In the opening scene of Nancy Burski’s “Desperate Souls, Dark City, and the Legend of ‘Midnight Cowboy’,” Jon Voight tells a story. The actor recalls, with vivid intensity, the conclusion of principal photography for “Midnight Cowboy,” John Schlesinger’s 1969 film adaptation of James Leo Herlihy’s novel. They were in Texas, he remembers, shooting the opening sequence, when he discovered director Schlesinger crouched on the ground behind a car; he was having what appeared to be a full-on nervous breakdown, convinced they’d made a terrible, embarrassing film. Voight forcefully locked in on his director, and told him, with absolute certainty, “John, we will live the rest of our artistic lives in the shadow of this great masterpiece!”
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He didn’t actually believe that, Voight laughs – he was just trying to comfort the flailing filmmaker. But his statement was accurate. “Midnight Cowboy” would win the Oscar for Best Picture of 1969, the first (and last) time an X-rated movie would be so honored. Schlesinger won the Oscar for Best Screenplay, and Waldo Salt picked up a trophy for Best Adapted Screenplay. Voight and Dustin Hoffman, both nominated for Best Actor, lost to John Wayne (an ironic loss, if you’ve seen the film), but these still stand among their most indelible and memorable performances.
“Desperate Souls” is adapted from Glenn Frankel’s recent book “Shooting ‘Midnight Cowboy’,” and the writer, producer, and director is Burski, whose filmography varies from the cine-centric “By Sidney Lumet” to the much heavier “The Rape of Recy Taylor.” Her new film tells the story of how “Midnight Cowboy” came to be, though such a description minimizes its ambition; it makes it sound like a DVD special feature, which it certainly is not.
There are those aspects, to be sure. We see archival footage galore, screen tests and behind-the-scenes footage, along with copious film clips. There are archival interviews from those no longer with us (including Schlesinger and Herlihy), or not choosing to participate (Hoffman’s interview for Frankel’s book is excerpted), along with new interviews from Voight, co-stars Bob Balaban and Brenda Vaccaro, and various survivors (including Salt’s actor-turned-writer Jennifer and Schlesinger’s nephew Ian Buruma), as well as contemporary cultural commentators. The story of “Midnight Cowboy”’s makers, production, and release is told, and told well.
But Burski wisely treats the film not just as her ultimate topic, but as the center of a spider web for other, equally fascinating subjects. Part of what made “Cowboy” so potent was how it was about so much, even if much of what it was about was off-screen, or hinted at, or only legible in coded subtext. So “Desperate Souls” situates the film within its various historical contexts: the burgeoning gay movement, cowboy culture, Vietnam, civil rights, Chicago 1968, the post-MLK urban uprisings, the New York avant-garde art and film scene, and the Lindsay-era explosion of grimy, authentic “Fun City” movies.
Schlesinger was a free enough filmmaker – and one, importantly, schooled in documentary – that all of this bleeds into the frame. “It expressed its time by being of its time,” we’re told, and Burski most keenly understands the picture’s place as part of a movement towards cinematic realism. Schlesinger and his cinematographer Adam Holender – a Polish émigré making, miraculously, his feature film debut – used hidden cameras and long lenses to create a stark, documentary-like snapshot of the “real” Times Square, and Burski elegantly testifies to the effectiveness of their efforts by juxtaposing genuine archival footage with images from the movie. You can barely tell them apart.
The filmmaker occasionally struggles to bring the disparate material together, wandering a bit too far afield, at points, into barely relevant biographical information or later films of the filmmakers or genre, thwarting the film’s considerable momentum and present tense. But she mostly keeps the connections clear, and prevents the decoding from becoming too obtuse. Most of all, she eloquently conveys the impeccable (but unpredictable) alchemy of the production by underscoring, with frequency, how much of its brilliance was an accidental confluence, how its specific magic was the right combination of people, events, and timing. Or, as Jennifer Salt puts it, “There was some sort of connectivity between everything, between the people that made it, and what each of them brought to it.” [B]
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