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Edge of Midnight: The Life of John Schlesinger: The Authorised Biography

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The writher Michael Cunningham (THE HOURS) said that seeing SUNDAY BLOODY SUNDAY "saved" his life. Peter Finch (on the same movie) remarked that when he did the close-up "liplock" with Murray Head that he just closed his eyes and thought of England. When Princess Margaret and her then husband Lord Anthony Snowdon saw SUNDAY BLOODY SUNDAY, she said within earshot of both Schlesinger and his lover Michael Childers, that she thought the movie was "horrific. . . "Men in bed kissing!" (This from a woman who had an affair with a man 18 years her junior and was caught on film topless with him-- while married to Snowdon.)This film, the director said was his most personal and was about his own affair with a young man; but he labeled THE DAY OF THE LOCUST his "greatest achievement, something that few critics, however, would say. Bob Dylan wrote "Lay, Lady, Lady" for MIDNIGHT COWBOY but didn't get it finished in time to be used in the movie. Schlesinger hated exercise and opined that when he thought about it, he just lay down until the moment passed. Although he lived for many years in the U. S. he felt that many Americans lacked manners, particularly when they went to movies. "'Audiences talk incessantly. . . They run up and down and eat all the time, because that is what they are used to doing at home.'" (We all can tip our hats to this gentleman for that attitude.) Mr. Mann's robust biography of John Schlesinger is chock-full of these and similar details. He had access to everything about this great director: tapes, diaries, family and friends and Mr. Schlesinger although only after he had had a stroke.

Although Mann's work is the "authorized" biography, he assured both Schlesinger and Childers that he would tell the whole story, the "low points and highs." Be that as it may, about the worst thing we find out about Mr. Schlesinger is that he had a temper and often screamed at actors. Mr. Mann most obviously is besotted by Mr. Schlesinger and why shouldn't he be? A lot of us are. When no one else was doing so, he directed films that we had not seen before-- MIDNIGHT COWBOY and SUNDAY BLOOD SUNDAY. Never before had the subject of men loving men been shown so naturally and without shame.

An astute critic, Mr. Mann gives his own reviews of practically everything Schlesinger ever directed: movies, opera, television. He attempts to be objective, noting in much detail the faults of THE NEXT BEST THING, the film starring Rupert Everett and Madonna. According to Mann, Schlesinger attempted to change the script so that the two principals decide to have a child, rather than having an "drunken, unplanned sexual encounter." He was vetoed by Mr. Everett, who gets to live with his bad decision. For years Mr. Schlesinger attempted to direct another gay-themed movie to no avail. He turned down directing Armistead Maupin's TALES OF THE CITY but for a time considered Larry Kramer's THE NORMAL HEART. He also toyed with the idea of doing something with the novelist David Leavitt, but nothing ever came of that idea. Instead the world got THE NEXT BEST THING.

This biography is a tad long-- over 500 pages and also suffers from too much praise from practically everyone Schlesinger ever directed-- Julie Christie, Sir Alan Bates, Dustin Hoffman et al. The list goes on and on. At times it's almost like the footage attached to DVD's where actors and directors "remember" making a film, etc. You have to ask yourself how accurate are memories about events that happened 30 to 40 years ago. EDGE OF MIDNIGHT, however, is still required reading for Schlesinger fans. And there are many of us. As Mann reminds us, this fine director gave us a handful of really great films that will not be repeated and several others that may not be his best but are much better than a lot of films by his contempories.

William J Mann is interviewing famed movie director John Schlesinger at his home in Palm Springs. John has just had triple bypass operation followed by a stroke which has left him paralyzed on one side, confined to a wheelchair, and almost voiceless. Although his brain is far from crippled and he can nod, shake his head, and sometimes answer questions in a brief, unexpectedly pointed whisper.

They spend their days together looking out at the mountains which edge the city, and William sometimes talks with Michael Childers, John's lover and partner for many years. Friends of John's occasionally pop in for a visit - Julie Christie, and Brenda Vaccaro, all tearful and upset at John's seemingly hopeless condition.

Mann uses this sense of immediacy to great effect in Edge of Midnight: The Life of John Schlesinger. Each chapter begins with a sense of how John is declining and how the author is racing against time to find out as much as he can. By interweaving the present with the past, Mann traces richly varied accounts of John's early struggles and glory days.

The end result is of man who has led a creative, and artistically fuelled life, with Mann offering a poignant contrast between the figure who sits staring at the mountains beyond the window, adrift in silent internal exile, with the sound of his laughter on recorded tapes. John's creative energy and intuition, his penchant for mischievousness and naughtiness, and his willingness to take risks and really push the cinematic envelope for more than twenty years, are highlighted with a candid and sincere accuracy.

And John Schlesinger also gave us Julie Christie, whom Schlesinger chose for the character of Liz in Billy Liar. The world of cinema would indeed by dull without the gorgeous Julie. Much of the narrative talks about the tremendous international success of Darling, and how the movie, not only cemented Christie's stardom, but also allowed John to go on to make even riskier movies.

Mann talks about why Darling was so historically significant and the part it played in the cinematic sexual revolution, which in turn greatly affected the changing sexual habits and attitudes in much of the West. John was determined to raise the bar with onscreen frankness, and he often found himself stymied by the Hollywood old guard who were determined to promise their audiences "real stars looking glamorous in beautiful gowns in beautiful sets, no kitchen sinks, no violence, no messages."

But it was Midnight Cowboy and Sunday Bloody Sunday that really pushed the cinematic envelope: Sunday Bloody Sunday, with film's first same sex kiss, boldly rejects "moral" judgment in its account of the middle-class London doctor and the professional woman's feelings and presents both kinds of love as equally natural.

In Midnight Cowboy, Jon Voight's naive hustler from Texas foresees a future for himself in New York as a stud for affluent lonely ladies, but failure plummets him to the city's harsh and seamy underside instead. Midnight Cowboy proved that films, which overthrew convention, that dared embrace radical form and content, could also make money.

Schlesinger admits that he wanted to tell stories that dealt with the human condition, human difficulties, and even the illusions of love. His films were all about adult themes - the difficulties of maintaining relationships, abortion, extramarital affairs, and homosexuality. He wanted to make films about "people pushed on to an edge," and also people who were regarded as the underdog, the outsider in society.

He believed that films needed to be relevant, and that they needed to reflect the changing society. He also wanted his audiences to think, but more importantly, he wanted them to "feel," be it terror or revulsion or compassion or pity. In later years when he couldn't set up the films he wanted to make, Schlesinger damaged his reputation, then his heart and his arteries, by accepting too many potboilers in the desperate, unfulfilled hope of a box-office success that would enable him to work on his own terms again.

Glenda Jackson had a filthy sense of humor. John played a terrible joke on Julie Christie, which involved a feminine sex aid during the making of Far From the Madding Crowd. Sean Penn, although enormously talented, was a nightmare to work with. At the last minute, Brenda Vaccaro refused to show her nipples when doing the love scene in Midnight Cowboy.

The Hollywood brass turned their back on John after the colossal failure of Honky Tonk Freeway, Rupert Everett and Madonna gave the poor man hell on his final disastrous movie, The Next Best Thing - Madonna begging him to do for her what he had done for Julie Christie, while Everett was more concerned with rewriting the script as they were shooting.

William J. Mann has indeed written a formidable account of one director's life, a wonderful patchwork of tidbits including interviews with the people he helped make famous - Alan Bates, Julie Christie, Glenda Jackson. Martin Sheen, Ian McKellan, and Dustin Hoffman.

What evolves is a fascinating biography of a man who desired success, and ambition, and even lots of money. It's a portrait of a tormented man who had a quirky pessimism not withstanding and lived a life relatively free of personal demons. Comfortable with his homosexuality, and totally committed to making movies, "his art came not from discontentment with life, but rather from a love of it." Mike Leonard October 05.

Edge Of Midnight: The Life Of John Schlesinger is the authorized biography of the filmmaker whose most famous works include "Midnight Cowboy", "Bloody Sunday", "Marathon Man", and "Day of the Locust". Written with the full cooperation of Schlesinger, his family, and his companion of 36 years Michael Childers, as well as with complete access to tapes, diaries, production notes, and correspondence, not to mention interviews with the actors, crew members, friends and colleagues who knew Schlesinger, Edge Of Midnight accurately traces the singularly amazing career of a dedicated and visionary man. Highly recommended for professional cinema researchers and intrigued lay readers alike.

Poor John Schlesinger. This gifted filmmaker never seemed happy, gave off more than a whiff of bitterness, and even seemed jealous of some of the people with whom he worked.

Most especially, the late Penelope Gilliatt, who authored his finest work, "Sunday Blody Sunday." There has been much misinformation regarding this film. Gilliatt was a brilliant film and theatre critic and a writer of fiction. She was orginally part of the greatly influential team of Kenneth Tynan and Gilliatt at the Observer (London). Schlesinger asked Gilliatt to write the sceenplay of Sunday Bloody Sunday. He thought she was the "right writer." Subsequently, the film was made and received rapturous reviews; it stands today as Schlesinger's finest work, along with his T.V. film, "An Englishman Abroad." The trouble started when Gilliatt received the vast majority of the praise for the film, back in 1971 -- I remember. Pauline Kael went so far as to say that Schlesinger had been inspired by the "delicate substance" of Gilliatt's script, which led him to do his finest work. (And Kael and Gilliatt were NOT friends.)
Perhaps, in addition to Gilliatt's brilliance as a fiction writer, Schlesinger chose the heterosexual Gilliatt to write the script because she had been a champion of civil rights for gays and lesbians in Great Britain in the 1950s, when she was only in her 20s, long before, say, Stonewall in the U.S.A., and fought so that GLBTs could have a place at the theatre and film tables of England under the repressive and homophobic Lord Chamberlain. At any rate, her much-honored script is what the film is remembered for. (Also, Sunday Bloody Sunday didn't get a Best Picture Oscar nod, whatever that silly thing is worth, not because of the subject matter, but because a major English studio was about to go bankrupt owing to the dreadful and dreadfully expensive movie bomb "Nicholas and Alexanda," so the Academy members rushed in to help, or at least tried to, with a Best Picture nomination for it to get the studio afloat.) On its release, SBS was not a commerical success.
Anyway, SBS was a major criticial success. The attention focused immediately on Gilliatt and her original screenplay. Schlesinger charged in one interview that Gilliatt had wanted him to film the scene in which Peter Finch and Murray Head kiss, in long-shot, with the two of them running toward each other in slo-mo and shot side-on. Gilliatt was a film critic of what has been described as sky-rocketing intelligence (at the Observer and at The New Yorker), who received threats for her theatre criticism in support of breakthrough playrights in England. I cannot believe that she ever, even once, suggested, as Schlesinger claimed, that she wanted Finch and Head to run toward each other in slow-mo longshot for their kiss. Read her dazzling reviews of Ingmar Bergman's The Passion of Anna and Face to Face to know that she was simply incapable of that sort of sentimentality. To my knowledge, Schlesinger never offered any proof of the charge, either. The problem was, as I remember the events, he and Gilliatt didn't get along and he simply seemed terribly jealous of the acclaim heaped on her. He called her an intellectual snob, apparently because she was largely self-educated and a genius. She had, according to her friends, a near-photographic memory, was the youngest person ever to pass the entrance exams to Oxford, spoke six or so languages, was a serious writer of fiction and criticism, and had a colossal knowledge of theatre and film. Schlesinger must have felt deeply intimidated. How could he hold his own with her?
The playwright Joe Orton, also gay, apparently had no problem with her erudition, as they were beloved friends, and Gilliatt had many, many loyal and faithful friends in the GLBT community. Anybody who has read her fiction will know the script is hers in its entirety, and she made changes only to repair some structural problems and to accomodate the line readings of the actors, with whom she worked closely throughout the film, especially Glenda Jackson. Peter Finch said her script was the most beautiful he had ever read. How all this must have galled Schlesinger, already a sometimes trying presence to those who knew him. At the end, he made one dreadful film after another, often blaming the result on the actors' interference, etc. In truth, Hollywood had become so infantilized that the work of serious filmmakers was largely abandoned long before Schlesinger's death. All the same, he made two magnificent works, Sunday Bloody Sunday and An Englishman Abroad, and one deeply flawed but beautifully acted film Midnight Cowboy. It's doubtful the rest of his work will survive. As for Gilliatt, her vast body of criticism (film and theatre) is used in university film and theatre classes around the world, many of her short stories will survive as masterworks of the form, her brilliant profiles of Bunuel, Godard, Renoir, etc., are among the best of their kind and will be read long after all of us are gone. And Schlesinger, apparently jealous to the end, will forever be indebted to Penelope Gilliatt for her contributions, and she made many, many more contributions to the film than her screenplay, for as long as he or his film is remembered.

I am lying in the sun in Hollywood and I have just devoured this splendid John Schlesinger biography. I recommend it to every movie fan the world over. It is a lovely book and worthy of its subject.

Being north of forty, it would be impossible to underestimate the importance of John Schlesinger's influence on my life as a gay man. Midnight Cowboy and Sunday Bloody Sunday were seismic movie going moments for me. Truly great movies in their own right, both have fully-dimensional gay characters as well as homo-erotic moments that lodged in my young brain and stayed. Jon Voight is a luscious Ken Doll in Midnight Cowboy. And Murray Head could be the poster boy for sexy 70's male in Sunday Bloody Sunday. Glenda Jackson watching Murray's perfect physique as he showered was thunderous for me because every day in Catholic high school I stood next to beautiful boys in showers and I couldn't stop staring and also could not forget none of them would ever be mine.

And thank you John Schlesinger for Julie Christie! The movie-going public will be forever in John's gratitude for giving us Julie.

They say that the music one listens to in our teenage years becomes "our" passion music-wise for our entire lives. Certainly, my life-long allegiance to Joni Mitchell and Aretha Franklin attests to that.

I feel the same way about Julie Christie. I was too young for Billy Liar and Darling when they came out. But both movies mean a great deal to me now. As do McCabe & Mrs. Miller and Shampoo and Return of the Soldier and Afterglow. I love watching this creature on screen. Julie is sexy to me even though I have no desire for her. And I am as much a fan now as I ever was when I first laid eyes on her. More of a fan probably.

Bravo to William J. Mann for painting a vivid portrait of one of our greatest film directors. And bravo John for your illustrious career!

Writing this book has been, obviously, a labor of love for William Mann, whose earlier books convinced me that henceforward, everything he writes is to be treated as the work of an immensely serious, politically committed and ethical scholar. And yet when all is said and done, and a hell of a lot gets said in this book, I remained singularly unconvinced. Unconvinced as to Schlesinger's talent--sure, he made some great movies, but he'd have to have made CITIZEN KANE for the scales of justice to swing back to normal in light of MADAME SOUZATCHKA or THE BELIEVERS. Unconvinced about the frame story, for it seems so pathetic to dwell and dwell and dwell on the miseries of Schlesinger's life after his debilitating stroke when he could hardly speak and seemed miserable in every encounter. Unconvinced even about the title, which seems to have been chosen to echo Schelsinger's greatest success, MIDNIGHT COWBOY, but in that acse why not just call it MIDNIGHT COWBOY? And then in the long run he seemed like a miserable man in every respect of life, looking back, he was never very happy nor does he seem capable of radiating either good will or basic charity. Added to this the contemptible misogyny which, in a Balzacian scene, Mann summons up by asking Schlesinger for his final, considered opinion of the late Penelope Gilliatt. It's unprintable here, and unpleasant even in context of whatever crime she was supposed to have committed.

Are authorized biographies ever a good thing? What's the point of advertising them in that way?

And yet taken as a whole the book is a splendid piece of work, and in giving us the extremely varied picture of a lot of filmmaking atmospheres, from the Angry Young Men scene of the late 1950s in England, to the New American Cinema that MIDNIGHT COWBOY may be fairly said to have begun, to a later day when stars and producers and test audiences made movie making difficult for directors, Mann excels. It's panoramic in sweep, extremely detailed. And maybe the "authorized" label encouraged many in Schlesinger's circle to speak with Mann, including--well, it seems just about everyone. A great story about Madonna's affectations begins the book, which I won't spoil here but it involves her belief that she had a shot in securing the lead role in MEMOIRS OF A GEISHA. Enough said, go for it!

Two lapses in sense made me doubt my hero Mann for a moment. In discussing the Austin Powers phenomenon, he pronounces that "We've come so far that rebels now go BACK in time rather than forward, when the youth culture borrows relics of the past and jumbles them together into a pastiche of expression and attitude." Surely this has been an attribute of youth culture at least since WWII? Blue jeans weren't invented in the 1960s, they were retrieved from a workingman's past in the 19th century.

And look at this sentence, which touches on the critical reception of MIDNIGHT COWBOY. "Stanley Kauffman in THE NEW REPUBLIC adored the film, using adjectives like 'dexterity,' 'intelligence' and 'perception' to describe John's direction." Okay, maybe I'm missing the forest for the trees, but on the other hand maybe "adjective" has a new definition: "noun"?