Cinema Speculation

*The filmmaker Paul Williams was a real exciting talent during this era of independent filmmaking. His Long Island set high school film, Out of It, starring Barry Gordon and a pre–Midnight Cowboy Jon Voight, is a charming trifle that surprisingly springs a powerhouse ending on its unsuspecting audience. Voight, post–Midnight Cowboy, joined him again when he starred in his interesting The Revolutionary (which also included Jennifer Salt). At one point, during the early stages of Mean Streets (which Ed Pressman almost produced), Martin Scorsese tried to get Voight to star in the picture, playing the role that Harvey Keitel ended up essaying. In his attempt to court Voight, Scorsese even cast David Proval and Richard Romanus, two actors he met in Voight’s Los Angeles acting class.

I asked Martin why, ultimately, didn’t Voight do it?

He told me, “Jon Voight was a really wonderful actor and so we talked about it for quite awhile. And he was really starting to think about it. After Midnight Cowboy [Voight] was a major star and to be in a film that, at that point, [Jonathan] Taplin [the producer] had gotten about $650,000 to make, it just didn’t seem like the milieu was right. Besides, at that time he was working with a guy named Paul Williams. He was Paul’s guy. If he was going to do a low-budget independent feature, it would have been with Paul.”