5 books not to miss: Don Lemon, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, more
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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
The making of a classic American film in âShooting Midnight Cowboyâ
By Abby McGanney Nolan Globe Correspondent,Updated March 11, 2021, 4:31 p.m.
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A scene from Midnight Cowboy with Dustin Hoffman (left) and Jon Voight.COURTESY OF UNITED ARTISTS
On a brutally hot Texas day in the summer of 1968, near the end of filming âMidnight Cowboy,â the British director John Schlesinger had a sort of fit. Visibly shaking, stirred by grievous doubts, he asked his lead actor Jon Voight, âDo you really think anyoneâs 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 women?â