By Vanessa Zimmer
For Waldo Salt, writing a screenplay wasn't about crafting a clever or witty piece of dialogue - although he could certainly do that. It was about writing in images, almost like composing poetry.
That's not too surprising, considering he wrote the powerful scripts for Midnight Cowboy (1969) and Coming Home (1978), both of which won him Oscars, as well as Serpico (1973) and many others. His legacy - he died in 1987 - is recognized with the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award, presented every year since 1991 at the Sundance Film Festival.
His was not a legacy easily won, as told in Waldo Salt: A Screenwriter's Journey, which played at the 1990 Festival. Unlike so many others, Salt returned successfully to the film industry following an 11-year absence after being blacklisted for belonging to the Communist Party during the McCarthy witch hunts of the 1950s. During that absence, he kept afloat by writing under a pseudonym, outside the hub of the industry, mostly for television and commercials.
He had debuted in 1938 at just 24 years of age with the screenplay for Shopworn Angel, with Jimmy Stewart and Margaret Sullavan, and followed with a bevy of projects, including Rachel and the Stranger, with Loretta Young, Robert Mitchum and William Holden, and The Flame and the Arrow, with Burt Lancaster and Virginia Mayo.
The blacklist experience profoundly affected his life, according to the documentary, endowing him the interest and introspection to develop characters rejected by society as outsiders, who were stubborn and eccentric, and who dared to suggest that the American dream was not perfect.
As John Schlesinger, the director of Midnight Cowboy, put it: Salt took his anger and turned it into wisdom. Midnight Cowboy is the story of the relationship built on the streets of New York City between a wannabe street hustler from Texas (Jon Voight) and an ailing con man (Dustin Hoffman).
North America Stories
19/03/2026
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By Vanessa Zimmer
