Hacker Cinema
Midnight Cowboy
1969 · Film · 113 min
Directed by John Schlesinger
Joe Buck is a wide-eyed hustler from Texas hoping to score big with wealthy New York City women; he finds a companion in Enrico "Ratso" Rizzo, an ailing swindler with a bum leg and a quixotic fantasy of escaping to Florida.
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7 comments on Hacker News
Professionals are often blinded by the conventional taste that they worked so hard to develop.
The first editor of “Midnight Cowboy” resigned because he felt the naturalistic footage looked terrible and couldn’t be used for a proper movie. The film won Oscars for both Best Picture and Direction.
IMO the success of "Midnight Cowboy" (1970 Oscars for Best Picture + Director + Screenplay) marks the moment when the New Wave truly hit Hollywood.
Although set in New York, it owes a lot more to Godard and other Europeans than American movies of the past.
This is the best rebuttal to my thesis. Thanks.
There is a tension between art and commercial art. Beethoven should have never written that battle symphony.
When done well, I think you can get both. Start with the story and then weave in the commercial aspects. Or start with the story and only choose to finance movies that have both art and commercial value. What you can't do is start with the commercial side and then try to hammer in a good story. There have been a few masters that managed to pull that off, but it's rare. Add in committee-management instead of having an artist's eye and it becomes total crap.
It's in nobody's interest to only have arthouse flicks that nobody watches. Happily it's not an either-or decision. Good drama will draw in the commercial part than can then be exploited. Everybody's happy. What I'm seeing now is that majority of films start with a locked-in fanbase and then try to do their best at creating an n+1 episode. That's how they're getting around the quality problem: they make it moot. They know the locked-in fanbase is coming no matter what they produce, and if it's a real stinker? Well hell, all of the press and arguing about how bad it is will just drive up interest for n+2. Not only is that not trying to mix a good story in with a commercial line, that's putting the story quality pretty far down the list. It's noticeable.
ADD: I'd say that in the heyday of arthouse flicks, say 65-80, you had the peak of movies that covered both bases well. Nobody's doing another Midnight Cowboy.
> A Clockwork Orange was, however, a box office success in the US and was nominated for the Oscar for best picture in 1972 (losing to The French Connection).
The original release in the US in 1972 was rated X. It's one of only two X-rated films to receive a nomination, the other being "Midnight Cowboy."
Kubrick pulled the film from the UK after receiving threats to himself and wife.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Clockwork_Orange_(film)
"In truth, Wayne’s roles, and personal ideologies, were much more ambivalent, complicated, and nuanced in his opinions than popular memory allows."
His characters were always divorced ( and possibly misogynist ) , lousy fathers and frankly, assholes. I think that's the charm - the character could say what's on his mind. Embittered, more or less tired of life. Somebody who'd paid the price for all that violence and hubris. This was pretty outrageous at the time.
I also think his movies were a lot for people who had ...daddy issues.
But the guy had a basket of riffs ( and usually hooks from the writers ) to make that work. Those movies play weekly on infinite repeat.
I think Teh Movies would have made movies where women did what John Wayne did but that would have landed flat at the time. He had ...some movies with the great Woody Strode, where Woody played the better man ( especially "Liberty Vallance" ) so it's harder to say he was strictly racist.
Also - see "Rustler's Rhapsody" which is a deconstruction of the contradictory tropes in Westerns.
They do identify the moment - when "Midnight Cowboy" won the Oscar - when my parents' generation disconnected from movies.
P.S.
Since I've heard about Aeris being killed by Sepiroth before, I went ahead and watched it on YouTube, and I wasn't impressed. It must have been because I didn't play the game. If that scene affected you at all (if it looked like anything but cheesy crap animated with expressionless plastic dolls) it was because you were prepped by playing the game to experience that scene in a particular way. You can watch a clip of "La Strada" or "Midnight Cowboy" or "Unforgiven" or "Casablanca" out of context and at least get a sense of the emotional dynamics of the characters. That's the strength of movies. The strength of games is the immersion and feeling of personal involvement with the characters, personal involvement driven by your own actions, choices, and sacrifices. I may have felt like Ratso Rizzo was my friend, but I never picked up a john to get money for a bus ticket for us to leave town together. I may have shared Rick Blaine's feelings as he put Victor and Ilsa on the plane to Lisbon, but I didn't decide to do that. It just happened to me.
Games will always be second-rate next to movies when it comes to presenting scripted drama, but they don't have to feel that way. Aeris and Sepiroth is proof of that, I guess. Gameplay allows games to affect us in ways that movies can't and enables different and stronger emotional contexts for experiencing games as art. The art of games is in the gameplay. Detaching from gameplay is just a crutch, like filming a stage production, copying another art form because we don't understand the new one well enough yet.
Midnight Cowboy received Best Picture in 1970 according to imdb. This movie can hardly be considered pornography by today's standards, but it was about a male prostitute and rated X.