Krim was the kind of businessman for whom the phrase “pillar of the community” could have been invented alongside his day job, he engaged in politics, the arts, and charitable causes, and he was a major fundraiser for the Democratic Party and a close friend of John F. “Once something got into his head, it never got out.” Picker, who worked as a senior executive at U.A. “His mind was like a bear trap,” recalled David V. He wore a gray bespoke suit to the office every day of his working life and was considered to be both the brains and moral conscience of United Artists, the famous anti-studio studio. Soft-spoken and serious, with an industry-wide reputation for being smart, tough, and fair-minded, Arthur Krim was a classic studio mogul, so powerful he didn’t even feel the need to live in Hollywood, preferring his native New York. Since this is a Hollywood story, let’s start with the man with the most money and power. The story takes place at a pivotal moment in American cultural and political history, when homosexuality was still widely viewed as a contagious disease and a dire threat to American youth, while filmmakers were struggling for more freedom to tell adult stories.
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But when the filmmakers defiantly refused to cut even one frame, the board sheepishly gave the movie an R rating anyway.Ĭall it a heartwarming story of Hollywood hypocrisy, one that got repeated frequently two years ago when Midnight Cowboy celebrated its 50th anniversary. Later on, after Midnight Cowboy won best picture, an embarrassed board supposedly pleaded with producer Jerome Hellman and director John Schlesinger to snip a few frames of the film so that board members could claim the movie had been toned down and therefore had earned an R. Which meant no one under 17 was allowed in the theater and suggested to mainstream moviegoers that the ratings board was effectively condemning the movie as pornographic. The long-standing myth is that the Motion Picture Association of America’s prudish ratings board, repelled by Midnight Cowboy’s scenes of fellatio, sodomy, homosexuality, and sadomasochism, slapped an X on the film before its release in May 1969. Joan Didion once wrote of Hollywood, “Much of what is written about pictures and about picture people approaches reality only occasionally and accidentally.” So it is with Midnight Cowboy, one of the classics of the short-lived New Hollywood era and the only X-rated film ever to win an Academy Award for best picture.