Brokeback Mountain was a milestone in queer cinema and influenced several films and television shows to feature LGBT themes and characters. This neo-western drama had won three awards for Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Original Score at the 78th academy awards of 2006 but, sadly lost best picture to ‘crash’ which led to many accusing the academy of being homophobic. Even in this decade, it continues to be one of the most beautiful movies that showcase the trapped view of being an outcast in a rugged, heterosexual, homophobic world. So, simply calling it a gay cowboy movie would be cruel.
This forbidden romance, set back in a fictional Brokeback Mountain of Wyoming in the early ’60s was directed by Ang Lee. The story revolves around the life of two country boys Jake Twist and Ennis Del Mar, who find themselves in a complex sexual relationship that they did not understand nor can manage. As a movie with such raw emotion, it always left the viewers with a heavy heart and one big question, “is it based on a true story?”
SO, IS IT A TRUE STORY?
No, it isn’t based on a true story but adapted from a short story of the same name originally written for ‘The New Yorker’ in 1997 by Annie Proulx, who was trained as a historian at French Annales School. The story portrays not only the struggle of being gay in the early 60s but also the pain of not being with the one we love the most. Being a landmark plot and best of its kind, Brokeback Mountain won Annie a national magazine award for fiction in 1998. A slightly expanded version of the story was published in Proulx's 1999 collection of short stories, Close Range: Wyoming Stories, among the finalists for the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
Just days after its publication, Diana Ossana a screenwriter by profession, discovered the story, impressed by its beautifully written plot, she convinced her writing partner Larry McMurtry to give it a try. Together the duo approached Annie Proulx and eventually got her permission to write a screenplay for it. But as Ossana confessed earlier, the bigger challenge for them was convincing directors and producers to film this heart-wrenching story of romance., After so many downfalls, James Schamus the CEO of ‘Focus Features” optioned the film rights in 2001 and showed the screenplay to Ang Lee at the request of Ossana. Initially, Lee denied the project and went on to direct Hulk, and Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon but decided to direct it before his retirement.
The movie was released to critical acclaim, the accurate representation of characters, the legit selfless love, the terror of being caught and sheer levels of social issues made the viewers believe that it must be inspired by true events. But, Annie herself stated that “The story was not “inspired,” but the result of years of subliminal observation and thought, eventually brought to the point of writing” in an exclusive interview with planet Jackson hole in December 2005.
Apart from that, in an interview with ‘The Missouri Review,’ Annie stated, “I watch for the historical skew between what people have hoped for and who they thought they were and what befell them” (via The Missouri Review-1999).
To sum it up, ‘Brokeback Mountain’ is a well-articulated plot of Annie’s observations, the accurate screenplay by Diana Ossana and Larry McMurtry, the artistic direction of Ang Lee, and the astonishing performance of Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal.
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