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Oscar-winning film director John Schlesinger died on July 25, 2003, at his Palm Springs home from complications of a stroke he had suffered on New Year’s Day in 2001. A year later, biographer and novelist William J. Mann (Wisecracker: The Life and Times of William Haines) agreed to write the late filmmaker’s authorized biography — under one condition: that it be a work of journalism rather than a vanity piece. Schlesinger, who eventually became unable to communicate, and his life partner, photographer Michael Childers, gave Mann full access to diaries the director had amassed over many years. In Edge Of Midnight: The Life Of John Schlesinger, Mann drops you smack into the late director’s life and a wild journey that explodes with shock and awe and balances with an equal measure of sweetness and compassion. Enjoy this exclusive excerpt! — Steven Biller, Editor, Palm Springs Life

If one were to discover a man by the books he kept in his bedroom, a fairly accurate picture of John Schlesinger might emerge. Staying in his room, I perused the titles on his bookshelves. Classics of Italian Cooking, The Joys of Wine. Books on music: a Stravinsky primer, The Wagner Companion. About a dozen biographies: Buñuel, Benjamin Britten, Frida Kahlo, Tennessee Williams, David O. Selznick, my own book on William Haines. Memoirs: Peggy Guggenheim’s Out of This Century, Alan Bennett’s Writing Home. Books that spoke to him as a gay man: two from Edmund White — The Beautiful Room is Empty and The Farewell Symphony — and a compendium of stories from the AIDS Memorial Quilt. And books of humor: funny picture books, collections of irreverent jokes, and a darkly ironic account of the Nazi propaganda machine.

It offered the picture of a literate and civilized man — a man supremely interested in art, in food, in life, in the lives of others. And a man who liked to laugh, often at things people told him he shouldn’t laugh about.

“John loved stuff associated with death,” said John’s friend Pat Crowley, who worked with him as an assistant director on The Falcon and the Snowman and The Believers. “He had a real morbid sense of humor. When we were doing The Believers, during a scene in a morgue in Toronto, there was a giant metal cabinet in the center of the room that had unidentified cases kept in cold storage. And there was this unidentified leg, found in Niagara Falls, and John was obsessed with that leg, with what could’ve happened to it, who it belonged to.

“So we took an actor and tied his leg behind him and had him run in during shooting, hollering, ‘Where is it, where is my fucking leg, someone told me that my leg is in here!’” And John was shocked and we all just laughed because he was always playing jokes on everybody else, and you were always looking for ways to get back at him.”

I was finding his story, bit by bit, and humor and laughter informed so much of it. In his files, he kept a letter he’d received from an Arizona college student soon after the U.S. release of Midnight Cowboy. The student had been quite offended when the audience laughed at Ratso’s complaint, late in the film, that he has wet his pants. Moved by the story, near tears at the plight of the dying Ratso, the student wondered how, as the director of the film, John might have responded to such insensitive amusement.

“Thank you for your very interesting letter,” John replied. “I take a rather different point of view. I think much that is tragic is also comic at the same moment. The point about audience reaction is that one wants them to feel something, and laughter at this particular moment, when one is so near tragedy, only says to me how tremendously involved the audience was with the film and with the characters. On the occasions I have been in the theater with the film and watched the audience reaction, it is amazing to see how quickly the laughter is changed to total silence at the moment of Ratso’s death, and this is exactly what I as the filmmaker intended.”

Much that is tragic is also comic. I thought again of John’s gag of pretending to have had a stroke long before he actually did.

“You know, I think he sometimes enjoys this,” said Gary Shaw, nodding over at John in the wheelchair. “He always enjoyed making people squirm. I think he finds some humor in their discomfort when they come to see him now, when they try to get him to talk. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s having a little fun with all of this.”

Comedy or tragedy? I remembered what he had said in his diary: “I like to think it’s always about both.”

Post-production began on Midnight Cowboy in September 1968, soon after John and his life partner, Michael Childers, had returned from London. What became immediately apparent was that the problems with editor Hugh Robertson had only become worse; he was cutting the film with none of the style John felt was necessary for such a modern film. If it was radical in content, it had to be radical in form as well. John called in Jim Clark.

“I thought it was extraordinary,” Clark said, “especially in terms of performance. But it had problems with the fantasies, mostly in the opening 20 minutes, basically a construction problem. It was too long, overdone. It took forever to get Joe to New York. I was there for three months and all I did was cut the dreams, the fantasies, and the party. The rest is Hugh Robertson’s.”

The flashbacks were the biggest problem. They had been a problem in writing the script, in the acting, and in the editing. “Well, you know, the book had all these rape scenes that were linear but could not be linear in the film,” Clark said. “I remember one which was a nightmare that Joe Buck has. It was shot in black and white and we slowed it down. Then, as the nightmare is reaching its peak, we put it into red. It was a very stylistic thing to go from black and white into this stabbing red moment, and then he wakes up. There were lots of things I did experimentally that we kept in the film.

“There was material everywhere, that’s what the problem was,” Clark said. “They didn’t know what they had. The film was being completely mismanaged. I kept finding material shot by some second unit director that was just sitting on a bench. It had never been seen or used but it was good.

“The situation was very awkward,” Clark continued, “because Hugh Robertson was still there. He was still the editor but he never liked the film. Hugh was very tall, always smoking big cigars, and he owned the cutting room. I was in the room next door and I could hear John approach. He’d be in there trying to talk with Hugh, his voice getting louder and louder, and eventually he was screaming at Hugh. Then John would be standing at my door, sweating and angry, and he’d yell, ‘You’ve got to get that film away from him, he’s ruining it!’ He’d disappear and I’d be left in an awkward situation. Everybody thought I was one of John’s boyfriends and that’s why I was there. And I didn’t have a work permit. I was illegal and everybody knew it. So it was difficult.”

When the film was finally cut there were more chunks of (Dustin) Hoffman left on the floor than of (Jon) Voight. “I was angry because a lot of the stuff we had shot wasn’t in the film,” Hoffman admitted. “While he was cutting it, John realized he could not cut it equally. This was Voight’s story. And so there was stuff that got cut that I had loved and seen in the rushes — a whole Chaplinesque scene by Ratso at the party.”

Then came the task of placing a score onto the film. John Barry had composed a beautiful, haunting theme [that] remains familiar to moviegoers three decades later. Barry had made his name with the scores for Dr. No, Born Free, and The Lion in Winter, and would win a Grammy for Midnight Cowboy.

But something more was needed: an opening theme that would set the mood and spirit of the film. In September, Jerry Hellman spoke to Bob Dylan, who agreed to write something but then kept them hanging for so long they had to look elsewhere. It was Childers, once again, who found the eventual choice, Harry Nilsson, who began writing a song expressly for the film. Meanwhile, to use in rough-cut screenings, Childers gave John one of Nilsson’s other tracks, “Everybody’s Talkin,’” from his Aerial Ballet album. While they waited to see what Nilsson came up with, John got used to the song they had, discovering resonance in its lyrics: “People stopping staring/I can’t see their faces/Only the shadows of their eyes . . .” And, as a harbinger of the final, pitiful bus ride to Miami, in which Joe Buck removes Ratso’s filthy, urine-soaked New York clothes and replaces them with bright, colorful tropical wear: “I’m going where the sun keeps shining/Thru’ the pouring rain/Going where the weather suits my clothes . . .”

“We knew we had to have it,” Childers remembered. “We had to keep it.” The irony was that Nilsson hadn’t written “Everybody’s Talkin’”; Fred Neil was the songwriter. The piece Nilsson composed for the film, “I Guess the Lord Must be in New York City,” would be rather buried in the overall soundtrack. Bob Dylan, too, finally came through with a composition, but too late for inclusion: Childers remembered opening up a package from Dylan and popping in the track. It was “Lay, Lady, Lay.”

But one cannot imagine Midnight Cowboy now without “Everybody’s Talkin’.” It is one of the great movie openings of all time, with a song that evokes the story of the film and the legacy of the times. It is the perfect theme song for the final culmination of the adventurous, rebellious, scary, exciting, heartbreaking 1960s.

It was a time of rapid change and conflict. Just prior to filming, Martin Luther King had been assassinated; during production, Robert Kennedy was killed. John had to call off filming for a day when police blocked the streets for Kennedy’s funeral at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. By the time Midnight Cowboy had wrapped, the number of U.S. soldiers sent to Vietnam had passed the half-million mark. The violence at the Democratic National Convention that August had further seared the nation’s conscience.

It wasn’t just conflict, but out-and-out rebellion in the air. All throughout the summer, the crew had heard daily exhortations from Abbie Hoffman inciting civil unrest; just before the picture was released, drugged-out students staged “freak-ins” across New York. In April, members of the Black Panthers in the Bronx were indicted on conspiracy charges, galvanizing a movement. Midnight Cowboy was still playing in theaters when, in June, patrons fought back against police harassment at Stonewall, a gay bar in Greenwich Village, thus kicking off the modern gay rights movement. And that summer, just before the film’s gala premiere in London, the legendary rock concert was held at Woodstock, N.Y.

Midnight Cowboy cannot be understood outside its times. It was part of the zeitgeist, part of the worldwide cultural shift, the conflict caused by colliding generations. It became a symbol, a rallying point in many ways: like Easy Rider, Medium Cool, and Alice’s Restaurant, it was required viewing for the youth movement, part of the currency exchanged by the new generation.

Studio executives weren’t sure what Schlesinger had wrought. An advance screening was held for the United Artists brass at the West 54th Street movie lab. “We were getting out of the taxi,” Jerry Hellman said, “and John turned to me to say, ‘Do you honestly believe anyone in their right mind is going to pay to see this rubbish?’”

David Picker was more optimistic. “I brought everyone to that first screening,” he said — all of his bosses, the marketing people, his entire family. “I knew I was taking a chance, because we hadn’t seen anything yet. But I trusted what John was doing, and I was right, because the reaction from everyone was stunning.”

Appropriately so: even within the increasingly permissive cinema of the 1960s, Midnight Cowboy went boldly where few films had ever gone. With the abolition of the Production Code, the Motion Picture Association of America had set up a new ratings system. The board decreed that Midnight Cowboy — with its nudity, homosexuality, and four-letter words — would receive the “adult” classification, or X. John concurred with their decision. “We felt the X was the correct rating for it,” he said. “We had made the film for adults, not for children. I had no problem with the X initially.”

Of course, in those days, X did not carry the baggage it would even a few years later; it was not yet associated with explicit porno-graphy. Yet it soon became apparent that an X on a film was going to prove problematic regardless. The X severely limited not only where the picture could screen but also where it could be advertised. “It also dashed hopes for network television revenue,” Hellman said, as he and John refused to alter the film in any way.

Once Midnight Cowboy was nominated for an Academy Award as Best Picture, the X became even more troublesome. The Academy didn’t want an X among its nominees, so the MPAA offered to change the rating to “R” if John would simply slice a single frame from the theater blowjob scene. Again Schlesinger refused, again backed up by United Artists. After the film won, the situation simply could not be allowed to stand: the Academy would never tolerate an X-rated film being advertised as “Best Picture of the Year.” So, without a single cut made, the MPAA reversed itself and changed the rating of Midnight Cowboy from X to R.

Yet it’s important to remember that, as first released, Midnight Cowboy was rated X, and still it was a blockbuster, still it had people lining up around the block to see it. Its official New York premiere was held on 25 May at the Coronet Theater on Third Avenue with a glittering array of celebrities in attendance. “Everybody from Henry Kissinger to Jane Fonda and Roger Vadim,” Childers said. “People were coming up to us, grabbing us, speechless, or they were crying, ‘This is the most devastating, moving, wonderful movie.’ That kept happening, all around the world.”

Two nights later, Childers went out to gauge the general public reaction, to see if the masses had as much enthusiasm for the picture as the A-list celebrities had shown. “I ran to a pay phone to call John,” he said. “I was screaming that the lines were 10 blocks long and they went all the way back to the bridge! And it was still only three o’clock in the afternoon! John said, ‘Stand on the corner in front of Bloomingdale’s across the street. I’m coming down. I’ve got to see this!’”

“There is nothing, absolutely nothing, like having a huge blockbuster success,” Childers said. “Your whole world changes.”

From being ignored and invisible following the flop of Madding Crowd, John was now the hottest property in Hollywood, appearing on The Today Show and with Dick Cavett, and being interviewed, debated, discussed, and fawned over. The best table at Sardi’s was now reserved for him whenever he wanted to drop by. At industry gatherings, executives from Paramount and MGM made it a point to drape their arms around his shoulders. Every actress wanted her picture taken with him.

Awards came from the Academy, the Directors’ Guild, and the Golden Globes, as well as from the Berlin Film Festival and the Italian National Syndicate of Film Journalists. And Cowboy swept the British Academy Awards, winning Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Actor for Hoffman and Most Promising Newcomer for Voight.

The success of Darling had been nothing compared to this; John Schlesinger was now the toast of the world.

Adapted from Edge Of Midnight: The Life Of John Schlesinger by William J. Mann. Copyright  2005 by William J. Mann. First published in the United States by Billboard Books, an imprint of Watson-Guptill Publications, a division of VNU Business Media Inc. Reprinted with permission.

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