Midnight Cowboy--the first (and only) X-rated film to win the Best Picture Academy Award--is truly a movie that you couldn’t make now, and Frankel’s wonderful book demonstrates that you almost couldn’t make it back in the 1960s.This account explores how a taboo-busting novel about an unlikely friendship attracted an equally unlikely group of people--including a gay British director, a blacklisted screenwriter, the star of The Graduate, an unknown blonde, a  Fifth Beatle and a cohort of Warhol superstars—for a drama in a Manhattan on the verge of total collapse. Their stories and insight provide a fascinating glimpse of a time when art and sex and success and creativity were being redefined in ways that still reverberate today.