"Desperate Souls, Dark City and the Legend of 'Midnight Cowboy' " opens with a closeup of Jon Voight's face against a black background. The co-star of the Oscar-winning 1969 film recalls that, after the last shot was filmed, he came upon the director, John Schlesinger, who was visibly distraught.
Asked what was wrong, Schlesinger said, "What have we done? We've made a movie about a dishwasher who goes and fucks a lot of women in New York. What will they say about this picture?"
Mr. Voight's reply: "John, we will live the rest of our artistic lives in the shadow of this great masterpiece." After a beat, Mr. Voight said to the camera, "I said the most ridiculous thing I could think of. But it turned out to be true."
"I found Jon to be incredibly generous and actually quite charming during the period of time we worked on that interview," said Nancy Buirski, the director of "Desperate Souls," which will have its East Coast premiere at the Hamptons International Film Festival on Sunday. "He really did come forward with a lot of his feelings."
The first X-rated film to win the Best Picture Oscar, as well as many other awards, "Midnight Cowboy" follows Joe Buck (Mr. Voight), a Texas dishwasher, to New York to make money as a hustler preying on wealthy women. Things don't go according to plan, and he winds up joining forces with Ratso Rizzo (Dustin Hoffman), an ailing con man who lives in an abandoned building.
When Ms. Buirski was looking for a project to follow her documentary "The Rape of Recy Taylor," she was considering two film-related books by Glenn Frankel, one about "High Noon" and one about "The Searchers." Mr. Frankel's "Shooting 'Midnight Cowboy': Art, Sex, Loneliness, Liberation, and the Making of a Dark Classic" had just been published when she was speaking with him about the earlier works.
"I asked him if any filmmakers had shown any interest in the new book, and that hadn't happened yet. I said, 'Well, that's what I want to do.' So it all fit together."
Aside from "Midnight Cowboy" itself, what attracted Ms. Buirski to Mr. Frankel's approach to his subject is that "he was also interested in the climate surrounding the film. I like looking at stories -- and this goes back to some of the films I've done on issues like race and Sidney Lumet -- where you put the story on a larger canvas. No great work of art happens in a vacuum. Sometimes things resonate more because of what's surrounding them, not just what's in them."
"Desperate Souls" is a fascinating look at "Midnight Cowboy" from an almost infinite variety of perspectives. Combining extensive clips from the movie with newsreel footage contemporaneous with it, clips from other films, and interviews with participants in the film, including Schlesinger, "Desperate Souls" places the movie in the contexts of the Vietnam War, gay liberation, and countercultural upheaval.
Among the commentators is Jennifer Salt, the daughter of Waldo Salt, who earned an Oscar for his "Midnight Cowboy" screenplay. Ms. Salt, who played the victim of a gang rape in the film, dated Mr. Voight during the shooting of the film and provides perspective on him ("he brought a lot of humanity to Joe Buck"), as well as the social and political contexts of the time.
Because Mr. Schlesinger was gay, homosexuality, from the repressive climate of the 1950s to Stonewall and beyond, is mentioned by several people. Lucy Sante, a critic and artist, notes that the cowboy-themed hustler is "a gay thing," but Schlesinger couldn't be explicit about it at the time.
Ian Buruma, a cultural historian and Schlesinger's nephew, maintains that his uncle was interested in "an unusual and tender" relationship between Joe and Ratso, not a sexual one.
And Schlesinger himself, in an interview recorded before his death in 2003, said, "It is a film about friendship and loyalty. And those, I think, provide it with enduring qualities I imagine, that have made it last for so long . . . It's really about the need for human commitment."
"Midnight Cowboy" was the first film role for Bob Balaban, the actor, director, writer, and producer, who is a longtime Bridgehampton resident. He plays a student who picks up Joe Buck in a movie theater in a scene that was controversial by the standards of its time.
Mr. Balaban says in "Desperate Souls" that "Midnight Cowboy" was the first film he ever saw in which New York City actually looked like itself. He also discusses how in large measure the Vietnam War "energized an entire cadre of young people." He maintains that the film could never have been made before the "wild and woolly" 1960s.
Ms. Buirski's films have been shown at festivals worldwide, and locally at the Hamptons International Film Festival and Hamptons Doc Fest. While she is on the Doc Fest advisory board, she is not an East End resident, but has friends here. "If I'm going to vacation anywhere, it's usually Sag Harbor or East Hampton," she said.
Her take on "Desperate Souls" reflects her feeling about all her films: "It really is about the idea of looking at something and what influences it and the influences that it has."
It will be shown at the East Hampton Cinema on Sunday at 8:45 p.m. and the Sag Harbor Cinema on Monday at 2:15 p.m.
