It's a fascinating look at the process that led to one of the 20th century's most iconic works of art ... Histories of filmmaking can easily turn into inside baseball, interesting only to film students and the most dedicated cinéastes, but Frankel does a remarkable job telling the story of how the movie happened. He's such a gifted storyteller that you don't even have to be familiar with the film to find the book fascinating ... That Frankel is willing to point out that the movie is flawed is part of what makes the book so essential—Shooting Midnight Cowboy is a history, not a paean, and he asks viewers to reconsider what the movie meant, not just to American culture, but to the cast and crew who made it. Frankel's book is a must-read for anyone interested in cinematic history, and an enthralling look at Schlesinger's 'dark, difficult masterpiece and the deeply gifted and flawed men and women who made it.'
... a masterfully structured study bursting with detail and context ... revealing details permeate Frankel’s book, touching on the making of the movie (you’ll likely never think about casting in the same way), the individuals involved, and the social history of the time and place. Frankel puts it all together with narrative verve, telling a propulsive tale about creativity, commerce and loss.
Frankel shies away from none of these behind-the-scenes tensions, allowing the overarching theme of great art requiring hard work and hard feelings to flourish across the many tales told ... By illustrating the city’s homophobic bent in the years leading up to and following Midnight Cowboy’s release, the author also depicts why the most enduring queer marriage will always be between our nelly art and the underground ... Unlike such exceptional biographers as Joan Schenkar or Jenn Shapland, Frankel doesn’t rely on imagination to guide the story he tells with a mastered, Pulitzer-earning succinctness. The enviably straightforward writing style he puts to such great use in Shooting Midnight Cowboy makes sense when one considers his roots: like Rizzo, he’s a Bronx boy, born into a working-class family in the wake of World War II. While Frankel fared better than his fictional shoe-shining film sibling, graduating from Columbia University in 1971, both still boast the same learned understanding and appreciation for New York City’s rogue economies and their geographies...As a result, Frankel makes for the most trustworthy of narrators. Even if it seldom shows in his research-rich chapters, one gets the sense that his interest in this unlikely blockbuster came with, at minimum, a hearty dose of homegrown empathy and curiosity — a dying breed of a combination.
... illuminating ... the new book employs a wide lens ... In creating his definitive account, Frankel has gathered memorable details about tight budgets, perseverance, and resourcefulness ... it’s the films’ fascinating backstories as much as their lonesome cowboys that animate Frankel’s trilogy. There are no tidy endings for anyone involved, least of all the guy riding off into the sunrise on a Greyhound bus, alone again.
Frankel is a smooth writer and sure-footed narrator who uses this volume to excavate the cultural landscape of postwar America — the entrenched homophobia, the shameless exploitation of women, the corrosion of our cities. But even good books about great movies have limits. In this case, squeezing more than 300 pages of prose from a 113-minute film does not always come easily ... Frankel is a diligent researcher, and he uncovers the rich details that gave the movie its texture and authenticity ... While Frankel uses Midnight Cowboy to trace broader cultural trends, some digressions are extraneous. There are unnecessary details of the self-absorbed Warhol; of a bomb that detonates in a townhouse next to Hoffman’s Greenwich Village apartment; of Schlesinger’s next movie. Some careless writing also creeps in ... Nonetheless, Frankel’s book will satisfy anyone interested in how a long-shot movie about two underdogs became an American original.
Frankel...is diligent in his attention to all of the moving parts that go into making a film: the building of a team of disparate, sometimes at-odds talents; the days and weeks of preparation; the last-minute flashes of inspiration. He is somewhat less convincing in describing the why and how these many elements combine to create something of lasting resonance ... while Frankel is free with superlatives...he gives little sense of what recommends Midnight Cowboy to posterity ... Because Frankel looks at cinema for a reflection of the times and as a means for changing hearts and minds, he has a limited interest in fringe work. Addressed to a small and self-selecting audience, low-profile 'underground' cinema has only so much capacity to 'shift the dialogue' or have a 'social impact' ... From Oscar triumph Frankel proceeds through a familiar threnody—the lament for Times Square, sanitized and Disneyfied, and for New Hollywood ... after a while you might start to wonder how much of this mourning New Hollywood is another form of self-congratulation with the addition of dewy nostalgia, and how much a “breakthrough” like Midnight Cowboy amounts to the mainstream arriving at a point where real outsiders had been hanging out for years[.]
... more of a cultural biography than a stodgy academic study, where a seminal movie is patiently explored through an accumulation of empirical evidence in order to capture the underlying zeitgeist ... The great advantage of Frankel’s genial approach is that he understands film as a collaborative process. Consequently, other key figures in the making of Midnight Cowboy are given due credit ... While Frankel leaves room for hoary reminiscences, he is also shrewd and hard-headed ... Frankel’s attention to detail is commendable, if occasionally exhausting...Thankfully these pedantic lapses are rare, and Frankel largely unfolds his facts in an elegant and engaging manner.
... a very good read ... The middle section of Frankel’s book is about the actual filming of Midnight Cowboy. It’s only fairly interesting. Nothing that momentous happened while the movie was being made ... It’s in the final section, post–Midnight Cowboy, where I finally felt Herlihy palpably on the page, when he became rich from owning part of the financially successful film at the same time that his writing talents were diminishing.
... true to its title, is assiduous in explaining the who, what, where, why, and how of its namesake ... These and other nuggets of trivia have an undeniable, page-turning appeal, but...Frankel is primarily interested in movies as superconductors that channel the larger cultural currents around them ... As a piece of research and reportage, Shooting Midnight Cowboy is thorough without being exhausting; Frankel’s flowing, curvilinear style intertwines firsthand accounts with wide-angle scene setting, granular anecdotes nested in grander narratives. What does get a bit wearing, though, is the book’s insistence on an underdog triumphalism that either fails to interrogate the pat, deterministic aspects of the final product or else betrays disappointingly conventional taste ... Frankel is of course entitled to call Midnight Cowboy 'a dark, difficult masterpiece' that “floats above other films and books of its era,” but such language gives his book the feeling of a victory lap on behalf of a movie already long since garlanded with prizes. As a historian, Frankel is rigorous and revelatory; as a critic—to paraphrase another, more classical ’60s western—he may be a bit eager to print the legend.
... another making-of book that transcends the genre. This is no mere story of the production of a movie ... instead, it offers in-depth portraits of the man who created the characters of Joe Buck and Ratso Rizzo...and the men who gave them cinematic life ... Frankel provides us with the context we need to fully appreciate the film as a vivid snapshot of a specific time and place in American history.
Frankel...paints the story of the film with a wide and holistic brush ... Tackling questions of censorship and the MPAA ratings, bravura performances by Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman, the costumes, the soundtrack, and the film’s coronation at the 1970 Academy Awards, Frankel expertly brings it all together ... An in-depth, exquisite biography of a legendary film, and a must-read for cinephiles.
In this outstanding work...Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Frankel covers every facet of the film’s creation ... In a canny move, Frankel places the film in historical context, detailing major world events at the time of the shoot ... Interviews with the film’s surviving principals add immediacy, and descriptions of small production details enhance the book’s power ... A rare cinema book that is as mesmerizing as its subject.
