Having proven his Hollywood credentials, director John Schlesinger took a huge chance in adapting the novel Midnight Cowboy, the tale of a Texas hustler trying to survive on the mean streets of 1960s New York. The film's boundary-pushing subject matter—homosexuality, prostitution, sexual assault—earned it an X rating when it first appeared in cinemas in 1969, yet it racked up three Academy Awards. By turns madcap and serious, and enriched by interviews with Dustin Hoffman, Jon Voight, and others, this account of how the film was made is also the story of a country and an industry breaking free from decades of cultural and sexual repression.