Latest news with #JohnSchlesinger
Telegraph
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
The Julie Christie film that scandalised Sixties Britain is back – you must see it
When film fans think about the swinging Sixties in cinema, it tends to be with almost Austin Powers-esque nostalgia. One remembers the Beatles gaily dashing about in A Hard Day's Night, Sean Connery's brooding charisma as James Bond and, if you will, the broader delights of the perennially popular Carry On series. Yet many of British film's most talented film-makers, writers and actors also collaborated on films that are both quintessential time capsules of what a certain kind of moneyed bohemian, artistic life was like six decades ago, and also stand up well today. One such example of this kind of picture was John Schlesinger's Darling, which was first released in September 1965 and is now being reissued in cinemas for its 60th anniversary. If you haven't seen it, it is entirely worth getting to your nearest art house cinema and savouring. Sexually charged and transgressive even today, it is the study of a bored, amoral fashion model, Diana Scott (Julie Christie), who divides her self-interested attentions between two older and successful men: the kindly Melvyn Bragg-esque Robert Gold (Dirk Bogarde) and the high-powered and equally ambitious advertising executive Miles Brand (Laurence Harvey). Diana, naturally, betrays both of them, as she has betrayed everyone else who she comes into contact with, but the bed-hopping storyline is not the central appeal of the picture. Instead, Frederic Raphael's Oscar-winning screenplay memorably conjures up an anti-romantic vision of Swinging London where everyone is on the make, and where personal integrity is subsumed to beauty, charm and ambition. Even the film's title is ironic. Schlesinger knew from the outset that the picture was going to be the opposite of the light-hearted optimism of A Hard Day's Night and other quintessential Sixties films. 'I think that our attitude to Darling was a good deal more cynical than merely an optimistic look at Swinging London,' he would admit. The idea for Darling came from a conversation with the journalist Godfrey Winn, who played himself in Billy Liar. Winn asked the director whether he was at all interested in making a film that was based on real life, and when Schlesinger replied that the idea hadn't occurred to him, the journalist told him about what the director called 'an extremely cynical arrangement that was publicised after someone's suicide, in which there was a girl who was being kept by a syndicate of people, people in showbusiness and banking and so forth, and they all had access to her in a flat. One day, she despaired at her predicament, and threw herself out of a window.' Diana does not end the film in similarly fatal fashion, instead being married off to an Italian prince, but nobody would mistake the eventual resolution for a cheery one; it concludes with Diana, betrayed in her turn by a vengeful Robert, leaving Britain for Rome and a new, hollow life there. The ending is an ironic inversion of that of Schlesinger's previous picture, Billy Liar, in which the protagonist is unable to flee to London with his dream girl, but had it not been for the now-forgotten actress Topsy Jane, Darling may never have existed. Jane was originally cast in the brief but pivotal role of Liz, Billy Liar's apparent means of escape, but she dropped out with mental health issues. This necessitated her replacement by the then-unknown Christie, who walked away with the picture in true a-star-is-born fashion. However, it was by no means certain that she would appear in the picture, both for reasons of commercial viability and her own initial distaste for the starring role. The first choice was Shirley MacLaine, who was a far better-known actress – her performance in 1960's The Apartment had been Oscar-nominated – but it was felt that Diana should be played by someone British. As Schlesinger later said: 'We always had Julie Christie in mind for the part, but she was an unknown quantity then, and there was a good deal of resistance… Julie was very perturbed by the part, because she said it wasn't like her. So I said 'You're an actress, for God's sake, you can understand where she's coming from, this character.' Christie – a professional to her fingertips, as she has remained throughout a long and illustrious career – did not need to be told twice. In any case, the screenplay that Christie was presented with had gone through a tortuous creative process. The initial idea had come from Schlesinger, who came up with the storyline in collaboration with the film's producer Joseph Janni. Yet the director was not a proven screenwriter himself, and so he turned to the modish young writer Raphael, who had had some success the previous year with the black comedy Nothing But The Best. The script that they came up with was originally entitled Woman On Her Way, but this was felt to be excessively on the nose, so the simpler, more effective current title was then decided upon. 'The writing of Darling lasted a very long time,' Raphael would recall. 'I started working with John and Joe early in 1962, and the film was eventually shot in 1965, which was a very long gap. I didn't get paid, because I didn't ask for money, which was foolish of me. I got quite tired of it, because John kept saying 'They don't like the script, dear', so we buggered off to Greece to work together.' Raphael would shortly experience his own small-scale betrayal, which would, in turn, affect the misanthropy which seeped into the film's script. 'They then got someone else to do some work on the script, and as I hadn't been paid, I took a rather sour view of this, because I thought we were friends, but there aren't any friends in the business, and I should have known that. Besides, the work was dreadful, and virtually none of it ended up in the film.' Darling eventually began filming in August 1964 in the appropriately swinging cities of Paris, London and Rome, but production was not straightforward. The openly gay Schlesinger and the closeted Bogarde conducted a love affair off-set, and Harvey, who was rumoured to be bisexual himself, was deeply conscious of the fact that his casting in an extended cameo was the major reason that the production had managed to raise its budget of around £400,000. He had become an international star with his role in the 1959 picture Room At The Top, in which he had played an ambitious social climber not a million miles away from a male Diana Scott, but had failed to capitalise on his Oscar-nominated role since, and was desperately in need of a hit. Bogarde, meanwhile, was the fourth choice for the role of Gold, after Paul Newman, Gregory Peck and Cliff Robertson had all turned it down. The character was then rewritten as British, and the versatile and talented actor – who was still tainted by the fall-out from the controversy behind his 1961 Victim – assumed the role. Schlesinger had more fun casting the minor parts – he took a cameo as a theatre director; the Inkling and academic Hugo Dyson appears briefly as a writer; and a real-life Spanish aristocrat, José Luis de Vilallonga, 9 th Marquess of Castellbell, plays the Italian prince who marries Diana – but the film was frequently on the verge of collapse due to a lack of funding. Only Bogarde's reluctant agreement to take a pay cut and David Lean's decision to cast Christie in the sought-after role of Lara in Dr Zhivago, which both created a buzz around her and, crucially, injected money into the production because of her needing to be bought out of her existing contract with the producer Janni, saw it proceed to completion. The jostling egos – Christie aside – and general air of one-upmanship may have fed into the film's uniquely claustrophobic atmosphere. But for Raphael, it made for a miserable experience. 'I'd seen the rushes in London and said that they were dreadful and wrecking the whole film, and I was right,' he said. 'Most of the stuff I'd seen was never in the movie, with Dirk, who was very good in the film, looking like a spurned hairdresser. He did say to me on one occasion 'I find this character very weak in this scene', and I found myself saying to him 'Why the f___ do you think we asked you to do it?'' The typically waspish screenwriter said of the star: 'Julie was extraordinary but not interesting. She couldn't say her lines to save her life and if she could mispronounce anything, she would. But in that movie, she does have an extraordinary quality – all the rawness of her backstory fed into it, and she was that girl.' Christie, perhaps mindful of the knowledge that the film's success rested on her slender shoulders, was very nervous in her first lead role, and often took refuge on the set to fall asleep. It fell to Bogarde to act as a friend and mentor to her, and in his memoir Snakes and Ladders, he wrote of Christie that 'She has more magnetism or, if you like, star quality than any actress I have worked with.' When the picture finally finished production, it was selected for an unusual accolade, and premiered at the Moscow International Film Festival on July 16 1965. If you had wished any film to symbolise the downside of the corrupt and materialistic West, you could hardly have asked for anything more effective. Its button-pushing sexual content was not just near the knuckle for the period, but positively shocking. One talked-about scene showed Diana and Miles attending a cross-dressing bisexual sex show in Paris, which is depicted coyly by today's standards but with enough detail for it to be clear what's going on. Then there's the almost casual revelation that Diana has decided to abort Robert's baby – at a time when abortion was illegal in Britain - rather than be tied down by the responsibility. Little wonder that he rounds on her, sneering 'Your idea of fidelity is not having more than one man in the bed at the same time. You're a whore, baby, that's all. Just a whore' and calling her 'a filthy little bitch.' Schlesinger also included a gay character, in the form of the photographer Malcolm, who is allowed to eye up a good-looking waiter, only to be reprimanded by Diana: 'We are not complicating our holiday with any disgusting sexcapades.' Unsurprisingly, the film had to be cut for both the UK and American release – it still received an X rating in this country – and the unexpurgated version was not released until a DVD release in 2007, which included shots of a man wearing a woman's corset and an extended version of the sex party. It's still strong enough to receive a 15 rating, even now. When it eventually premiered in edited form London in September, it received excellent reviews, all of which concurred that it captured the dark underbelly of the progressive society, and won several awards, including both a Bafta and Oscar for Christie. (Had it not had the BBFC -mandated cuts, it is more likely that it would have been greeted with protests.) One climatic scene in particular, in which Diana, amidst a breakdown, furiously tears off her clothes and jewellery, attracted attention (and was deleted from the initial American release of the film). Christie had not wanted to perform the scene, which required her to appear nude, but Schlesinger and Raphael argued that it was the depth of the character's descent, and thus integral to the picture. She eventually agreed, and the results made her a star. From being an unknown just a couple of years ago, she became perhaps the single most talked-about and iconic woman in Britain, a celebrity on a scale several times greater than even Diana managed. Her own life continued to contain parallels with that of her character – swap out Gold and Brand for the actors Terence Stamp and, notoriously, Warren Beatty – but she displayed rare acuity when it came to the parts that she took later, a legacy of the kudos that this role gave her. Some may suggest that Darling has dated, and that its cynicism and modishness (as well as nods to fashionable directors like Jean-Luc Godard and Michelangelo Antonioni) mark it as a film of its time. They may be right, but it also retains a strange, almost transfixing power, largely because of its lead. It was the beginning of a legendary career for her, and she deserved all the acclaim that she received. And Christie herself retained something of the spirit of Darling, after everything. As she told this paper in 2008: 'I honestly don't see anything wrong with hedonism. Life is for having fun with.' Diana may well have agreed with her. The 60th anniversary restoration of Darling is in cinemas from May 30 Beyond Darling: Julie Christie's five greatest roles 1. Billy Liar (1963) As the free-spirited, charismatic Liz, Christie may only be on screen for around ten minutes or so in what was her breakthrough role, but she bursts into cinema as an irrepressible and wholly likeable force of nature. The greatest question for many viewers is why, exactly, Tom Courtenay's fantasist Billy doesn't seize the opportunity to jump onto the train with Liz and embrace a new and happy life, rather than remaining locked up in his fertile imagination. His loss, however, was cinema's gain. 2. Doctor Zhivago (1965) Along with Darling, Christie's great breakthrough role was as the love interest Lara in David Lean's mega-budget adaptation of Boris Pasternak's bestselling novel about the after-effects of the Russian Revolution. Amidst the endless snow, Maurice Jarre's schmaltzy but unforgettable theme tune and scene-stealing performances from character actors (her old inamorata Courtenay among them), Christie manages to anchor the film by playing Lara as simultaneously wholly comprehensible and effervescently mysterious. To be frank, one would launch a revolution just for her. 3. Far From The Madding Crowd (1967) The Kinks sang on Waterloo Sunset about how 'Terry meets Julie, Waterloo station, every Friday night' and the song, written about Christie and her then-lover Terence Stamp, immortalised them as a quintessential Swinging London couple. It was inevitable, then, that they would star opposite each other in Nicolas Roeg 's excellent Thomas Hardy adaptation. Christie was cast as the strong-willed and independent Bathsheba Everdene and Stamp, appropriately enough, appeared as the dashing but venal Sergeant Troy. Roeg managed to make the film both wholly of its time and thoroughly contemporary, and Stamp's scarlet military tunic and virile swagger inspired a thousand hipsters – as well as the entire aesthetic of The Libertines. 4. Don't Look Now (1973) Christie reunited with Roeg for one of cinema's greatest ghost stories, a uniquely haunting study of loss and mystery set in a never more sinister Venice. Although Christie's part was largely a supporting one, with the late, great Donald Sutherland in the central role of her grieving husband convinced that he sees the apparition of her late daughter, they both featured in the film's most (in)famous moment, a lengthy sex scene shot in Roeg's signature time-jumping fashion. It dared to portray married love – and that taking place after terrible loss – in a sensual and exciting fashion, rather than the usual jokey or negligible treatment. It thus led to persistent rumours that the actors got carried away and ended up making love on camera for real. Roeg never denied this with the authority that he should have. 5. Away From Her (2006) Christie became much less prolific as an actress in the early 2000s, and today has apparently retired from cinema. She has only made a handful of on-screen appearances in the past two decades, and the most recent of these came in 2012, in Robert Redford's The Company You Keep. However, she did have one final great role in her, and that was as the Alzheimer's-afflicted Fiona in Sarah Polley's affecting and deeply compassionate study of loss in life. She was deservedly Oscar-nominated for her vanity-free performance, in which she eloquently conveys the indignity and horror of mental decline. If she never makes another film, this stands as a magnificent and resonant testament to her remarkable gifts as an actress.
The Guardian
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Darling review – Julie Christie's romantic satire of swinging 60s has a terrific punch
Some of it feels a bit dated now, and that brittle, sophisticated chatter in the cocktail party scenes has a fingernails-down-the-blackboard screechiness that can't have been intended at the time. But John Schlesinger's winsome adventure from 1965 still has verve and ambition, a romantic satire of swinging London now on rerelease for its 60th anniversary. Julie Christie plays Diana Scott, a model and actor who enjoys an insouciantly upward rake's progress in smart-set London: an innocent, almost childlike Becky Sharp-type character, for all her dissolute encounters, and abortion and divorce are notably presented without sorrowing dismay and disapproval. The wry, Oscar-winning screenplay from Frederic Raphael imports and anglicises the influence of Godard, Resnais, Varda and the French New Wave; fashion models and advertising are vitally important; there is a media interview with a writer (English author and don Hugo Dyson has a cameo as a supposed author of provincial decency and integrity); and we get the occasional gloomy brooding about the bomb. Interestingly, however, the scenes set in Paris where Diana witnesses a live sex show, are a rather saucer-eyed English view of the naughty French, and would never pass muster in an actual French film. Having said which, Schlesinger manages freeze-frame images quite as well as the continentals. Christie's ingenue is a girl from a good English family, who got married too young to a decent but boring chap. Soon she is caught between two lovers played by two acting thoroughbreds whose faces have an amazing and sometimes near-gargoyle expression of worldliness: Dirk Bogarde and Laurence Harvey. Bogarde is Robert Gold, who fronts an earnest TV show about culture called Art and You. We see him conducting interviews in the street about what passersby think is most shaming in modern British society. Schlesinger gives us what looks like hilarious, genuine voxpop footage in which people declare that Britain's most shaming things are, variously, traffic problems and the prevalence of homosexuality. One of Robert's interviewees is Diana who soon finds herself in an extramarital entanglement with him. When they go to a hotel room, Robert has to pretend they are a married couple by buying a suitcase and making it feel respectably heavy for the bellboy by covertly filling it with copies of the old London Evening News – the headline of which is an irresistible madeleine for non-swinging Britain: MINERS – ALL HOPE VANISHES. Without any great agonising, Robert leaves his homely wife and children to move in with Diana in her swinging London flat (she is thrilled by the 'gorgeous negroes' upstairs, a very 1965 script moment) and Robert introduces her to an elegant new stratum of society where she meets oleaginous smoothie Miles Brand, an adman played by Harvey; he gets her on his books and his German clients love Diana's 'Aryan' look. Diana also befriends a gay fashion photographer Malcolm (played by actor turned author Roland Curram) who accompanies her on holiday. The film is full of incidental detail that will grip all fans of bygone Britain. Uptight Robert drives an Austin 1100 (like the one beloved of Basil Fawlty) whereas Miles drives a groovy Volvo sports car – the kind that Roger Moore had playing Simon Templar in The Saint. But the parade of ironies continues. Miles gets Diana promotional work at a grotesque charity event where people donate to famine relief while gorging themselves on food and wine, and even secures her a walk-on role in a sub-Hammer movie. She also plays the role of a Renaissance principessa in a silly TV ad for chocolate, filmed at the palazzo of a suave and recently widowed Italian nobleman who is entranced by Diana – and she reaches the Grace Kelly moment in her career. Christie is always in danger of being upstaged by Bogarde and Harvey, pouting male divas both, and her performance is in fact a model of restraint and self-effacement compared with these preening exquisites. Bogarde shows us a flash of something spiteful and even sinister in the way he treats Diana at the very end, and also in his spasm of jealous rage when he realises she has been cheating on him, dragging her down an escalator in the London underground and bellowing the word 'whore' in that refined voice. The bland, amiable, noncommittal Diana certainly doesn't deserve that label. It's directed with terrific punch with Schlesinger, who – as in Midnight Cowboy and Far from the Madding Crowd – has a flair for showing us innocents who wish to survive. Darling is in UK cinemas from 30 May and on 4K UHD and Blu-ray from 16 June
The Guardian
7 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘Julie Christie is magnetic': on the set of party girl classic Darling
Julie Christie had made little headway as an actor until she was cast in the comedy Billy Liar (after Topsy Jane, the original choice, had to pull out). The film's director John Schlesinger (pictured, right) was impressed with her performance and offered her the lead role in his next film. All images: © 1965 StudioCanal Films Ltd. Images preserved and supplied by the BFI Archive Darling was a then-daring account of a 1960s party girl, Diana Scott, and her seemingly effortless rise to the top – only to find emptiness and disillusion there. Christie was reportedly incredibly nervous about her first lead role, and was often found asleep on the set, exhausted by the demanding schedule Christie got on well with Dirk Bogarde, right, who played her lover, TV presenter Robert Gold. In his memoir Snakes and Ladders, Bogarde wrote: 'She has more magnetism or, if you like, star quality than any actress I have worked with' Laurence Harvey, pictured right, was the film's other male lead, playing sleazy adman Miles Brand, who picks Scott as the 'Happiness girl' and takes her to a live sex show in Paris. Harvey, who had become a major star in 1958 with Room at the Top, was the first big name to commit to the film, ensuring the production could get off the ground Paul Newman, Gregory Peck and Cliff Robertson had already turned down the role of Gold, which was originally written as an American journalist before Bogarde, left, came aboard Schlesinger had a handful of substantial films under his belt before Darling, and was very much identified with the British new wave of the early 1960s. After a brief acting career, he emerged from the BBC as a documentary-maker, winning a Bafta for Terminus, his short film about Waterloo station. A Kind of Loving and Billy Liar were successful examples of the 'kitchen-sink' style, and he would go on to work with Christie again on Far From the Madding Crowd in 1967 Producer Joseph Janni, left, is one of the unsung heroes of the British new wave; born in Italy, he made a string of films with Schlesinger (including Billy Liar, Sunday Bloody Sunday and Yanks) and gave Ken Loach his feature film directing debut with Poor Cow in 1967 Christie went on to win the best actress Oscar in 1966, beating (among others) Julie Andrews for The Sound of Music. Frederic Raphael won the best original screenplay Oscar, and there was a third Oscar for costume designer Julie Harris. The Sound of Music, however, triumphed in its other contests with Darling, winning best picture and best director for Robert Wise Roland Curram (far right at front, in sunglasses) was cast as gay photographer Malcolm, whom Diana takes to Italy when she shoots a chocolate commercial – and they each spend a night with the same good-looking waiter Darling contains some fun casting, including Schlesinger himself as a theatre director auditioning Scott, and academic Hugo Dyson as a writer interviewed by Gold. But possibly the most intruiging is José Luis de Vilallonga, AKA the 9th Marquess of Castellbell (pictured, in tie), a real-life Spanish aristocrat, who played the Italian prince whom Scott eventually marries. Vilallonga had a decent acting career, appearing in Les Amants, Breakfast at Tiffany's, Cléo from 5 to 7, and Juliet of the Spirits among many others Production was nearly abandoned when funding dried up, forcing Janni to ask Bogarde to take a pay cut. However, the shoot was kept afloat after David Lean decided to cast Christie, on the strength of a private viewing of Darling's footage, in the much sought-after role of Lara in Doctor Zhivago. As Christie was under contract to Janni, the producer received 50% of the fee and channelled the money straight back into Darling, thereby saving the day. Bogarde, right, (with Schlesinger, middle) was also up for a role in Zhivago, but wasn't cast Christie was reportedly unhappy at the prospect of the film's climactic nude scene, in which she was called on to smash up the living area of the Italian castle where her character lived, and then throw off her jewellery and clothes. She eventually agreed after both Schlesinger and Raphael convinced her it was necessary
BBC News
19-05-2025
- Entertainment
- BBC News
'I'm not interested in happy endings': How Midnight Cowboy became the only X-rated winner of the best-picture Oscar
When Midnight Cowboy came out 56 years ago this week, it instantly upended Hollywood's idea of a mainstream hit. A bleak tale of loneliness, sexuality and survival in New York, it was powered by career-defining performances from its lead actors. "I did have problems with it as I now see the movie," actor Dustin Hoffman confessed to the BBC in 1970 as he reflected on his performance as the sickly New York grifter Enrico "Ratso" Rizzo in Midnight Cowboy. "I can see where I am inconsistent in the character." The film, released in cinemas on 25 May 1969, would go on to earn Oscar nominations for both Hoffman and his co-star Jon Voight, who played a naive young Texan with aspirations to be a rich woman's gigolo. Based on James Leo Herlihy's 1965 novel, Midnight Cowboy's bleak tale of loneliness, sexuality and survival in New York was very different from the film in which Hoffman had his breakthrough role, The Graduate. Having played a clean-cut middle-class young man, fresh out of college, Hoffman did not strike its director John Schlesinger as the obvious choice to play the story's down-at-heel streetwise conman. "Jerry Hellman [the film's producer] had seen him in a play by Henry Livings, Eh?, off Broadway and said, 'He's a wonderful character actor, don't just go by The Graduate, you had better go and meet him,'" Schlesinger told the BBC's On Screen in 1994. "So, I went to New York, and Dustin met me in a dirty old raincoat and we wandered around the 42nd Street area and the Hell's Kitchen area, which is sort of a largely Italian area, and he blended in so perfectly with the background that by the end of the evening, there was absolutely no question that he had got the part." But to play the ailing Rizzo, who suffers from a disabled leg and tuberculosis, Hoffman felt that he needed to keep checking the film's rushes while filming to ensure his performance was consistent between takes. "I had to try and keep a posture, a gait going, a way of walking, a dialect going. I was very worried about the fluctuation of that," he told the BBC's Film Night in 1970, when he was interviewed on the set of his revisionist Western, Little Big Man. The actor later told Vanity Fair in 2000 that he ended up putting a stone in his shoe to ensure that he would limp on camera without having to think about it. "I think the average person will see work like that and think it is very difficult," said Hoffman. "But my own feeling is that Jon Voight's part was far the more difficult role in Midnight Cowboy because it was somehow a little more foggy, it didn't seem to really have a razor's edge to it as written, and it's to his credit that he brought what he did to it." Voight, too, was far from a shoo-in for the role of an out-of-his-depth would-be hustler who ends up broke and desperate in New York, and forms an unlikely bond with Rizzo. The actor had initially been dismissed by Schlesinger, who felt that he didn't have the right look for the role. "We turned down Voight, and a wonderful casting director in New York in those days, Marion Dougherty, said, 'You are missing something, why won't you see Jon Voight?' We said, 'That face it isn't what we were thinking,' and she said, 'Meet him, read him one scene,' so we agreed and he came in and he seemed to us to be quite extraordinary, and so we added him to the list of people we were going to test." The battle for the perfect cast and music But the director still chose Canadian actor Michael Sarrazin for the role instead. Luckily for Voight, Sarrazin was under contract with Universal Pictures, and when they tripled their price for him, Schlesinger looked at the screen tests again. Voight, who was willing to be paid scale – the Screen Actors Guild minimum wage – was then cast. "He had a kind of belligerence in his personality as well as a total sweetness and innocence that I think the part needed," Schlesinger said. Midnight Cowboy did not seem an obvious contender for box-office success. Schlesinger's usual producer Joe Janni turned the project down, warning the director that the film could ruin his career. But Schlesinger, who was himself gay, told the BBC in 1994 that the story of outsiders struggling to survive on society's margins was something he could identify with. "I'm not terribly interested in sort of pseudo-happy endings of people walking hand-in-hand into the sunset because I don't think it is true. So, most of the films that I made have question marks at the end," he said. Midnight Cowboy, which juxtaposes flashbacks, reality and fantasy to hint at the motivations driving its protagonists, was edited to Harry Nilsson's cover version of Everybody's Talkin'. The song would become synonymous with the film, seeming to encapsulate its wounded characters' longing, aimlessness and desire for a better future. "I always put music on at a very early stage in the cut," said Schlesinger. "I thought not only is it musically and rhythmically right, it's lyrically right, it has a wonderful apt lyric, so we put it on an early cut, and we went to the head of music at United Artists and said, 'This is what we want.'" But a United Artists executive did not want to use a song that was already published and, believing that its feel could be easily replicated, he instructed the film-makers to work with a songwriter to come up with something new. "We went to various people from [Bob] Dylan to Joni Mitchell, who wrote a song that had far too many words," Schlesinger said. Dylan would ultimately write Lay Lady Lay for the film, but submitted it too late for it to be used. "When we first showed the film to the distributors," Schlesinger continued, "we had Everybody's Talkin' on it, and the same man got up from the screening and said, 'My God, where did you get that song from? It's so terrific.' And we said, 'Well, we played it to you several months ago, and you said anybody can reproduce it.' So, he said, 'Well, we've got to have it.'" An adults-only audience Because Midnight Cowboy had explicit depictions of gang rape, prostitution and drug use, it was always destined to be limited to an adult audience upon release. And when it was reviewed by the Motion Picture Association of America, it was duly given a Restricted rating, meaning that in 1969 no one under the age of 16 could see it without an accompanying adult. But the studio's boss, Arthur Krim, was nervous: he had consulted a psychiatrist who denounced the film's "homosexual frame of reference" and its "possible influence on youngsters". It was Krim who then decreed that the Restricted rating wasn't enough: Midnight Cowboy should be X-rated instead, so that no one under 16 would be admitted, even if they were with an adult. An X rating, a category typically associated with pornography, would usually be the commercial death knell for a mainstream film. Many cinemas refused to show X-rated films, while many newspapers and TV stations refused to run advertisements for them. But Universal Studios made the rating a selling point, paying for advertisements that trumpeted: "Everything you hear about Midnight Cowboy is true!" More like this:• The risqué rom-com that defined a genre• Jean-Luc Godard on the film that changed cinema• The 'obscene' banned book that became a bestseller When it was released, the film became a surprise hit. It made back 10 times its modest $4m (£3m) budget and became the third highest grossing film of 1969. "It had an extraordinary reception," said Schlesinger. "I didn't realise we were sitting on top of something that was going to be that successful." Midnight Cowboy was also critically lauded, earning seven Oscar nominations the following year. It would go on to win three Academy Awards, with Schlesinger taking home the prize for best director, and Waldo Salt for best adapted screenplay. The film also scooped the Oscar for best picture, becoming the first and only X-rated film to do so. (The MPAA replaced the X rating with the NC-17 rating in 1990.) Alongside other films of the era such as Bonnie and Clyde, The Graduate and Easy Rider, Midnight Cowboy helped set off the New Hollywood movement, which would see US cinema embrace more narratively complex, morally ambiguous and stylistically innovative film-making in the 1970s. In 1994, it was selected for preservation by the Library of Congress due to its being "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant". Despite Midnight Cowboy's box-office success and critical acclaim, Schlesinger told the BBC that there was "no way" it would get made in 1994. "Recently I was having dinner, amongst the guests was the head of Columbia [Pictures] and I tried out just a precis, just the dramatic points of the story. And I said, 'If I brought you that, would you do it?' And he said, 'Absolutely no way, I'd show you the door.'" -- For more stories and never-before-published radio scripts to your inbox, sign up to the In History newsletter, while The Essential List delivers a handpicked selection of features and insights twice a week. For more Culture stories from the BBC, follow us on Facebook, X and Instagram.
