“X” Marked The Spot – Documentary Filmmaker Nancy Buirski On ‘Midnight Cowboy’s Enduring Impact And How It Got That Risqué Rating
deadline.comWhen Midnight Cowboy came out in 1969, Miami Herald critic John Huddy heralded its arrival with a string of superlatives: “Staggering, shattering, heartbreaking, hilarious, tragic, raw and absurd.” Over the years, the ranks of its admirers has only grown, among them documentary filmmaker Nancy Buirski. “I remember feeling that it was a really radical film,” recalls Buirski, who first saw Midnight Cowboy sometime after its original release. “It felt different from anything I had seen… It was like a gut punch.” Buirski’s documentary Desperate Souls, Dark City and the Legend of Midnight Cowboy, now playing in limited release in New York, Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, Detroit and other cities, digs into the loam that produced such a bleak yet beautiful flower of a film.
Midnight Cowboy hit theaters the same year as Hello, Dolly! and Paint Your Wagon but unlike those celluloid larks, John Schlesinger’s film dared to offer a story embedded in a gritty American reality — Joe Buck, a Texas would-be gigolo newly arrived in New York, intent on selling his body to “rich ladies,” and the bond he eventually forms with a dodgy down-and-outer, the consumptive Ratso Rizzo. “It has to be the right time, it has to be the right place, it has to be the right person,” observes Midnight Cowboy cinematographer Adam Holender, about the alloy of circumstances necessary to create a classic. “Midnight Cowboy came at a time and in a place when there was a huge ferment, artistic ferment, in the theater and elsewhere – in film… And we’re lucky that he was there, [screenwriter] Waldo Salt was there, Dustin Hoffman was there, Jon Voight was there.” The source material was the 1965 novel Midnight Cowboy by James Leo Herlihy, an openly gay American
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