Desperate Souls, Dark City and the Legend of Midnight Cowboy

This is not a documentary about the making of Midnight Cowboy. It is about a dark and difficult masterpiece and the deeply gifted and flawed people who made it. It is about New York in a troubled era of cultural ferment and social change. No Oscar®-winning film captured its tumultuous time as indelibly as 1969’s X-rated Midnight Cowboy. Rich with interviews and archival footage, this ambitious documentary chronicles not just its unlikely creation, but the cultural, sexual and political undercurrents that fueled John Schlesinger’s classic movie-- long considered one of the best films ever made, not to mention one of the first to focus its frame of reference through a gay context.