I "borrowed" this from a forum. Annie Proulx's comments
[Excerpted from Brokeback Mountain: Story To Screenplay]
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0743294165/103-6508445-9767038?v=glance&n=283155(This is highlights from a 10-page article in the book.)
Sometime in early 1997 the story took shape. One night in a bar upstate I had noticed an older ranch hand, maybe in his late sixties, obviously short on the world's luxury goods. Although spruced up for Friday nights his clothes were a little ragged, boots stained and worn. I had seen him around, working cows, helping with sheep, taking orders from a ranch manager. He was thin and lean, muscular in a stringy kind of way. He leaned against the back wall and his eyes were fastened not on the dozens of handsome and flashing women in the room but on the young cowboys playing pool. 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. Then I began to consider what it might have been like for him - not the real person against the wall, but for any ill-informed, confused, not-sure-of-what-he-was-feeling youth growing up in homophobic rural Wyoming. A few weeks later I listened to the vicious rant of an elderly bar-cafe owner who was incensed that two "homos" had come in the night before and ordered dinner. She said that if her bar regulars had been there (it was darts tournament night) things would have gone badly for them. "Brokeback" was constructed on the small but tight idea of a couple of home-grown kids, opinions and self-knowledge shaped by the world around them, finding themselves in emotional waters of increasing depth. I wanted to develop the story through a kind of literary sostenente.
As I worked on the story over the next months scenes appeard and disappeared. (The story went through more than sixty revisions.) The mountain encounter had to be - shall we say? - "seminal" and brief. One spring years before, I had been in the Big Horns and noticed distant flocks of sheep on great empty slopes. From the heights I had been able to see a hundred miles and more to the plains. In such isolated high country, away from opprobrious comment and watchful eyes, I thought it would be plausible for the characters to get into a sexual situation. That's nothing new or out of the ordinary; livestock workers have a blunt and full understanding of the sexual behaviours of man and beast. High lonesome situation, a couple of guys - expediency sometimes rules and nobody needs to talk about it and that's how it is. One old sheep rancher, dead now, used to say he always sent two men to tend the sheep, "so's if they get lonesome they can poke each other." From that perspective Aguirre, the hiring man, would have winked and said nothing, and Ennis's remark to Jack that this was a one-shot deal would have been accurate. The complicating factor was that they both fell into a once-in-a-lifetime love. I strove to give Jack and Ennis depth and complexity and to mirror real life by rasping that love against the societal norms that both men obeyed, both of them marrying and begetting children, both loving their children, and, in a way, their wives.
It was a hard story to write. Sometimes it took weeks to get the right phrase or descripter for particular characters. I remember vividly that, driving on Owl Canyon Road in Colorado down over the state line one afternoon and thinking about Jack Twist's father, the expression "stud duck," which I had heard somewhere, came to me as the right way to succinctly describe that hard little man, and a curve in the road became the curve that killed Ennis's parents. The scene for the kiss when Jack and Ennis reunite after four years occurred in its entirety as I drove past the Laramie cement plant - so much for scenery. The most difficult scene was the paragraph where, on the mountain, Ennis holds Jack and rocks back and forth, humming, the moment mixed with childhood loss and his refusal to admit he was holding a man. This paragraph took forever to get right and I played Charlie Haden and Pat Metheny's "Spiritual" from their album Beyond The Missouri Sky (Short Stories) uncountable times trying to get the words. I was trying to write the inchoate feelings of Jack and Ennis, the sad impossibility of their liason, which for me was expressed in that music. To this day I cannot hear that track without Jack and Ennis appearing before me. The scraps that feed a story come from many cupboards.
I thought too much about this story. It was supposed to be Ennis who had dreams about Jack but I had dreams about both of them. I still had little distance from it when it was published in The New Yorker on October 13, 1997. I expected letters from outraged religio-moral types, but instead got them from men, quite a few of them Wyoming ranch hands and cowboys and fathers of men, who said, "you told my story," or "I now understand what my son went through." I still, eight years later, get those heart-wrenching letters.
Seeing the film disturbed me. I felt that the cast and crew of this film, from the director down, had gotten into my mind and pulled out my images. Especially did I feel this about Heath Ledger, who knew better than I how Ennis felt and thought.
A few weeks after I saw it for the first time I was driving through the Sierra Madre. It was a windless, brillant day, the aspen lit by slant-handed autumnal light; hunting season and time for the annual shove down, when stockmen with the 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 a laden pack horse. No rider in sight. I thought I would wait a minute and see if either 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 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, the 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 1970's, 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.
