Making Joe Buck for ‘Cowboy’

Harrison Ford auditioned for the part of Joe Buck in “Midnight Cowboy.”

I thought about that when we rewatched 1969’s Best Picture Oscar winner the other night. It might have worked, and the universe might have been deflected, the course of history altered. Maybe Jon Voight would have had another chance to break through in some other movie, maybe he would never have been heard from again.

Voight seems perfectly cast as Buck, a naive Texan from Big Spring, one of those big small towns that arise every 100 miles or so in west Texas. He was acting; Voight is from Yonkers, son of the golf pro at Sunningdale Country Club in Scarsdale, N.Y. Most of the members of Sunningdale were Jewish, all were affluent.

Elmer “Whitey” Voytka — it became Voight later on — was a poor Catholic kid whose parents came from Hungary. He came to the club young, starting work there as a caddie shortly after it opened, and stayed there the rest of his life, almost 50 years. A very good player, he qualified and played in the U.S. Open in 1928 and 1929.

Whitey was in some respects raised by the country club members. They taught him how to tie a tie and which fork to use. He taught them — or tried anyway — to hit five-yard fades.

In 1960, at the PGA of America’s annual meeting, Whitey was one of the co-sponsors of a motion to do away with the group’s infamous “Caucasian-only” clause. The motion didn’t pass that year, but did the next.

It is worth noting that in the official history of the club, no mention of Whitey’s family is made. They just say he was “a wonderful person and classy presence around the first tee who set the standard for all around him.”

Which is only odd when you consider that Whitey had three sons. In addition to Jon, there was older brother Barry, who became a geologist, an expert on plate tectonics, rock mechanics and disaster prevention. He’s perhaps the world’s leading volcanologist.

Younger brother James initially wanted to be a professional golfer like his father, but he had some early success in the music business, performing in the 1950s as Wes Voight. In 1964, he wrote a song called “Wild Thing” and started calling himself Chip Taylor.

“Wild Thing” became a hit for the Troggs in 1966, and Jimi Hendrix recorded a live version in 1967. Since then more than 400 versions of it have been recorded by artists like Jeff Beck, the Muppets and the Green Bay Packers.

Chip Taylor’s Wikipedia entry might not be as long as those of his brothers, but his life has been remarkable. He supported himself as a card-counting professional gambler for years, is a member of the Songwriter’s Hall of Fame, and released more than 20 albums of original music. He still goes out as alt-country singer-writer Chip Taylor’s bass player.

So Jon Voight wasn’t Joe Buck, no matter how perfectly the character seemed to fit him. That’s a trick the movies play on us sometimes.

…

On the Criterion Collection Blu-ray version of the movie, there are a few supplemental features about Voight and the way he prepared to play Joe Buck. You should watch them out of order; first his initial screen test in which he’s peppered with questions by screenwriter Waldo Salt. (Salt’s daughter Jennifer plays Buck’s Texas girlfriend in the film; they were for a time an item in real life).

Waldo Salt is belligerent, insulting, goading Voight, in character as Buck, about his cowboy get-up. Voight responds in kind — he’s surly, and his attempt at a Texas accent is genuinely horrible. (In his recent book “Making Midnight Cowboy,” critic Glenn Frankel wrote that Voight’s “accent sounds like it’s stuck in traffic somewhere between Yonkers and Amarillo — it’s clear he’s never heard a real Texan talk.”)

Then listen to Voight tell interviewer David Frost about how he prepared for the role by going to Midland, Texas and simply listening (and covertly recording) real Texans. There’s more to acting than pretending.

…

Dustin Hoffman, who plays Enrico “Ratso” Rizzo, the polio-afflicted son of a hunch-backed shoeshine man from the Bronx, is from Los Angeles. Director John Schlesinger didn’t want him for the part — Hoffman’s only major role up to that time had been as clean-cut Benjamin Braddock in “The Graduate” — until he went to an off-Broadway production where Hoffman showed up disheveled with a scruffy beard.

Harrison Ford could have played Joe Buck — he flew to New York from Los Angeles on his own dime to audition, but Schlesinger rejected him in favor of Voight. (Ford had previously lost out to Hoffman for the lead role in “The Graduate.”)

Had he taken the role, Ford likely wouldn’t have considered playing Han Solo in the “Star Wars” films; he might have been too big a star. Or, having played Joe Buck, he might have been considered too “scuzzy” (a word that was popularized if not invented by Waldo Salt’s “Midnight Cowboy” script) for the relatively All-American spaceman Solo.

Voight wasn’t Schlesinger’s first choice either; the part first went to Michael Sarrazin, coming off his breakthrough role opposite Jane Fonda in Sydney Pollack’s “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?” But Sarrazin wasn’t willing to work for the bare minimum salary — $17,500 — the other major members of the cast had agreed to. Or rather Universal Pictures, which had Sarrazin under contract, was unwilling to agree to it.

Sarrazin would do the role for $50,000, Universal said. And filming would have to be pushed back; he had a previous commitment and would have to buy his way out of it before he could do “Midnight Cowboy.” Schlesinger wanted to acquiesce; producer Jerry Hellman insisted they take another look at Voight’s screen test, alongside Sarrazin’s.

Schlesinger still liked Sarrazin. A reluctant Hoffman was called in to offer his opinion. He’d filmed the scenes with Sarrazin and Voight. He said he could work with either guy.

But finally he admitted that, when he watched the scene play out with Sarrazin, he found himself looking at himself. But when he watched it with Voight, he told Schlesinger, “I found myself looking at Jon.”

So they went back to Voight, who didn’t believe them at first.

But then he went to work on acquiring a Texas accent.