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. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

From the author of the splendid The Searchers: The Making of an American Legend (2013) comes another making-of book that transcends the genre. This is no mere story of the production of a movie (1969's Midnight Cowboy); instead, it offers in-depth portraits of the man who created the characters of Joe Buck and Ratso Rizzo, the novelist and playwright James Leo Herlihy, and the men who gave them cinematic life, director John Schlesinger and screenwriter Waldo Salt. Frankel, who won a Pulitzer in 1989 for international reporting, brings a reporter's eye to the story of Midnight Cowboy, showing how the 1965 novel, which told the story of a Texas man who comes to New York to be a male prostitute and is forced to explore his sexual identity, was the result of Herlihy's own search for identity and acceptance in a society in which being gay was often still a closely guarded secret. Schlesinger's gritty, almost painfully realistic approach to the material was itself a product of his own personal and artistic history (he was known for ultra-realistic "kitchen sink dramas" about ordinary people looking for meaning in their lives). Midnight Cowboy is an acknowledged classic of American cinema, and Frankel provides us with the context we need to fully appreciate the film as a vivid snapshot of a specific time and place in American history.

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.)

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