When the midnight cowboy appeared 56 years ago this week, it immediately hit higher mainstream Hollywood. The dismal story of New York's loneliness, sex, and survival is provided by its profession-defined performance.

Actor Dustin Hoffman admitted to the BBC in 1970 that he reflected on his performance as New York Grift Enriso Rezoo Rezo of the New York Cowboy, who admitted to the BBC: “I do have problems right now.” “I can see where I’m inconsistent in the role.”

The film, released in cinemas on May 25, 1969, will continue to win an Oscar nomination for Hoffman and his co-star Jon Voight, who plays a naive young Texan who wishes to become a rich woman.

According to James Leo Herlihy's 1965 novel, the desolate story of the loneliness, sex and survival of midnight cowboy is very different from the movie where Hoffman plays a breakthrough role. Hoffman plays a clean middle-class young man who just graduated from college and didn’t hit his director John Schlesinger, the obvious choice to be the dwarf street liar who plays the story.

"Jerry Hellman (producer of the film) has seen him in Henry Livings' drama, huh?, said next to Broadway, 'He's a great character actor, don't just graduates, you'd better go see him.'' Schlesinger (the area is mainly Italian, he blends so well with the background that by the evening, no doubt he's already got some of it."

But to play the ill Rizzo with disabled legs and tuberculosis, Hoffman feels he needs to continue checking the rush of the film while filming to make sure his performance is consistent between the two victories. He said on the 1970 BBC movie night: "I had to try to keep my posture, gait, walking, dialect. I was very worried about this wave." The actor later told Vanity Fair in 2000 that he ended up putting a stone in his shoes to make sure he would do it without having to think about the camera.

"I think the average person would see a job like this and think it's very difficult," Hoffman said. "But my own feeling is that Jon Voight's character is more difficult in the midnight cowboy because it's a little foggy and doesn't seem to have the advantage of a razor as he wrote, and he attributes to everything he brings to it."

Voight is also away from the scammers who caused him, as he eventually went bankrupt in New York and formed an unlikely bond with Rizzo. The actor was initially dismissed by Schlesinger, who felt he didn't see the role correctly. “We turned down Voight, a great actor from New York at the time, Marion Dougherty said, ‘You’re missing something, why not see Jon Voight?’ We said, “That’s not the face we were thinking about,” she said, “When we met him, we read a scene, “We agreed, he came in, he seemed very extraordinary in us, so we put him on the list of people we were going to test.”

But the director still chose Canadian actor Michael Sarrazin for the position. Fortunately for Voight, Sarrazin signed a contract with Universal Pictures, and when they tripled his price, Schlesinger looked at the screen test again. Voight who is willing to earn a salary scale - the minimum wage of the Screen Actors Association - is then cast. "His character and total sweetness and innocence, I think it's a kind of war," Schlesinger said.

Midnight Cowboys don’t seem to be the obvious contender for box office success. Schlesinger's usual producer, Joe Janni, turned down the project, warning the director that the film could ruin his career. But Schlesinger, who himself was gay, told the BBC in 1994 that he could recognize the story of outsiders struggling to survive. He said: “I’m not very interested in the disguised endings of people who are disguised.

Midnight Cowboy will flash back, reality and fantasy juxtaposes the motivations that drive their protagonist and has been edited as the cover version of Harry Nilsson. The song will become synonymous with the film, seemingly encapsulating the desire of its injured character, aimless and desire for a better future.

"I always play music in the early stages of editing," Schlesinger said. "I think it's not only musically and rhythmically, but lyrically, it has a great lyric poem, so we put it in the early cuts, we went to the music director at United Artists and said, 'That's what we want.'"

But an executive of a co-artist doesn’t want to use a song that has been published and thinks his feelings are easy to copy, instructing the filmmaker to work with a songwriter to come up with something new. "We all from Bob Dylan to Joni Mitchell, they wrote a song and talked too much," Schlesinger said. Dylan would eventually write the movie Lay Lady Lay Lay Lay, but it was too late to use it.

Schlesinger continued: "When we first showed the film to the publisher, we were chatting on it, the same guy stood up from the show and said, 'My God, where did you get that song? It was amazing.' We said, "Okay, we played it to you a few months ago and you said anyone could copy it." "So, he said, "Okay, we have to have it." ”

Since Midnight Cowboys have a clear description of gang rape, prostitution and drug use, they are always restricted to adult audiences after release. When the American Film Association reviewed it, it received a limited rating, meaning that in 1969, no one could see it without the accompanying adults.

But the studio's owner Arthur Krim was nervous: he consulted a psychiatrist who condemned the film's "gay reference frame" and its "possible impact on young people." Krim then ordered the limiting rating was not enough: Midnight Cowboys should be X-rated so that even if they were with adults, they would not admit people under the age of 16.

X-ratings (genres usually associated with porn) are usually the commercial death knee joints of mainstream movies. Many cinemas refuse to show X-rated movies, while many newspapers and TV stations refuse to open advertisements for them. But Universal Studios set the rating as a selling point and pays for ads: “Everything you hear about midnight cowboys is real!”

When it was released, the film became a surprise. It lowered the $4 million (£3 million) budget by 10 times and became the third highest-grossing movie in 1969. “It has received extraordinary reception,” Schlesinger said. “I didn’t realize we were sitting in such a successful place.”

Midnight Cowboys also received serious praise, receiving seven Oscar nominations in the following year. It will go on to win three Academy Awards, while Schlesinger won Best Director and Waldo Salt won Best Adapted Screenplay. The film also won the Academy Award for Best Picture, becoming the first and only X-rated movie. (MPAA replaced the X rating with the NC-17 rating in 1990.) Along with other contemporary films like Bonnie and Clyde, graduates and relaxed riders, Midnight Cowboy helped launch the new Hollywood sport, which would make our cinemas more narrative, morally more complex, morally ambiguity and stylistic, and narratively narrative in 1970, 1970. In 1994, the Library of Congress was selected as "Cultural, Historical or Aesthetic Meaning" for preservation.

Despite the box office success and wide acclaim at Midnight Cowboy, Schlesinger told the BBC that it hadn't been "unable" to produce in 1994. He said, "There is absolutely nothing to do, I will tell you the door."

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