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
Bookshop The cunning and taut lines in the irreverently funny latest from Addonizio (
Mortal Trash) reveal a poet teetering on the edge of existential ennui. The collection opens with the humorous poem âNight in the Castle,â in which an artistâs grant has afforded the poet speaker palatial accommodations and she is carried away by grandiose flights of fancy: âI want to stay here & poison the king next/ I want to be a feared and beloved queen ordering up fresh linens &/ beheadings.â Elsewhere, Addonizio responds to Walt Whitmanâs contention in âSong of Myselfâ that he might prefer to live among animals, declaring that animal life is probably not as idyllic as he imagines: âI know you like grass but itâs no fun to be a pricey pre-hamburger/ ruminating with no TV.â A true master of the bon mot, she declares in âTelepathy,â âMen like to say theyâre not mind readers, but the ones Iâm drawn to arenâ�