by Annie Proulx
Screenwriters almost always deal with adapting novels to film, and necessarily great chunks are excised, crunched, plots straitjacketed, dialogue transmuted into television-speak. This was different. Larry and Diana were working with a short story which came with a sturdy framework. But there was not enough there. I write in a tight, compressed style that needs air and loosening to unfold into art. They had to invent, enlarge and imagine. It was, in a real way, a collaboration. I began to wonder why movie people didn’t prefer short stories to novels, since the opportunity for original work is built in.
Over the next few years several producers and directors appeared on the horizon, but there were problems with all of them. Larry liked an interesting young filmmaker who had made a funny and original short feature. I met this fellow in Tucson and liked him, hoped he would understand the place and the characters. We arranged to meet again in Wyoming so he could look at the terrain and possible scene sites. He came with a photographer, advisor, location person and others. That meeting turned into something I think of as “The Wyoming Death Trip.” From the start, everywhere the tenderhearted city folk looked there was a dead animal. First it was deer by the side of the highway, then squashed rabbits on the tarmac. We stopped at a sheepherder’s home quarters. He was out with the sheep, but as it was spring there was a makeshift pen with a few dozen bum lambs in it. One of the film entourage spied a dead lamb by the side of thefence and freaked. He decided (erroneously) that the lambs were starving to death, and, a man of action, rustled around until he found a bag of feed, poured some into a pan and set it in the pen. Keith, the ranch hand showing us around, blanched. I suggested we leave the lambs, hoping the sheepherder paid to look after them would not pursue us with a machete. We went to an untenanted house that might work as Ennis and Alma’s place. But as soon as we stepped inside, there, near the hem of a long curtain that reached the floor, lay a dead mouse. We finished the day at a lonely ranch house outside Ucross called “the old Childress place.” Empty for years, the crawl space below was a haven for rattlesnakes, the interior home for other animals needing shelter. We looked into a dusty room with a hole in the ceiling where once the stovepipe exited. The Los Angeles people sucked in their breaths as one, for on the floor lay the dried remains of a rabbit, discarded by an owl. That was it. These urban people just did not get it that Wyoming has a lot of wildlife and that the wildlife sometimes gets dead. Animals and rural places were clearly alien to them, and just as clearly I knew they could not make this film. And I pretty much gave up on the whole idea. It wasn’t going to happen, because there were no producers or directors who understood the rural west, the rural anything. Old story.
A long time later Focus Films showed interest. That was encouraging, as they, in an earlier incarnation known as Good Machine, had produced the successful film version of The Laramie Project. I had met one of the people involved with that film in Denver one night, and we had gone up the street looking for a CD of Jim White’s “Wrong-Eyed Jesus,” which was a great favorite of mine at that time. So I was inclined toward Focus. They were suggesting Ang Lee as the director, and I thought, here we go again. Could a Taiwanese-born director, probably a thoroughgoing urbanite, who had recently re-created The Hulk, understand Wyoming and the subterranean forces of the place? I doubted it. But the wheels were rolling now. I didn’t know what to expect and tried not to think about it.
On a New York visit I met James Schamus briefly, and Ang Lee in a funky boÎte far downtown. I was nervous about meeting Ang Lee despite his reputation as brilliant and highly skilled. Would we have anything to say to each other? Were the cultural gaps surmountable? We smiled and made small talk for a while and then, reassured by something in his quietness, I said that I was very afraid about this story, that making stories sometimes took me into off-limits places and that I feared the film would not follow that path. He said that he was afraid, too, that it would be extremely difficult to make into a film. He said he had recently lost his father. I remembered from my mother’s death a few years earlier the vast hole in the world that opened and could not be pulled closed. I had a glimmering that Ang Lee might use his sorrow creatively, transferring a personal sense of loss to this film about two men for whom things cannot work out, that he might be able to show the grief and anger that builds when we must accept severe emotional wounding. I felt we both knew that this story was risky and that he wanted to take the story on, probably for the creative challenge and perhaps (though he didn’t say so) for the gasping euphoria when you get into unknown but hard-driving imaginative projects. However slender, there was a positive connection.
Later there were some disagreements. In the written story the motel scene after a four-year hiatus stood as central. During their few hours in the Motel Siesta, Jack’s and Ennis’s paths were irrevocably laid out. In the film that Ang Lee already had shaped in his mind, the emotional surge contained in that scene would be better shifted to a later point and melded with the men’s painful last meeting. I didn’t understand this until I saw the film in September 2005 and recognized the power of this timing. Although I have always known that films and books have different rises and falls, different shapes, it’s easier to know that in the abstract than on the killing ground. At some point I wrote a letter pleading for the motel scene that went for naught. It was out of my hands, no longer my story, but Ang Lee’s film. And so I said goodbye to Jack and Ennis and got on with other work.
Before I finally saw the film I had heard from Larry and Diana that it was very good, that the language was intact, that the actors were superb. But I was not prepared for the emotional hammering I got when I saw it. The characters roared back into my mind, larger and stronger than they had ever been. Here it was, the point that writers do not like to admit; in our time film can be more powerful than the written word. I realized that if Ang Lee had been born in Barrow or Novosibirsk it would likely have been the same. He understands human feelings and is not afraid to walk into dangerous territory.
Seeing the film disturbed me. I felt that, as the ancient Egyptians had removed a corpse’s brain through the nostril with a slender hook before mummification, the cast and crew of this film, from the director down, had gotten into my mind and pulled out images. Especially did I feel this about Heath Ledger, who knew better than I how Ennis felt and thought, whose intimate depiction of that achingly needy ranch kid builds with frightening power. It is an eerie sensation to see events you have imagined in the privacy of your mind, and tried hopelessly to transmit to others through little black marks on a page, loom up before you in an over whelming visual experience. I realized that I, as a writer, was having the arest film trip: my story was not mangled but enlarged into huge and gripping imagery that rattled minds and squeezed hearts.
The film is intensely Wyoming. Lee included dead animals and good fights, both very western. Although it was shot mostly in Alberta, production designer Judy Becker toured Texas and Wyoming, noting land-forms and long views. A few weeks after I saw it for the first time I was driving through the Sierra Madre. It was a windless, brilliant day, the aspen lit by slant-handed autumnal light; hunting season and time for the annual shove-down, when stockmen with Forest Service allowances move their cows and sheep to the lower slopes before the early storms. As I came around a corner I had to stop to let a band of sheep cross the highway. In the trees on the upslope stood a saddled horse, bedroll tied on behind, rifle in scabbard; behind it stood a laden pack horse. No rider in sight. I thought I would wait a minute and see if Jack or Ennis might come out of the trees; then I shook my head, feeling wacky to have tangled the film and reality, and pretty sure that neither character was going to show.
Aside from the two-faced landscape, aside from the virtuoso acting, aside from the stunning and subtle makeup job of aging these two young men twenty years, an accumulation of very small details gives the film authenticity and authority: Ennis’s dirty fingernails in a love scene, the old highway sign ENTERING WYOMING not seen here for decades, th
e slight paunch Jack develops as he ages, the splotch of nail polish on Lureen’s finger in the painful telephone scene, her mother’s perfect Texas hair, Ennis and Jack sharing a joint instead of a cigarette in the 1970s, the switched-around shirts, the speckled enamel coffeepot, all accumulate and convince us of the truth of the story People may doubt that young men fall in love up on the snowy heights, but no one disbelieves the speckled coffeepot, and if the coffeepot is true, so is the other.
Adapting Brokeback Mountain
Larry McMurtry
SOME THIRTY YEARS AGO, IN A COLUMN IN AMERICAN FILM, I posed a question: Why do great works of literature so rarely get adapted into equally great films? Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina has been filmed—not ineptly—several times, but the novel is immeasurably greater than any of the films.
In the column, I suggested several reasons why great writing gets treated—for the most part—so inadequately in films. For one thing, the knowledge that they are setting out to film a known masterpiece is likely to inhibit directors, to one degree or another. Then there is the problem of literary style, which, in great books, is often inseparable from the subject matter. Style and substance fuse so intricately that most directors will be hard put to find even an approximate cinematic equivalent to a literary style.
My own early picaresque novel, All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers, is a case in point. The book has great appeal to filmmakers. It has been scripted more than a dozen times; several eminent directors have approached it, only to quickly back away. Why? Because somehow the fun—perhaps even the essence—of that novel is in the prose. How on earth would one render its absurdist, frolicsome qualities on the screen? To date, no director has dared to take the leap.
In my column, I argued that flat, rather plain-styled novels, such as my own Last Picture Show, are usually better vehicles for adaptation than towering masterpieces. Of course, there will always be exceptions: the director George Stevens took Theodore Dreiser’s plain-styled masterpiece An American Tragedy and did it full justice in his own masterful film A Place in the Sun.
The exception to the strong book/weak film rule that means most to me and to my writing partner Diana Ossana is, of course, Annie Proulx’s great short story “Brokeback Mountain,” which has now been filmed—wonderfully—by Ang Lee. As adapters, we did our level best to follow the clear track of the story, augmenting and amplifying, adding texture and substance where necessary. Both Diana and I felt privileged during the entire endeavor: a literary masterpiece, but one accessible to the screenwriters and filmmakers, had come our way. What was there to do but be glad?
Though “Brokeback Mountain” is surely a masterpiece, it is also—fortunately for Ang—a very young masterpiece, less than ten years old, and, perhaps for that reason, less inhibiting to the director. The story of the long-frustrated love of Ennis del Mar and Jack Twist slots into the strong, long American tradition of doomed young men: The Great Gatsby, The Sun Also Rises, Miss Lonelyhearts and many others. Except when together, Ennis and Jack are very lonely young men. Though short in compass—only eleven pages in the New Yorker version—it echoes as powerfully as a high plains thunderclap.
I was the more stunned when I read “Brokeback Mountain” because I realized that it was a story that had been sitting there all my life, fifty-five years of which have been lived in the American West. There the story was, all those years, waiting in patient distance for someone to write it.
Now Annie Proulx has written it, in spare, wire-fence prose that is congruent with the landscape itself, and with the struggling, bruised speech still to be heard today across the north plains.
* * *
I have written elsewhere that the dominant visual mode of dealing with the American West, from the day the first painter set foot west of the Mississippi, has been lyrical pastoralism. Just find a mountain range, with a river running through it, and the cloak of pastoralism is there, either to protect you or smother you, as the case may be. Ang Lee is a reluctant, even an unwilling, pastoralist. He gets as much of the grit of the towns as he can into the picture, but since it is to the mountains that the two lovers go for their brief reunions, the landscape itself poeticizes their union more than the director would have probably liked. John Ford addressed this problem by making Monument Valley stand for the whole West—if he had to have a hill, he would make it a red butte, and the fact that Monument Valley is a landscape unique in the world did not deter him.
The photographic image that best illustrates the poeticizing strength of American West pastoralism is Ansel Adams’s Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico, in which a huge, splendid full moon rises over what appears to be a humble hamlet in New Mexico. But—one must ask—what about the people who live possibly ragged lives beneath that glorious moon? To see what the West has done to the people who live with its harshness as well as its beauty, you need to go not to the pastoralists, but—as Diana Ossana also suggests—to Richard Avedon’s great In the American West, a book of extraordinary photographs just now being reexhibited, in all their life-size starkness, at the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, Texas.
The West of the great mountains, of the high plains and rippling rivers, is very beautiful, so beautiful that it tempts many not to see, or want to see, the harshness of the lives of the people who live in the bleak little towns and have to brush the grit of the plains off their teeth at night.
Richard Avedon realized, as did Ang Lee in his turn, how seductive Western landscape can be. Who would not be seduced by that great moon rising over that crumbling village? Then, if you look a little farther west, there will always be the Tetons, and you are in the world of Shane, itself a story of loss and sorrow. Richard Avedon eliminated pastoralism altogether by shooting all of his subjects against a white paper background.
Ang Lee did not have that option, but he was well aware of the pastoralist danger when he came to film Brokeback Mountain: look too often at those hills, lie too long beside those rippling rivers, and you may think you are hearing a love song, when actually it is a death song.
Brokeback Mountain is a tragedy of emotional deprivation, as not a few western stories are, and the fact that Ennis and Jack and their families so often find themselves heartbroken in beautiful country only makes the heartbreak worse.
Climbing Brokeback Mountain
Diana Ossana
READING HAS BEEN THE ONE CONSTANT IN MY LIFE, AND MORE OFTEN than not a refuge: from chores; from people; from hardships of various kinds; from the random perversity of life; but mostly, from insomnia.
Insomnia has been a lifelong affliction, in that I’m incapable of sleeping more than four hours at a stretch. Reading in the middle of the night can be an indulgence, since there are minimal distractions: long periods with no parental squabbles, no younger siblings to tend or to torment me, no telephones to answer, no neighbors coming to the door, no work to start or finish. It was easy to become fully absorbed in whatever story I happened to be reading at the time, and to become one—or all—of the characters, to again experience feelings I had already felt or to live lives I might never have had the opportunity to know otherwise. Reading fiction is especially liberating for someone who struggles with expressing normal human emotion or who spends the majority of day-to-day life simply trying to get by.
So it happened that in the fall of 1997, while living in Larry McMurtry’s prairie-style home in Archer City, Texas, in the middle of a long, sleepless night, I picked up the October 13 issue of The New Yorker and began reading Annie Proulx’s “Brokeback Mountain.”
I was seduced by the simple lyricism of Annie’s prose and then startled by its rawness and power. By the time I reached the last words of the story, I felt, to paraphrase Annie’s own words, as if my guts had been pulled out hand over hand a yard at a time. This spare narrative about a doomed love between two unremarkable men tapped deep into my own private well of pain and regret, and I was weeping by the end, deep, gut-wrenching sobs. I got up, splashed water on my face, lay back down and fe
ll asleep.
When I awoke the next morning, my first thought was that my epiphany had been a fluke, one of those middle-of-the-night obsessive realizations that might never feel as meaningful in the light of day. I had to reread “Brokeback.”
That first reading was about the tragedy of Ennis del Mar, clenched and terrified, incapable of imagining a life different than the one he had chosen for himself. The second reading revealed to me more layers of tragedy—Jack’s wretched, unrequited love; Alma’s fragmented hopes and quiet despair; Lureen’s cumulative bitterness. I felt broken in two.
I sensed immediately that this was a great story with the power to touch many people. I felt it ought to be out in the world in some major, major way. I knew then that I wanted to adapt “Brokeback Mountain” into a screenplay. I hurried downstairs to find Larry. He had just returned from his bookstore, and I cornered him in the kitchen.
Would you please read this short story?
No. You know I don’t read short fiction anymore.
I know, I know. Just humor me.
My abrupt tone must have spurred him, because he took the magazine upstairs, came back down in fifteen minutes and admitted it was the best short story he’d ever read in The New Yorker. I asked him if he thought we could adapt it into a screenplay. He considered for a moment, and agreed we could. We sat down, wrote Annie Proulx a single-page letter and put it in the mail. I phoned our manager at the time and explained that we wanted to option and adapt a short story for film. It was a tragedy about two poor Wyoming ranch hands who fall in love in 1963, I said, and he told me to forget it—just forget it—because it would never get made. I recalled D. H. Lawrence’s “never trust the teller, trust the tale,” and I said please, just read the story. By the end of the day, he was back on the phone, urging us to write to the author immediately—which, of course, we had already done.