Desperate Souls, Dark City

Director: Nancy Buirski

2023 / 101min / DCP

Released in 1969, Midnight Cowboy remains an era-defining landmark movie, featuring beguiling performances from Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman as two loners who join forces out of desperation. With Blacklist survivor Waldo Salt’s brilliant screenplay and John Schlesinger’s fearless direction, the film became the only X-rated picture to ever win the Academy Award for Best Picture. Its vivid and compassionate depiction of a more realistic, unsanitized New York City and its inhabitants paved the way for a generation’s worth of gritty movies with complex characters and adult themes.

Revisiting Schlesinger's film more than a half-century later, Desperate Souls, Dark City and the Legend of Midnight Cowboy is less a document about the making of the film, and more a study of the places and people both gifted and flawed behind it; New York City in a troubled time of cultural ferment. Featuring extensive archival material and compelling new interviews, director Buirski’s Academy Award-shortlisted documentary illuminates the manifold ways Schlesinger’s zeitgeist-defining drama captured a rapidly changing city.

Q&A with Editor Anthony Ripoli and Co-Producer Claire Chandler, moderated by Michael Taylor, ACE, on Monday, January 8th