The story takes place at a pivotal moment in American cultural and political history, when homosexuality was still widely viewed as a contagious disease and a dire threat to American youth, while filmmakers were struggling for more freedom to tell adult stories. But when the filmmakers defiantly refused to cut even one frame, the board sheepishly gave the movie an R rating anyway.Ĭall it a heartwarming story of Hollywood hypocrisy, one that got repeated frequently two years ago when Midnight Cowboy celebrated its 50th anniversary. Later on, after Midnight Cowboy won best picture, an embarrassed board supposedly pleaded with producer Jerome Hellman and director John Schlesinger to snip a few frames of the film so that board members could claim the movie had been toned down and therefore had earned an R. Which meant no one under 17 was allowed in the theater and suggested to mainstream moviegoers that the ratings board was effectively condemning the movie as pornographic. The long-standing myth is that the Motion Picture Association of America’s prudish ratings board, repelled by Midnight Cowboy’s scenes of fellatio, sodomy, homosexuality, and sadomasochism, slapped an X on the film before its release in May 1969.
Joan Didion once wrote of Hollywood, “Much of what is written about pictures and about picture people approaches reality only occasionally and accidentally.” So it is with Midnight Cowboy, one of the classics of the short-lived New Hollywood era and the only X-rated film ever to win an Academy Award for best picture.
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