Midnight Cowboy - 1969

Midnight Cowboy Framed Art Print
16 in. x 22 in.
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Midnight Cowboy (1969) is an ultra-realistic, adult film (shot on location) with sordid, downbeat and serious content, from British director John Schlesinger, who had previously directed the widely-acclaimed Darling (1965) - with a Best Actress win for Julie Christie.

This film portrays the unlikely companionship and poignant tragic drama of two homeless, down-and-out, anti-hero drifters who are powerfully bonded together in a tale resembling Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men. With a misleading title for the morality tale about the venomous American class system, some viewers thought it was a western; in fact, the film's title expresses the code name for a "male hustler" - the self-professed occupation of one of the characters, a slow-witted, fringe-jacketed Texan dishwasher transplanted to the big, apathetic city of New York to hopefully become a high-paid street gigolo. The flip-side of this dark and serious buddy picture was its major competitor of the year, the M-rated, humorous revisionistic western/comedy Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) with its heroes Butch Cassidy (Paul Newman) and the Sundance Kid (Robert Redford).

It was notable for being the first and only X-rated film (its nude scenes and bold content - sex and drugs - were shocking for its time, but its X-rating for its initial release was later downgraded to R when the film was re-released in late 1970) to receive the Best Picture Oscar from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. It garnered seven nominations, including Best Actor (Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight), Best Supporting Actress (Sylvia Miles in an extremely brief on-screen role), and Best Film Editing (Hugh A. Robertson), and ended up with three Oscars - Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Adapted Screenplay (by Waldo Salt from James Leo Herlihy's 1965 novel). It was an archetypal film for the "New Hollywood" of the 70s, with its adult themes of alienation, sex and drugs, anti-authoritarianism, and a quest for freedom.

Jaws - 1975

Jaws Wall Mural
48 in. x 72 in.
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Jaws (1975) is a masterful, visceral and realistic science-fiction suspense/horror-disaster film that taps into the most primal of human fears - what unseen creature lurks below the dark surface of the water beyond the beach? The tagline for the tensely-paced film, "Don't go in the water," kept a lot of shark-hysterical ocean-swimmers and 1975 summer beachgoers wary (similar to the effect that Hitchcock's Psycho (1960) had on shower-taking).

The screenplay, mostly written by young, 27 year-old director Spielberg himself and Carl Gottlieb, was provided in part by Peter Benchley who wrote a trashy action novel by the same name (but originally titled A Stillness in the Water) about the fictional New England coastal town of Amity, Long Island - a summer resort that is terrorized by a menacing Great White Shark (known as the genus/species Carcharodon carcharias. Both Benchley's best-selling book (released in the winter of 1973-74) and Spielberg's film borrowed from various sources.