SLEAZEBAG HOFFMAN TOSSED OUT OF EATERY!
Went to Sardi’s dressed as Cowboy kinkster Ratso Rizzo
SUPERSTAR Dustin Hoffman looked so real dressed as seedy Ratso Rizzo for his role in the iconic flick Midnight Cowboy, he was kicked out of Manhattan’s classy Sardi’s eatery!
That’s one of the memories director John Schlesinger shares about the filming of the 1969 movie detailing the squalid underbelly of the Big Apple in author Glenn Frankel’s new book, Shooting Midnight Cowboy: Art, Sex, Loneliness, Liberation and the Making of a Dark Classic.
Just two years before literally getting the bum’s rush at the glittering nightspot, Hoffman, now 83, scored the first of his seven Oscar nominations for The Graduate, playing a clean-cut, upper-middle class kid.
But the method actor, who later won two Oscars, convinced Schlesinger he could totally play against that type — and be filthy petty thief Ratzo Rizzo — by showing up as the sordid, crippled character for a meeting at a Manhattan Automat.
“Hoffman wore a dirty raincoat and beaten-up shoes. His hair was greasy,” writes Frankel.
His shocking transformation won him the role.
Then during filming on the grim, garbage-strewn, crimeridden, bum-infested streets of Manhattan, Hoffman, still in his seedy costume, and Schlesinger took a break and went to Sardi’s, the classy eatery of New York’s rich and famous.
“Dustin walked in as Ratso, and the maîtred’ didn’t want to give them a table,” writes the author.