Midnight Cowboy

Spoiler warning: Plot or ending details follow.

Midnight Cowboy, starring Jon Voigt and Dustin Hoffman, is a 1969 John Schlesinger film, based on a novel by James Leo Herlihy, in which a naive young Texas cowboy named Joe Buck (Jon Voigt) comes to New York City to be a male hustler (a "midnight cowboy"). There he meets the scraggly Rico (Enrico) Salvatore "Ratso" Rizzo (Dustin Hoffman). Over the course of the film Buck slowly comes to terms with his sexuality and the closeness of his relationship with Rizzo. The film is the only X-Rated film to win the Academy Award for Best Picture (as of 2004, the only other X-rated pictures that have been nominated were A Clockwork Orange, which lost in 1972 to The French Connection and The Exorcist, which lost in 1973 to The Sting). Both Hoffman and Voigt were nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor, but they both lost to John Wayne, who recieved his only oscar for his role in True Grit.

The film has been deemed "culturally significant" by the Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry.

The film also featured the song 'Everybody's Talking', sung by Harry Nilsson.

The Muppets character Rizzo Ratso is a street-wise but pesky rat modeled after Hoffman's character.