Dustin Hoffman remembers un-X-pected 'Midnight Cowboy' Best Picture win 50 years later

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With the loud declaration 'I'm walkin' here,' a gritty, explicit film about a male prostitute (Jon Voight) and a consumptive…

struggled to get financing and upset preview audiences. “When we started having screenings, people would get up and leave. They were so offended,” Hoffman recalls. The actor tells EW that audiences and financiers alike bristled at the explicit sexual content, as well as the film’s gay overtones.

Yet Hoffman was overseas during the ceremony, certain that an ailing John Wayne would win Best Actor . Not that he places much stock in awards. “There’s good work and there’s great work and there’s work that’s less than good — it’s more of a symbolic award,” Hoffman says. He persuaded Schlesinger to meet him at the automat Horn & Hardart, on 42nd Street, late at night. “A lot of actors [ate there], but late at night the clientele changed because it was 42nd Street in those days. That was hookers and hustlers and drugs — that was 42nd Street. Very disreputable,” Hoffman remembers. “I wanted him to see that I [could] mix in with those people. He was talked into it, and he met me there.

The point has since been disputed, with some of the production team claiming it was scripted, but Hoffman says that’s simply not true. “The ‘I’m walkin’ here’ came out — it was not written. It was not scripted,” he insists.

 

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I’ve watch that movie during film class.

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