Interview: Author Glenn Frankel on Westerns, John Wayne vs Gary Cooper, and ‘Midnight Cowboy’
In Maker’s Dozen, we ask folks in and around the film industry 12 questions and have them ask one of us.
Glenn Frankel is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, historian, and author of The Searchers: The Making of an American Legend, High Noon: The Hollywood Blacklist and the Making of an American Classic, and Shooting Midnight Cowboy: Art, Sex, Loneliness, Liberation, and the Making of a Dark Classic.
We spoke with Glenn about The Searchers, the artistry of High Noon, his literary-cinematic universe, John Wayne vs Gary Cooper, Billy Wilder, and more!
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
1. What’s the Glenn Frankel origin story?
I was born in the Bronx and grew up in Rochester, New York. I always wanted to be a writer. Eventually it occurred to me that newspapers actually paid people to write, and that if I didn’t get paid to write, I wouldn’t be a writer. My girlfriend got into a Teacher Corps program in Richmond, Virginia, so we moved there and I got a small newspaper job outside of Richmond. Then I got a better job and eventually I was lucky enough to get a job at the Washington Post. I spent something like 27 years there. I was a foreign correspondent, I was editor of the Sunday magazine, did a lot of stuff. Among other things, it was a great place to learn how to write.
I was very lucky to get that job, but I always wanted to write books. I wrote a book about Israel, where I was a foreign correspondent for three years. Wrote a book about people in South Africa, where I also worked for the Post. And when I left the Post and was lucky enough to get a job at Stanford University, I was thinking about what kind of book I wanted to write. I decided that, just as I’d done books about the places I’d lived in, I would try to write an American book, and The Searchers is what came up. Growing up it had been my favorite movie, and one of the greatest movies. It wasn’t just me, of course. Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, and George Lucas all saw the movie around the same time I did and it became their sort of touchstone movie. So there’s something about it, not just because it’s a western and not just because of John Ford and John Wayne, but because it’s really the combination of what a great western can be. I looked around and didn’t find any books simply about The Searchers beyond an academic work. So I thought, John Wayne and John Ford go to Monument Valley. That’s it. That’ll work.
2. The Searchers has a stranger-than-fiction backstory involving the Comanche and white settlers in the 19th-century American frontier. What’s the biggest lingering misconception about that time period?
Generally, people tend to look at our past and at the conquest of the west in American history as good people who set out into a very dangerous world and won, and brought our values and morality and our superior technology and defeated enemies, whether they be savage barbarians or bad guys out on the plains. The western is a great story of American goodness. And of course the minute you look behind the screen, you see all kinds of problems.
The Searchers is loosely based on the true story of a kidnapping of a young girl named Cynthia Ann Parker by Comanches in Texas back in the 1830s. In Cynthia Ann’s case, this was a woman who’d been glorified over the years, even by progressives, as a sort of great Texas woman. In truth, she was the victim of this brutal 40-year war between Texans and Comanches, a war that was very intimate and personal. They weren’t bombing each other with airplanes or killing with drones—they were standing in front of people, looking them in the eye, and shooting their enemy. Children and families and old people weren’t just the collateral damage of this war; they were the goal. This was a real war of civilization. It’s very hard to comprehend what that means and what it says about us and the people we ultimately defeated.
So my book didn’t become just a “making of a movie” book. It also reflected the time the movie was about and when the movie was made. Movies, I discovered, are a wonderful looking-glass into the past. And so I was able to bring my journalistic background and training to write a book that was not just about the making of a movie, but also about a story that gradually became a frontier legend and that’s been told and retold by every generation to fit its own needs and sensibility.
3. We named High Noon our #1 western. What’s something you’d notice about it only after multiple viewings?
Really good question. Because the movie is pretty tight and pretty straightforward, so the themes are out there in front of you. I think each time you see it the themes clarify themselves a bit more. The fact that the marshal is such a reluctant hero. He doesn’t wanna face these four younger guys out on the street. He’s getting older, and he really wants to ride off with his beautiful young bride, yet he can’t do it. He can’t explain it. He’s a taciturn western hero, and that becomes clearer and clearer each time you watch the movie.
Growing up I never really thought High Noon was a great movie. A lot of people didn’t really see it as a western. They thought of it as a social drama that just happened to be set in the West and people criticized it for that. But in fact, the more you watch it, the more you see the artistry of it. And as for the question of whether it’s really a western, I think that’s kind of silly. It stars Gary Cooper. It has Tex Ritter singing a wonderful theme song. It doesn’t have beautiful landscapes or Indians and cowboys fighting each other or some of these other things that we expect in westerns, but I think you’re well-justified in naming it the greatest western.
4. Your newest book charts the making of Midnight Cowboy. What was your favorite discovery about it?
I found out a few things that don’t fit the myth of Midnight Cowboy, and one of the most important was about the X rating. It’s the only movie to have won the Oscar for Best Picture that was X-rated. The rating system had just come in when Midnight Cowboy was being made in 1968. The movie comes out in ‘69 and the general thought was that the new ratings board had given it an X because it was just too adult and they couldn’t defend it, and that it was a cowardly act on their part. I found out that wasn’t the case at all. The ratings board actually had rated it R, but the head of United Artists, Arthur Krim, had been nervous about Midnight Cowboy. The gay sex scenes were a little uncomfortable for him and he was wondering how they might affect, say, young men. This was an era when the conventional wisdom was that homosexuality was a disease at best, and not only a disease but a contagious disease and that watching a movie could affect young men like me as a teenager then.
So the ratings board hadn’t given it an X, United Artists had, and then after the movie won Best Picture, United Artists went back to the ratings board. I know this because I talked to a member of the ratings board at the time who basically said, “Well, we’d already rated it R. Of course we gave it an R. We had no further discussion.” This was important to me because it opened the window on the question of how homophobia infected even the great liberal bastion of New York City at that time. It was an example for me of how the sensibility of the time and the movie sort of mixed together, and I think it helped enrich my book. And I hope for some people at least that offered a better explanation of why that was rated X.
5. The Glenn Frankel Literary-Cinematic Universe has now taken shape. What’s a common thread between those three movies?
I think the thing that strikes me is the great artistry and craft of people working on a great movie. I have no doubt I’m a believer in the auteur theory. I believe directors have personalities, and those personalities are certainly reflected in each of these three movies. But at the same time, what struck me was the collective nature of the work. Take Midnight Cowboy. You’ve got the great Ann Roth designing the costumes. You’ve got Waldo Salt, the former blacklisted screenwriter, writing a tight, beautiful screenplay. You’ve got John Schlesinger the director. You’ve got the talented actors, not just Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman—who I think are as good as any two male stars in any American movie—but the supporting cast is wonderful.
So I’m struck by the collective talent of artists and craftsmen coming together under a great director to put something together that is still enduring. We’re talking about movies that are in some cases 70 years old now, and yet they endure in large part because the people who made them really honored their craft, knew what they were doing, and really were at the height of their talent.
6. John Wayne or Gary Cooper?
Very different men. I would never choose between John Wayne and Gary Cooper, but I will say this: Gary Cooper is like a 19th-century western hero. He could be in a James Fenimore Cooper novel. He was in The Virginian, an early version of the Owen Wister novel that set a standard of iconic Western heroes. He’s a 19th-century man: pretty simple, straightforward, taciturn. John Wayne is very much a 20th-century man. Conflicted, angry, lashing out, uncomfortable in his environment. John Wayne was not a cowboy. Gary Cooper was from Montana and knew how to rope a horse. He was a real cowboy. That’s how he got his start in Hollywood, as a stuntman. John Wayne never liked horses very much, was much better at golf and football than he was at riding.
Cooper was a natural in the movies. He was a movie star by two or three years in. Never meant to be, but he just had everything going for him. It took Wayne 10 to 12 years of B-movies. He was even a singing cowboy at one point. To build that persona we know as John Wayne, that sort of crooked walk and the smile and the “punch in the face” kind of thing… all that’s a construction. Wayne honored his elders and was very respectful of Cooper, but Cooper had a little bit of disdain for Wayne. Cooper was real Hollywood royalty. Wayne became the symbol of Hollywood, but it was a much harder climb. I think Wayne is the one who lingers longer, in part because he’s more of a 20th-century man.
7. What’s an underrated western?
A movie like Stagecoach isn’t an underrated movie and yet it really sets the template for many things that follow. It really is a social drama and comedy in many ways. These different people in the stagecoach from different parts of American life who have to come together and figure out how to survive. I don’t think people watch Stagecoach much anymore, except film scholars. My wife, who is very cynical about these kinds of things, has come to love Stagecoach and The Searchers over the years—mostly because I’ve dragged her to watch them so many times.
“Movies, I discovered, are a wonderful looking-glass into the past.”
8. What movie would you love to read a book about?
If I knew what that was, I’d write the book. I’ve toyed around with it and I may come back to The Apartment by Billy Wilder. Just a beautifully made movie with a wonderful cast, wonderful writing, great direction. Very modern in its sensibility, I would say, made just at the pre-dawn moment of women’s liberation about women in the workplace and strong women who find their way through things even in that terrible era. It’s also just about the most entertaining movie I’ve ever seen. It’s funny but it’s serious. It’s got a lot on its mind. As Hollywood directors go, nobody’s better than Billy Wilder, and nobody brings the sensibility he does and the way to surprise you. I’ve looked at a lot of other movies about women in the workplace from that era, but none of them even begin to touch The Apartment for sophistication and insight and entertainment. So I may still write that book myself, but somebody ought to.
9. Describe your perfect day.
My perfect day is to read something that surprises me, do a little more research on things that I’m interested in, and do some writing. I’ve been smart enough to find subjects that are just so interesting to me that, it’s not that they write themselves—oh God if only they could write themselves—but they push me. So a good day for me begins with reading a lot of other stuff and then maybe spending three or four or five hours knocking out a couple of pages that I feel comfortable with and that I can then spend the next three months rewriting constantly.
10. What’s your favorite and least favorite aspect of writing books?
Well, my favorite aspect is when I’m finished. Sometimes I ask myself why it’s so hard to do this. Not the research. The research is great. The reporting and going out and meeting people and interviewing people and going to archives… that’s lovely. But writing is hard for me. It’s gotten a little easier over the years, or at least I’ve come to peace with it by saying, “Look, you’re doing this. You’ve been doing it all your life. You’re going to keep doing it ‘til you can’t do it anymore. Wouldn’t it be nice if you enjoyed it a little more?” I’m sitting up here in an attic. I don’t talk to people a lot. I’m working for myself at this point. So to hear that anybody likes any of my books for any reason is enormously gratifying, and I feel very fortunate that this late in my career I have the good fortune to be able to do these things.
11. If you had to change careers tomorrow, what would you do?
I would watch more movies. I would read more books. I probably wouldn’t do anything more at this point. One of my grandsons is 13 now and we’ve talked about opening a restaurant, but that’s all just a mythology he had when he was four years old. We were gonna call it Pig in the Face. I don’t think that’s a really practical path for me at this point. I’m in my early 70s and this is all I got.
12. What’s your go-to advice for aspiring journalists or historians?
Read everything you can. I didn’t study writing or journalism, but that was in a much different era. And it’s very hard now to know how to get into the business. You’ve got to be flexible. You’ve got to be prepared. You’ve got to understand the technology. We’re just in the beginning of the digital media revolution. So many more things are going to happen. They’re great opportunities, but it’s much, much harder to have the kind of career I had. So read the stuff that you want to do. Figure out why writers have written the books the way they have. There’s no better teacher of that than great books. Read Mark Harris if you’re writing about the making of movies. Read John Gregory Dunne. There’s so many interesting people out there. See how they do it and work at it. And then there’s nothing like the experience of doing it for a long, long time.
+1. What’s your question for us?
Why the western? I mean, what is it that resonates? This is a form that people have said has been dying out and very hard to get made.
(Chad:) Well, we come from a place of loving movies, period. So we’ve done several different genres and themes in the last year, and to us westerns are just another essential part of movie history and the movies we love. Our Top 10 list combines a lot of the classics with some newer ones as well, so despite the fact that their cultural imprint has been fading over time, they’re still part of what we love about movies in general and just another opportunity to talk about what we love.