Midnight Cowboy Was an X-Rated Oscar Winner

Woodcut of Dustin Hoffman as Ratso Rizzo in Midnight Cowboy. (Artwork by author)

Midnight Cowboy is the only X-Rated movie to ever win a Best Picture Oscar. It signified the moment when American film shifted from studio control to an era of independent auteurs.

Dustin Hoffman plays Ratso Rizzo, a crippled two-bit con artist suffering from consumption. He befriends a sexually ambiguous cowboy gigolo named Joe Buck (Jon Voight). Ratso becomes a pimp to Buck’s male prostitute and the two struggle to survive on New York’s gritty streets. The film is dark and bleak and intertwined with subtle humor. Hoffman and Voight capture a platonic love between men rarely seen on screen.

During casting, Producer Jerome Hellman came across Hoffman performing an Off-Broadway play called Eh? Hoffman agreed to play the role of Ratso, but it took a year for screenwriter Waldo Salt to write the script and another year for Hellman and Director John Schlesinger to raise funds. During that time Hoffman starred in The Graduate and became an overnight star.

After seeing The Graduate, Schlesinger felt Hoffman was too clean cut and collegiate to play Ratso. Hoffman asked Schlesinger to meet him at a filthy Times Square coffee shop at night. Hoffman came dressed in character in a dirty raincoat with slicked back hair and several days’ stubble. He begged for money, unrecognized by Schlesinger. When Hoffman finally revealed himself, Schlesinger agreed he would “do quite well.”

Hoffman relished the seedy nature of Ratso Rizzo, the polar opposite of his ultra-preppy Benjamin Braddock character in The Graduate. (Has any actor had two greater first roles than Ratso Rizzo and Benjamin Braddock?) Mike Nichols, who directed Hoffman in The Graduate, begged Hoffman not to play Ratso Rizzo. “Are you crazy,” Nichols said. “I made you a star. This is an ugly character. What are you doing?” Hoffman was happy to remain a character actor.

When casting the part of Joe Buck, producers initially considered Warren Beatty, Lee Majors even Elvis Presley. They cast Michael Sarrazin but then passed on him when he asked for too much money. They scoured Off-Broadway Theater and found Jon Voight who was so desperate for the role he agreed to work for scale.

There was a charged chemistry between Hoffman and Voight. Voight traveled to Texas to study small-town…