Desperate Souls, Dark City and the Legend of Midnight Cowboy

A half century after its release, John Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy remains one of the most original and groundbreaking films of the modern era. Being the only X-rated film to ever win the Academy Award for Best Picture in 1969, its vivid and compassionate depiction of a more realistic, unsanitised New York City and its inhabitants paved the way for a generation’s worth of gritty movies with complex characters and adult themes.

More than a documentary about the making of Midnight Cowboy, this film is about a humane and groundbreaking masterpiece and the flawed but gifted people who made it. It is about a troubled era of cultural ferment, social and political change. It is about broken dreams and strivers, then and now. Desperate Souls, Dark City and the Legend of Midnight Cowboy is about an era that made a film and a film that made an era.