john schlesinger

It’s not exactly a secret that Hollywood can be a tad self-centred: it loves making films about itself, sometimes lovingly so (such as in Singing in the Rain), sometimes bitingly caustic (take Sunset Boulevard, for instance). And this has pretty much been a part of Hollywood’s MO since the beginning. For our December podcast, join Julie, Sam and Alan as they look at three films in which Hollywood depicts itself, for better or for worse, from the 1970s to the present. Starting with John Schlesinger’s adaptation of Nathanael West’s novel The Day of the Locust (1975), a dark, sometimes downright apocalyptic satire, continuing with Martin Scorsese’s Howard Hughes biopic The Aviator (2004) and ending up with Damien Chazelle’s much-derided Babylon (2022), they examine how these films depict historical Tinseltown and what this reveals about their attitudes towards the US movie industry.

For further listening on these topics, make sure to check out Karina Longworth’s podcast You Must Remember This, especially her series “Fake News: Fact Checking Hollywood Babylon” and “The Many Loves of Howard Hughes” – and our very own podcast episode #18 from way back in early 2019, in which Julie joined us officially for the first time to discuss The Aviator.

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In my head, John Schlesinger’s 1969 classic Midnight Cowboy is intertwined with Miloš Forman’s 1979 adaptation of Hair for some reason, to such an extent that I tend to mix up Jon Voight and John Savage. I have no convincing explanation why this is the case, but I suspect it may be that I watched at least the beginning of Midnight Cowboy at an age when I was too young to really take in what the film was about, so all that stuck with me was a young hick from one of the more rural states taking a bus ride to New York to begin a new life and, once there, falling in with a very different crowd than what he was previously used to. Perhaps Harry Nilsson’s melancholy hit “Everybody’s Talkin'”, playing over the Greyhound ride Joe Buck (played by Voight) takes to the Big Apple, added to that mostly inaccurate memory.

Those similarities are there, but they’re entirely superficial. Where Hair‘s Claude Hooper Bukowski goes to New York City after being drafted into the Army to go to Vietnam, Joe Buck has drafted himself into a very different kind of service: he wants to put his carnal talents, and his cowboy outfit, to good use to make the women and men of New York happy. And there’s no idealised, singing hippie tribe waiting to take Joe under their wings, but a fidgety, coughing con man named Rico “Ratso” Rizzo (Dustin Hoffman), who at first is eager to trick the naive Texas hick out of twenty dollars – but then, for a while, becomes the midnight cowboy’s only friend and companion.

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