1990 Directed by Eugene Corr, Robert Hillmann
Documentary is about the life and work of American screenwriter Waldo Salt who won two Academy Awards and was put on the Hollywood blacklist in the 1950s. The story is told through interviews with collaborators and friends such as Dustin Hoffman, Robert Redford, Jon Voight, John Schlesinger and with clips from Salt's films, chiefly Midnight Cowboy.
USA
Sundance Film Festival
USA
USA
This made me very sleepy, but it’s pretty good. Spoils Midnight Cowboy, though 🤠
Better than I expected it to be. Rather than being a standard talking head birth to death bio-doc (though it obviously does recount Waldo Salt's life, particularly him being blacklisted), it really gets into how he approached screenwriting, how he developed characters, how he would write visually for the screen. It also gave me a greater appreciation for Midnight Cowboy, a movie I've admired but never loved. I'm still not sure this should have been nominated for an Oscar, though.
6 /10
Included in The Extras of 'Midnight Cowboy' (1969), Criterion Collection #925.
Very good made for TV (but Oscar nominated) doc on the writer of Serpico, Midnight Cowboy and Coming Home, and who got a Sundance award named after.
It's captivating and even moving to see an artist who really did stick to his convictions at first; Salt was blacklisted, but didn't back away from feeling akin to Communist ideals, but did work on films, musicals and TV with an alias. But when he read what was really going on with Stalin and Kruschev in the mid 50s, he got disillusioned. That alone makes this story worth telling, and how he had to have a change of identity and purpose to not, well, write crap... That and learning about Taras Bulba, which Im kinda intrigued to see.
Oh, and throw him in with Gilliam and Welles as filmmakers who got obsessed with Quixote (to a fault)
A PBS America Masters episode included as bonus material on Criterion’s edition of MIDNIGHT COWBOY.
Muy completo documental acerca de la vida y obra del guionista Waldo Salt. Parte del material extra que engrandece la edición de Midnight Cowboy en The Criterion Collection.
Scavenger Hunt #79 5/31
“While I think you can learn things from scripted films, I have an affinity for documentaries. Watch a documentary on a subject you're interested in.”
Midnight Cowboy was just so damn good I had to learn more about this guy. His upbringing makes sense and I really relate to him. The desire to belong and interest in the military actually resonates with me as someone who loves the theatre. What a dedicated craftsman! Nothing special about the documentary really though.
I’ll be honest I didn’t know anything about Waldo Salt. Actually, I’m pretty sure his name had never registered with me, despite seeing his name on the titles for Midnight Cowboy (for which he wrote the screenplay – and won an Academy Award) a bunch of times. This 1990 documentary, then, was pretty illuminating, charting his life from childhood up until his death in 1987.
The list of contributors to the documentary is impressive: Dustin Hoffman, Jon Voight, John Schlesinger, Jerome Hellman and James Leo Herlihy – all significant Midnight Cowboy personnel. (Herlihy wrote the original novel and here he pays tribute to the way in which Salt condensed the numerous pages that ended the book into the wordless sequence…
Impactful and solid doctumentary. At parts had me quite emotional
