1978
Midnight Express opens
Alan Parker's harrowing drama about an American jailed in Turkey opens in New York, winning Oscars and lasting criticism for its portrait of Turks.
On October 6, 1978, Midnight Express opened in New York, three weeks before Columbia Pictures sent it across the United States. The film had already played at the Cannes Film Festival in May and had set a Columbia opening-day record in the United Kingdom when it premiered at the Odeon Haymarket in London that August.
Directed by Alan Parker from a screenplay by Oliver Stone, the film adapts Billy Hayes’s 1977 memoir, written with William Hoffer. Brad Davis plays Hayes, an American college student caught at Istanbul’s airport with bricks of hashish strapped to his chest. A possession sentence of four years turns into 30 years for smuggling after a higher court overturns the verdict, and Hayes is left to endure a brutal prison until he finds a way out. John Hurt, Randy Quaid, Bo Hopkins, Irene Miracle, and Paul L. Smith fill out the cast. The title comes from prison slang for an escape attempt.
Permission to film in Istanbul was denied, so the production moved almost entirely to Fort St. Elmo in Valletta, Malta. A small crew captured background shots of Istanbul while pretending to film a cigarette commercial. Made for about $2.3 million, the film went on to gross more than $35 million worldwide.
Why it matters
Midnight Express was a major awards success. It earned Academy Award nominations for Best Picture and Best Director, and won Oscars for Stone’s adapted screenplay and for Giorgio Moroder’s synthesizer score, whose soundtrack album was released the same day as the New York opening. It also collected six Golden Globes and BAFTA awards for direction, editing, and John Hurt’s supporting performance.
The film is just as well remembered for the anger it caused. Critics and the Turkish government condemned its portrayal of Turks as uniformly cruel, and protests followed screenings in several European countries. Hayes later said the film depicted all Turks as monsters and blamed the screenplay rather than his book. Stone apologized in 2004 for “tampering with the truth,” and Hayes went to Istanbul in 2007 to apologize for the film’s excesses. In 2010, Hayes, Parker, and Stone attended a screening at a prison in Turkey as part of the Antalya Golden Orange Film Festival.
Did you know?
The film reached comedy two years later. The line “Have you ever been in a Turkish prison?” in Airplane! (1980) is a reference to Midnight Express.
