The general impression I get is that they are bouncing off the film, not the story. There's more, but that is enough, ok?
It would be interesting to take a poll, just amongst our Brokies here, on what made them a Brokie.....
Was it the short story, or was it the movie?
Because I had not read the short story until several months, and several viewings, I have no hesitation in saying, for me, it was definately the movie. The genius acting of Heath and Jake, the magnificent screenply by Ossama and McMurtry, and the overwhelming direction of Ang Lee.
To me, they made the story that I became obssessed with.
I have never been a fan of Annie Proulx, and have always believed she has the fan base now, because of BBM.
The movie was what introduced the story to me. Read the story afterward and while I liked it -- and liked it even better after hearing Rodney read it aloud -- it just didn't grab me the way the film did. I've occasionally run across fans of the story who rather look down their noses at the film but sorry, that's how it happened for me.
IMO, her remarks are more than a little naive. She's describing the experiences of a long line of writers whose work has been successfully translated to film; they often feel like that event has turned their life upside down. Margaret Mitchell, who dealt with this with both her book and the movie that followed, once remarked in exasperation that "I made Tara (in Gone with the Wind) up, but people don't believe that."
On one hand I can sympathize but on the other, this is a tiresome routine we see regularly: someone works their butt off being successful and then when it happens starts telling all and sundry that 'I'm a very private person.' WTF? ? ? ? That's admittedly more understandable in a writer than in someone involved in performance art but it's still more than a little self-indulgent.
If she's been getting inundated with fanfics, IMO it's understandable that she'd get pissed off after awhile. First, while I don't mind admitting that I'd love it if Annie read my own story, I don't know why anyone would think that she'd even be interested in BBM fanfics -- or that she wouldn't know how to find them if she was. And second, some of the BBM fics do go way overboard with sex scenes: I've read some that were generally good stories but I just started skipping over those parts. It's one thing to read a porno story that clearly isn't intended to be anything else, but when you have an interesting story and characters, the principals having sex every other page can get irritating and distracting.
Jean Auel (
Clan of the Cavebear and the rest of the
Earth's Children series) is known for that. You kind of get the impression that people in the late Ice Age didn't do much else. (Well, after all, they didn't have TV, or books.....)