Desperate Souls, Dark City and the Legend of "Midnight Cowboy"

Featuring extensive archival material and compelling new interviews, Nancy Buirski’s Desperate Souls, Dark City illuminates how Midnight Cowboy captured the essence of New York City at a specific time, reflecting a rapidly changing society with striking clarity. Instead of a typical making-of documentary, Desperate Souls documents the lives of the people who made this difficult masterpiece. (101 mins., DCP)

More than 50 years after its release, Midnight Cowboy—which screens here for free on July 29—remains one of the most original and groundbreaking movies of the modern era. With memorable performances from Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman as two outsiders who are brought together out of desperation and John Schlesinger’s fearless direction, the film became the only X-rated film to ever win the Academy Award for Best Picture (the rating then simply meant a film was intended for adults only before being coopted by the pornography industry). Its vivid depiction of a more realistic, unvarnished New York City and its inhabitants was influential for a generation’s worth of gritty movies about the city.

Both screenings of the documentary begin with Cleveland filmmaker Bruce Checefsky’s Andy Warhol Films Jack Smith Filming "Normal Love," a recreation of Warhol’s lost film that disappeared after it was seized by police following a screening in 1964. (5:43 mins., DCP)

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Desperate Souls, Dark City, courtesy of Zeitgeist Films.