Brokeback Mountain: Big sky, long queue

While a producer and writer may wear several hats for a movie, for Diana Ossana it included reminding the art department to change license plates to indicate the picture truck that Jack Twist drives hails from 1960s Texas. The film she produced, and screenplay she wrote with Larry McMurtry, Brokeback Mountain, takes place in Wyoming and Texas and was lensed in Alberta in Canada.
Speaking to Ossana and McMurtry by phone on the day the Golden Globe nominations are announced one thing becomes evident, the news Brokeback Mountain creates has legs, and the last word will be months from now. Ossana and McMurtry optioned a short story by Annie Proulx that appeared in New Yorker magazine in late 1997 with the express purpose of writing a screenplay. They’ve been trying to get the script made into a film since then.
“We knew what we had in 1997,” McMurtry says. Adds Ossana: “Our aim was to keep the emotional power of the story intact.”
Brokeback Mountain traces the friendship of two cowboys, Jack Twist and Ennis Del Mar (Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger) over a period of approximately two decades (60s, 70s). Adding credence to the movie is Ossana and McMurtry’s sense of character and environment and the film’s odd temporal need, more than one time, to all of a sudden have the next scene several years hence. It’s dialogue sparkles with realism, sometimes the intimate and uncomfortable kinds of things that can only be spoken between lovers, or husbands and wives, all of whom are represented in the movie. “It’s an intimate story in a wide open space,” explains McMurtry. And there are plenty of big sky moments and American psyche perspectives, some of them landing on holidays like the Fourth of July or Thanksgiving.

Total gross receipts dictate a film’s perceived success. So Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith or War of the Worlds are the top grossing films of 2005 after opening on thousands of screens. Consider the amount of money Brokeback Mountain made playing at five theaters in its first weekend of release from December 9 through December 11, 2005: Over $547,000 with a per theater average of $109,485. Contrast that to that weekend’s topper Narnia on over 3600 screens with a per screen average in excess of $18,000. (At press time weekend, BM had expanded to 269 screens and was averaging $18,000-plus per screen.) Also realize that Narnia spent millions in media ads while all the advertising for Brokeback Mountain at that point was free courtesy of television and radio talk shows. The queues for Brokeback are not on Netflix but at the cinema.

If there is any formula for Brokeback’s theatrical release pattern it would not be the Million Dollar Baby keep mum until release style that Munich has used to good effect. Nor the Depression era Seabiscuit dog and pony show that Cinderella Man emulated. Brokeback Mountain mirrors the rise of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, which opened the weekend of December 8 through December 10, 2000 on 16 screens with a per screen average of $41,450. Both CTHD and BM are films directed by Ang Lee. CTHD was still in theaters 140 days later and had then grossed nearly $125-million. Look for similar numbers for BM in early March after any and all award and Oscar hoopla has subsided.

Presumably conservative critic Michael Medved was seen on Fox News using Brokeback Mountain as an example of how Hollywood has a hidden agenda to push themes like homosexuality. If only that were the case then pundits like Medved could safely shiver in his imagined terror. Yet the Hollywood perceived by some as pushing agendas is only about making money. If there was such a political agenda why was the film in turnaround limbo for many years?

“We always had lots of great response,” Ossana says. Within a week of their spec script hitting Hollywood they had calls from a can-do producer like Scott Rudin or a material-friendly director like Gus Van Sant, who was eventually attached to direct. That fell through and then Joel Schumacher was attached to the helm only for that option to run out. James Schamus, the film’s producer along with Ossana and also one of the presidents of Focus Features, the company releasing Brokeback Mountain, has been the force that saw the film to completion.


Brokeback Mountain seems to have a shelf life all its own, The storyline functions like a template that defines the person describing the plot. Is the film about a person who cannot understand or communicate his feelings? Is BM a gay cowboy film? Or is the real story more difficult to define. Jack Twist would be a textbook bisexual in any other context. And Ennis Del Mar could hardly be called gay. In his own redneck voice he demands: “I ain’t no queer.”

Make no mistake, Brokeback Mountain pulls no punches. Structure wise, the lovemaking or cornhole scene between Jack Twist and Ennis Del Mar occurs early in the film’s first act. Similar scenes transpire, also in the opening scenes, in Mala Noche (Gus Van Sant) and Happy Together (Wong Kar-Wai). McMurtry didn’t recall those particular films although he claims to see a lot of movies. “That scene is in the original short story,” reminds Ossana.

Regardless, McMurtry makes it clear that seeing another movie isn’t the way he writes. “I write about five pages a day, on a manual typewriter,” described McMurtry, adding he’s done by around 9:30 in the a.m., and it never takes him more than an hour-and-a-half for that many pages. Ossana than takes the pages, flushes them out, adds some text, takes some away and puts it all in a computer. “He turns it on like a facet,” laughed Ossana.