Award-winning documentarian Nancy Buirski looks back to see what combusted to make the now-classic 1969 Oscar-winning Best Picture “Midnight Cowboy,” still the only X-rated movie to win that top prize.
“My vision wasn’t about the making of ‘Midnight Cowboy,’ it was about the moment of ‘Midnight Cowboy,’” Buirski said in a phone interview.
Her “Desperate Souls, Dark City and the Making of Midnight Cowboy,” “looks at the film in the context of the time. Because the film has been successful and continues to resonate, it tries to help us understand why it does — the culture, the politics and all of that.” It screens in as part of the Provincetown International Film Festival Thursday.
“Midnight Cowboy” was wild stuff in the anti-authoritarian ‘60s where feminism, gay, civil rights and anti-Vietnam War protests were changing the landscape. The film’s mix of sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll follows the friendship between naïve Texan Joe Buck (Jon Voight in a star-making performance) and crippled, broke New York con man “Ratso” Rizzo (Dustin Hoffman).
Joe imagines he will be a stud for hire to lonely women but ends up on 42nd Street with queers. England’s John Schlesinger, who as a gay Jewish kid was bullied, had already created movie magic with his 1965 “Darling,” a look at trendy Swinging London that made Julie Christie an Oscar-winning star.
“Midnight Cowboy,” Buirski emphasized, “is a really interesting examination of why film is so important to our lives. We don’t just use it for entertainment: It changes us. That’s really what I wanted to look at.
“A new generation was taking over. You see in our film that there isn’t one thing that triggered ‘Midnight Cowboy’ — there were many. My challenge was to weave them all together.
“The ‘60s was so different than the ‘50s,” she added. “In the sense that in the ‘60s they felt a license to disrupt, ask questions, push back. There was this sense we didn’t have to necessarily listen to authority anymore. That intrigued me.
“Schlesinger I feel was understanding how important it was to ask those questions as he was observing the world.”
Why does this still resonate?
“Many reasons! Many of the social problems that are apparent in ‘Midnight Cowboy’ are even more so in our society today — homelessness, poverty. People who are the outcasts, the desperate souls.
“But there’s another part that really speaks to almost any decade. Basically any century. That’s the compassion that is called on to save these people. We all need saving in some ways. It’s so much a part of who we are as a species — to care about each other.
“And when we stop caring, that’s when we’re really forced apart.”
