With barriers at every turn, from an anxious director who didn’t want to work with the leading actors to disastrous early scripts, no one expected Midnight Cowboy to get completed – or be a hit. Jerome Hellman “helped steer the project through crisis after crisis, fudging on cost estimates, fighting with recalcitrant collaborators and surreptitiously shooting scenes on the streets of Manhattan to produce a bold, barrier-breaking movie that in 1970 became the first and only X-rated film to win the Academy Award for Best Picture.” – Washington Post