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Jerome Hellman, Producer of Midnight Cowboy and Coming Home, Dies at 92
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Jerome Hellman, the producer behind “Midnight Cowboy” and “Coming Home,” died on Wednesday, his wife Elizabeth Empleton Hellman confirmed. He was 92.
His work on landmark films helped define the new Hollywood of the 1970s. From 1964 to 1986, Hellman collaborated with notable directors including John Schlesinger on “The Day of the Locust” and “Midnight Cowboy,” Irvin Kershner on “A Fine Madness,” Hal Ashby on “Coming Home,” Peter Weir on “The Mosquito Coast” and George Roy Hill on “The World of Henry Orient.”
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/ Ratso Rizzo (Dustin Hoffman) sells Joe Buck (Jon Voight) on contacting a would-be pimp in Midnight Cowboy.
In 1969, an X-rated movie filmed in Texas and New York shocked the world when it became a sensation, capturing the number three spot at the year’s box office, and eventually winning an Oscar as Best Picture. “Midnight Cowboy” stars Jon Voight as Joe Buck, a naïve Texan who leaves his home in Big Spring to seek fortune in the Big Apple as a male hustler catering to affluent women. Things don’t go as planned. The hapless Joe strikes out time and again, winding up broke, turning small-time tricks on 42nd street. Along the way, he befriends a low-life named Ratso Rizzo, played by Dustin Hoffman, fresh off his successful debut in “The Graduate.” The two form an unlikely friendship that helps them survive the harsh reality of the big city.
Midnight Cowboy (1969).
Courtesy of United Artists Corporation
The film begins in a small town in Texas, where a young man, Joe Buck (played by Jon Voight), is dressing himself as a cowboy with a fringed jacket. He quits his job as a dishwasher and boards a bus, heading for New York City, where he imagines that he will be able to make a living selling his sexual services to rich sex-starved women. A series of flashbacks on the bus trip reveal that he was often cared for by his grandmother, Sally Buck (Ruth White), and that his mother and grandmother may have been prostitutes and also that he once had a girlfriend, Annie (Jennifer Salt). In New York, he takes a room in a fleabag hotel and heads out to cruise the streets, seeking customers. He meets Cass (Sylvia Miles), who takes him to her penthouse apartment for sex, but she is herself a call girl, and Joe ends up giving her money. Joe goes to a bar, where he meets the seedy and tubercular Ratso Rizzo (Dustin Hoffman). Ratso offers
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