http://www.kansascity.com/mld/kansascity/entertainment/movies/13776005.htm (thanks to karind for emailing the link)
Posted on Fri, Feb. 03, 2006
Secrets from ‘Brokeback Mountain’
In a new book, author reveals love story’s inspiration
By TIM ENGLE
The Kansas City Star
Now that you’ve fallen under the spell of “Brokeback Mountain,” what can you do besides see the movie one more time and root for it on Oscar night?
For one thing, read the Annie Proulx short story that started it all. And if you’re really over the moon for star-crossed lovers Ennis and Jack (Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal), you can read the script. Both — the 28-page Proulx story and the adaptation by Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana (a St. Louis native) — are contained in Brokeback Mountain: Story to Screenplay (Scribner, $16).
Like a DVD, this book also comes with extras: new essays by the three writers on how the story became a film. Proulx, now 70, reveals that the inspiration for “Brokeback” was a 60-something ranch hand she saw in a Wyoming bar, a fella who seemed to be paying more attention to some young pool-playing cowboys than the women in the place.
“Maybe he was following the game, maybe he knew the players, maybe one was his son or nephew, but there was something in his expression, a kind of bitter longing, that made me wonder if he was country gay.”
Other morsels from Proulx (pronounced “Proo”):
■ She set “Brokeback” in the ’60s because Ennis and Jack “had to have grown up on isolated hardscrabble ranches and were clearly homophobic themselves, especially the Ennis character.” The story tracks them over 20 years.
■ Proulx, like many others, rejects the notion that “Brokeback” is a tale of two gay cowboys. “No. It is a story of destructive rural homophobia.”
■ Proulx did most of her “writing” while driving around Wyoming. The most difficult scene was the flashback moment, from their summer on Brokeback, when Ennis walks up behind Jack and holds him.
To summon the words she needed, Proulx played Charlie Hayden and Pat Metheny’s tune “Spiritual” from the album “Beyond the Missouri Sky (Short Stories)” over and over again. “To this day I cannot hear that track without Jack and Ennis appearing before me.” (Metheny hails from Lee’s Summit.)
Ossana and McMurtry sent a letter to Proulx after reading “Brokeback Mountain” in The New Yorker in 1997, and they set to work on a screenplay. The script floated around for seven years. Finally, filming got under way in late spring 2004 with Ang Lee at the helm.
Ossana, a producer on the film, writes that she carried a copy of Proulx’s story with her every day on the set. “Whenever I would feel exhausted or overwhelmed, I would center myself by rereading her story.”
The published script very nearly matches the movie word for word, so if you were hoping to run across scenes or lines deleted from the finished film — no such luck. Interestingly, one scene that is slightly different is the flashback Proulx mentioned. In the script Ennis sings a “childhood song” to his buddy.
Still, there are two good reasons to read the screenplay. The first is the descriptions of the characters and action, such as this one in the first scene: “This is ENNIS DEL MAR: about twenty, but nonetheless compelling, not light or frivolous in disposition, appearance or manner, uncommonly quick reflexes — a high-school drop-out country boy with no prospects, brought up to hard work and privation, rough-mannered, rough-spoken, inured to the stoic life. Has outgrown his faded cowboy shirt, his wrists stick well out of the sleeves, the buttons gap.”
Some of that is right out of the original story.
The other reason to read the screenplay? If you couldn’t understand some of Ledger’s lockjawed mumbling in the movie. His Ennis is a man of few words, and a few of those few words didn’t always make it all the way out.
To read Proulx’s story as it appeared in The New Yorker, hit this link: uk.geocities.com/glreaderuk/BBM.html. By the time it got to book form, Proulx’s 1999 collection Close Range: Wyoming Stories, she’d done a little tweaking, most notably adding an italicized prologue.
