There is a particular kind of Hollywood magic that cannot be manufactured, only stumbled upon — the moment an unknown kid from Yonkers puts on a cowboy hat in the middle of Times Square and becomes, overnight, the face of a generation’s loneliness. Jon Voight was thirty years old when Midnight Cowboy premiered in 1969, and he had almost nothing to his name: a few television guest spots, a Broadway chorus past, and one small film credit. Within a year, he would be an Oscar nominee, the most talked-about young actor in America, and forever linked to Joe Buck — the sweet, doomed, unforgettable Texas hustler who went to New York looking for love and found something much harder.
The Nobody from Nowhere
By 1968, the role of Joe Buck had become one of the most coveted — and most feared — parts in Hollywood. James Leo Herlihy’s 1965 novel had been optioned by United Artists, and director John Schlesinger, fresh off the success of Far from the Madding Crowd, was building his American debut around it. The part demanded the impossible: an actor who could be a male prostitute without seeming sleazy, a dreamer without seeming foolish, and a man whose body was beautiful but whose soul was bruised.
Bigger, more established names circled the role. Warren Oates, the great weathered character actor, was seriously considered. Michael Sarrazin, the young Canadian heartthrob, came close enough that for a while it seemed the part was his. And then there was Jon Voight — a kid who had been grinding through television episodes of Gunsmoke and Naked City, whose biggest claim to fame was playing Rolf the telegram boy in the original Broadway cast of The Sound of Music nearly a decade earlier.
Voight flew to London to audition for Schlesinger in person. Legend has it that he arrived carrying the desperation of a man who knew this was his one shot, and he played Joe Buck not as a swaggering stud but as what the character truly was: a boy in a man’s body, performing confidence he didn’t feel. Schlesinger saw it immediately. The director reportedly watched Voight’s screen test and understood that the actor didn’t need to act the part’s vulnerability — he carried it with him. Sarrazin was out. Voight was in. The nobody got the role that would define his life.
Forty-Second Street at 3 A.M.
The shoot itself was a kind of beautiful torment. Schlesinger insisted on filming on the real streets of New York — the actual Times Square of 1968, not a studio backlot. This was the Times Square of peep shows and hustlers and all-night grindhouses, the neon-soaked underbelly that the film was about. The production filmed through the winter, often in the dead of night, with Voight in little more than his cowboy costume while the temperature dropped.
It was grueling in a way that modern actors, pampered by trailers and intimacy coordinators, can barely imagine. Voight has spoken over the years about how the shoot stripped him down — physically and emotionally. He was living inside Joe Buck’s skin for weeks: the walk, the drawl, the way Joe touches his hat when he’s nervous, the way his smile never quite reaches his eyes. Schlesinger was a demanding director, a perfectionist who shot take after take on those freezing streets, and Voight — still essentially a novice at film acting — absorbed it all.
His partnership with Dustin Hoffman became the engine of the film. Hoffman was the established name, fresh off The Graduate, and he threw himself into the grotesque, limping, coughing figure of Enrico “Ratso” Rizzo with total abandon. The two men could not have been more different in approach or temperament, but on screen they created one of the great friendships in cinema history — two broken people clinging to each other in a city that wanted neither of them.
Everyone knows the story of the most famous scene: Ratso and Joe crossing a Manhattan street when a taxi nearly runs them down, and Hoffman bangs on the hood and shouts, “I’m walkin’ here! I’m walkin’ here!” It was unscripted — a real cab had blundered into the shot, and Hoffman’s fury was genuine. Schlesinger kept it in. That moment, raw and unplanned, tells you everything about how the film was made: the city itself was a co-star, unpredictable and dangerous and alive.
The X That Became a Badge of Honor
When Midnight Cowboy was finished, the Motion Picture Association slapped it with an X rating — the kiss of death in 1969. The film’s homosexual themes, its frank sexuality, its unflinching portrait of hustling: the censors deemed it unsuitable, and many newspapers refused to advertise X-rated films. United Artists made a bold decision: they released it anyway, without the MPAA seal, and let the controversy become the marketing.
It worked — spectacularly. Critics were ecstatic. Audiences, drawn by the scandal and kept by the artistry, turned it into a hit. The X rating, meant to bury the film, became its badge of honor: proof that this was real, dangerous, adult cinema. (In 1971, the MPAA re-rated the film R, an implicit admission that the original judgment had been moral panic, not criticism.) To this day, Midnight Cowboy remains the only X-rated film ever to win the Academy Award for Best Picture — a record that will almost certainly never be broken, since the X rating no longer even exists in that form.
The Music, the Walk, the Hat
A performance like Joe Buck doesn’t live on dialogue alone — it lives in the details, and Voight built Joe from the outside in. The walk came first: that bowlegged cowboy strut, equal parts swagger and uncertainty, the gait of a man performing masculinity for an audience that isn’t buying it. Then the voice — a soft Texas drawl that cracks whenever Joe tries to sound tough. And the costume, which became iconic overnight: the fringed suede jacket, the too-tight jeans, the Stetson that Joe touches like a talisman whenever he’s nervous. Nobody had ever seen a cowboy look so lost in the middle of Manhattan, and that visual dissonance — the frontier myth colliding with the urban jungle — is the whole film in a single image.
The music sealed it. Harry Nilsson’s recording of “Everybody’s Talkin'” — written by folk singer Fred Neil — became the film’s aching heartbeat, climbing to number six on the Billboard charts and winning the Grammy for Best Contemporary Vocal Performance. John Barry’s score, all lonely harmonica and shimmering strings, wrapped Voight’s performance in a sound of beautiful desolation. To this day, you can’t hear those first guitar notes without seeing Joe Buck on that bus, watching Texas disappear behind him, practicing the smile he’s going to sell to New York. The American Film Institute would later rank Joe Buck among the screen’s immortal creations, and the film itself was selected for the National Film Registry — the government’s way of saying: this one matters forever.
Oscar Night, April 1970
The 42nd Academy Awards, held on April 7, 1970, belonged to the little X-rated picture that could. Midnight Cowboy won Best Picture, beating Anne of the Thousand Days, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Hello, Dolly!, and Z. John Schlesinger won Best Director. Waldo Salt won Best Adapted Screenplay for his shattering adaptation of Herlihy’s novel.
And in the Best Actor category, something extraordinary happened: both Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman were nominated — two newcomers to the Oscar race, playing two losers on the streets of New York, standing shoulder to shoulder against John Wayne, Richard Burton, and Peter O’Toole. The Duke won that night for True Grit, in what everyone understood was a career-crowning vote as much as a performance prize. But the symbolism was unmistakable. The old Hollywood of Wayne was giving way to the new Hollywood of Voight and Hoffman, of street-level realism and moral ambiguity. Voight, the unknown who had beaten out the stars for the part, had arrived.
He also won the Golden Globe for Most Promising Newcomer, and the BAFTA for Most Promising Newcomer to Leading Film Roles — the industry’s way of saying: remember this name.
How Joe Buck Defined a Stardom
Here’s the thing about a role like Joe Buck: it gives you everything and it takes something, too. Voight spent the next decade trying to prove he was more than the naive cowboy — and he did, magnificently, in Deliverance and Coming Home — but Joe Buck never really left him. The performance set the template for what made Voight great: his willingness to be vulnerable on screen, to let the audience see the hurt behind the handsomeness.
Watch the film today and what strikes you is not the period detail or even the famous theme song, “Everybody’s Talkin'” — it’s Voight’s face in the quiet moments. Joe Buck on the bus to New York, practicing his hustler’s grin in the window reflection. Joe Buck in the movie theater, realizing he’s been conned. Joe Buck holding the dying Ratso on the bus to Florida, whispering to a friend who can no longer hear him. In those moments, a thirty-year-old unknown delivered a performance of such naked emotional truth that it rewrote what a leading man could be.
Jon Voight would go on to win an Oscar, to become a father, a political lightning rod, a television star. But somewhere underneath all of it, he’s still Joe Buck — the kid from Texas with the cowboy hat and the big dreams, walking through Times Square at 3 A.M., looking for someone to love him. And we’re still walkin’ here with him.