Script To Screen: “Midnight Cowboy”

The last scenes from the 1969 movie Midnight Cowboy, screenplay by Waldo Salt, novel by James Leo Herlihy.

IMDb plot summary: A naive hustler goes to New York to seek personal fortune but in the process finds himself a new friend.

Ratso (Dustin Hoffman) and Joe (Jon Voight) are en route to Florida. However, Ratso’s health has been deteriorating…

Here is the movie version of the scene:

What strikes me the most is how Voight takes this scene direction — Joe sits stiffly, very frightened… reaches an arm and puts it around Ratso, settling back, staring straight ahead — and imbues the moment with such incredible emotion. You can just see the flood of confused feelings coursing through his body as he rides toward an uncertain future.

Of course, this reminds me of another ending scene in which Dustin Hoffman rides a bus:

One of the single best things you can do to learn the craft of screenwriting is to read the script while watching the movie. After all a screenplay is a blueprint to make a movie and it’s that magic of what happens between printed page and final print that can inform how you approach writing scenes. That is the purpose of Script to Screen, a Go Into The Story series where we analyze a memorable movie scene and the script pages that inspired it.

For more Script To Screen articles, go here.