I have no first hand knowledge of Texas nor Wyoming accents. Here is an article about the dialect coach, Joy Ellison, who worked with the Brokeback actors that I found interesting:
http://smithmag.net/2006/03/01/brokeback-mountains-secret-weapon/And here are some excerpts from a blog (
http://www.obliquity65.com/?p=545) allegedly gleaned from production notes that address the subject:
Anne Hathaway:...Joy Ellison was wonderful. We would do exercises where she broke down all of Lureen’s dialogue into basic Texas syllables. We would say the lines together.
Joy Ellison: Ang and I spent a lot of time talking about the voices and the accents, because he was very concerned about the authenticity of this – as he is with everything. We divided the periods into three sequences, which was a challenge for the actors because shooting was out of sequence. They had to maintain continuity. We named the voices Voice One, Two, and Three. In one day, the actor might shoot a scene in Voice Three – the older, deeper, slower voice – and then the next scene might be Voice One, which had more vitality and was perhaps higher.
Joy Ellison: Ang’s attention to detail is phenomenal. Every so often [during the shoot], he’d turn to me and say, “Joy, was that a little thick on the accent?” And he was usually dead-on. It’s a rare privilege to find a director who’s so careful and keen about the authenticity of something.
Joy Ellison: Michelle Williams and I took a trip through Wyoming and Montana. We went to some biker bars, and I taped people all the way. This is [now] decades later [than the movie’s periods], so accents are a little watered-down, but you can still get an essence. When an actor hears a tape of a rhythm from a native speaker, we can pick out sounds and work on them individually.
Michelle was born in Montana and left at an early age, but she still has that background and so she has a good sense of the rhythms and quality of the speech. Like a lot of trained actors, she let go of her regionalisms to be more flexible in other things they’re doing, so this was bringing her back.
Joy Ellison: People often think Wyoming and Texas accents are the same, but they’re really quite different. But “get” becomes “git” in both. The Wyoming one has more of a rhythm, and it’s much more subtle; you put phrases together and sometimes make a bit of a strange pause where you normally might not. You never say “-ing”; you say “walkin’” and “talkin’” and “thinkin’” and “drinkin’.” The Texas one has stronger sounds and stronger uses of the vowels. This movie had a beautiful script, written very accurately, I might add.
Joy Ellison: Their mouths would be [closed more], which worked well for the characters and the whole feeling, because the bigger picture is an idea of people who can’t communicate. They are in a period of time where, there may be a sexual revolution going on in the country but in that particular part of the country, it’s a much more conservative, bottled-up, and uncommunicative society. It would be very difficult for people to be open and communicative about these things. Ang was particularly careful about all of it.