“Midnight Cowboy” — the only X-rated movie to win Academy Awards (Best Picture, Adapted Screenplay and Director) — exposed the world to Manhattan’s underbelly.Michael Childers, who assisted his director boyfriend John Schlesinger on set, remembers the 1968 filming as “a colorful time in New York.
There were junkies on doorsteps, and I saw one dead body in a garbage can. That was part of our milieu. It was primal.”Even the nonhuman refuse shocked.
Due to a strike by sanitation workers, as Childers and Schlesinger arrived in the city to prep for filming, there were 70,000 tons of garbage piled on the streets.
As recounted in the new book “Shooting Midnight Cowboy: Art, Sex, Loneliness, Liberation, and the Making of a Dark Classic” (Farrar,.
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