Brokeback Mountain: Our Community's Common Bond > Brokeback Mountain Open Forum

Why not read the original short story by Annie Proulx?

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TJ:
I have been distracted by involvements in other forums not even connected the "BetterMost" ones and I forgot that I started this discussion thread back in March.

Reading Annie Proulx's original story, Larry McMurtry's & Diana Ossana's co-authored screenplay and watching Ang Lee's movie is like reading Matthew, Mark and Luke in the Bible, which are called the "Synoptic Gospels," but reading them one at a time before comparing them. All three gospels are basically the same in a way but there 3 different tellings of the same story. Two of the authors were Jews and one, Luke, was a Greek. Then, theres the Gospel According to John and it has quite a bit of things that are not in the other three gospels.

Since I initially posted the first message in this thread, I have seen lots of still pics online which seem to imply that some of the stuff which was in Annie Proulx's story and/or in the McMurty/Ossana screenplay could have been in the movie but was left out.

While the screenplay and the movie had Ennis hitching a ride to Signal with a semi-truck driver, the book has him driving his own truck there. I have seen still pics of Ennis and Jack wearing the very same shirts and jeans the wore in Aguirre's office and they are leaning against a GMC pickup which we see that Ennis drives later in Riverton. But, the truck is parked on the grassy area between the highway across from Aguirre's trailer and the railroad track.

On one of the BbM forums which likes to brag, in words to this effect, that it is better than any other Brokeback Mountain Movie forum on the internet, quite a few stated that they did not like the book at all but enjoyed the movie very much.

And . . . , some people on that forum said that while they the movie, they disliked the fact that the music for the movie was either real country music or the sound track was country & western music influenced. But, the music genres in the movie go along with what is in Annie Proulx's story . . . (and even with what is in the screenplay, too).

FuzzyChanny:

--- Quote from: Aussie Chris on April 26, 2006, 04:16:07 am ---Was I one of the nit-pickers?  I agree, in fact I'm astounded that a short-story could be made into a screenplay and then into a film pretty much unaltered.  Has that ever happened before and worked as well?  Harry Potter comes to mind but I wouldn't say it worked as well?  In BBM, just about all of the dialogue is there, the nuances, the gestures, everything.  In my earlier posts I was just commenting that I was grateful that the film retained a subtlety that could have easily been lost with a lesser director.  So I'm right there with you on my gushing praise for both works of art.  They both give me pleasure in different ways, but in my heart they both are simply the story of Jack and Ennis.

--- End quote ---

BBM is a LOT shorter than any of the Harry Potter books.

Front-Ranger:
In my case I read the story in 1997, and saw the movie nearly 10 years later. I was glad that Lee excised the cruel treatment of Jack from his father because the excellent performance of John Twist said it all. But I missed some of the dialogue of Ennis that Lee/Ossana/McMurtry cut out, because the movie made Ennis into much more of an unattainable object of love and made Jack's situation so much more quixotic and heartbreaking. I even feel anger towards movie Ennis for leading Jack on through the reunion when he had no intention of following through. Ossana and McMurtry made the perfect decision to flesh out the supporting characters and women while leaving Jack and Ennis pretty much true to their story characters. In the story to screenplay book, McMurtry said something about short stories being more adaptable to film as opposed to long novels, where you had to spend most of your time figuring out what to cut.

Jeff Wrangler:
I think somewhere Annie Proulx once said something like, "You can't have Ennis without Jack," and you sure can't have this movie without the short story.

At one level, that's obvious: No story in the first place, then no movie to be made from it. And what astonished me most about the film at my first viewing was how faithful it was to the original story. Even the characters created by McMurtry and Ossana to open up the story, sometimes (as in the case of Cassie) based on less than a complete sentence of Annie Proulx's original prose, were entirely plausible and worked very well.

I understand the position that the film and the story are two different works of art, but I still feel that anyone who refuses to take the story with him or her in attempting to understand the film does himself or herself a disservice, because sometimes in the dialectic of comparing the two, enlightenment can be found.

Someone on this thread mentioned Annie Proulx's essay in Story to Screenplay. I also heartily recommend Diana Ossana's essay in the same book. I found it very helpful in formulating my own conclusions about the movie.

TJ:
I hope this area of the forums is a place where I have a right to voice my opinion without people telling me that I have to right to one because I am not from the big city or another country like in other forums not connected with bettermost.net. In what went on in those other forums, I was reminde of the country singer, Toby Keith, who claimed that the Dixie Chicks ladies did not have a right to freedom of speech because he wrote songs and they didn't.

In some cases, the screenplay writers (SW) took what was merely mentioned and created one of more scenes based on that.

Why the SW people decided that Jack Twist would be hired by his father-in-law makes no sense at all.

In the book, when Jack complained in 1967 about getting no financial help from Lureen's NO NAME father in the first place. Jack did not even work for the company until after the man who hated Jack's guts was dead.

Consider the ages of Jack's son when he is talked about in the book. The boy is 8 months old when he is first mentioned and then the next time Jack talks about him, he is 15 years old and has a learning problem.

In my opinion, if the screenplay writers had actually really been true to the original story, they would not have merely tried to keep the "spirit of the story" by adding their own spin to it.

In a Time Magazine interview, Larry McMurtry admitted adding women to the story because he likes women and think women understand men better than men understand themselves.

I have observed that while some women have special gifts when understanding some things about men, most of them really have little understanding when it comes to men who are exclusively homosexual in their sexual orientation. I have met heterosexual women who were professional therapists and the reason they had an understanding of gay men was due to what they learned mostly from a gay brother or son.

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