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

Small Town America And BBM

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Karan13:
Hi there !
             I live in Birmingham England , i have never been to any part of America , been from a big city pretty much anything goes , i`ve heard that in some places , it was hard to even get to see Brokeback , i know some some towns are pretty religious is this so ?

Did you have trouble getting to see the movie ?
If so where are you from ?
I know the movie starts in 63 , but are things about where you live still similar ,? do let me know .

I usually post on ImDb so this is my first post here i`d love your feedback , Jack and Ennis struggle really got to me and hearing people on the IMDB board made me realise that in some places it`s not so different today. xx kaz

Phillip Dampier:

--- Quote from: Karan13 on June 02, 2006, 10:36:27 pm ---Hi there !
             I live in Birmingham England , i have never been to any part of America , been from a big city pretty much anything goes , i`ve heard that in some places , it was hard to even get to see Brokeback , i know some some towns are pretty religious is this so ?
--- End quote ---

First, WELCOME!!!   :D

I think in the United States, it all depends on where you live.  I live in New York, a "blue" state that tends towards the Democratic party.  In this area, Brokeback Mountain showed up at the local art house theatre, but it also had limited release in some of the small towns south of Rochester.  In the USA, most people see movies in these large "multiplexes" which can have 12-30 movie screens.  Many smaller towns have lost their movie theaters because they cannot compete with the multiplexes.  But for those that do have small independent theaters, BBM probably never made it to their screens, only because they show one to three "mainstream" films at a time, and BBM was not considered mainstream enough.

In more conservative states, BBM still made it to art house theaters, but probably not the commercial multiplexes.  Since theater attendance in this country has been dropping like a rock (it can cost $10US + per ticket, and if you want popcorn and a soda, please fill out this easy credit application because you don't have that much cash on you), theater attendance doesn't give the full story of a movie's success any longer.

Even in conservative towns, religion may not play as prominent a role as conservative political values.

The state of Wyoming (which is where Dick Cheney is from) is one of America's most rural states and although it has a Democrat for governor (who doesn't dare act like a liberal on anything), the state is one of four "mountain" states (Utah, Idaho and Montana being the others) that are reliable conservative states and were the last to send George Bush's poll numbers south of 50%.  I'd say the state is so rural that if you lived your life quietly and never made a "scene," I'd wonder if most people there would care what you were. 

nakymaton:
BBM was released like an art-house movie in the US -- it showed in three major cities at first, and then a handful of other major cities, and then expanded to smaller cities and to some small towns. I saw it about three weeks after it opened, but I had to drive for eight hours round-trip to see it. (Crossed state lines, saw a pair of shooting stars just before desert sunrise... it was quite an experience.) It played in my small town for two months, so when it finally opened here, there wasn't a problem seeing it. But this town was an exception -- I think it may have been one of a handful of towns used to test-market BBM in more rural communities. In some other towns, there were actually articles in local newspapers after the Golden Globes, explaining that the local theaters weren't boycotting BBM, and they would show it as soon as Focus made enough prints available. (But BBM didn't do nearly as well in those expansions, which were the ones right after Oscar nominations came out.) It did show in multiplexes where those were the only theaters around, but it didn't generally show in towns with fewer than five theater screens. If it had won Best Picture at the Oscars, maybe it would have shown in some towns with limited numbers of screens -- some of those towns still get movies really late in the release. But, well, that didn't happen.

The DVD was sold in Wal-Mart, which is the major discount chain store in small towns in America, so it's available to people in small towns even if it didn't show on a big screen. (And the Dave Cullen message board did a big donation campaign to libraries. The Wyoming libraries seemed really happy to get it, and it's now available in libraries in Riverton and near where Ennis and Jack grew up. Some libraries refused copies, a few because they disapproved of the movie, but most for reasons related to their circulation policies (no feature films, for instance).)

starboardlight:
I live in LA, so seeing the film was no problem for me. I was on IMDB pretty early on and as the film rolled out its release through the States, I was seeing people coming on to the forum posting about how difficult it was for them to see the film. That we know of, there were only 3 reports of theaters pulling the film from their line up, because of theater owner's "religious" objection. I put "religious" in quotes because those owners still went on to show films like Hostel and Match Point, which my any religious standard is far more objectionable. For small town American, it seemed that there was a lack of choices and opportunity to see this film, as the film ended up in the big cities for the most part. There were people reporting drive 2-3 hours into the city just to see it. Some even made it a whole day screening, going in early afternoon, and sitting through two screenings. Small town America can still be very conservatives, not only socially, but economically. As a theater owner in a small town, this film would have been a financial risk, where as some of the easier to digest films would be easy to sell to a limited population.

serious crayons:
I lived in Minneapolis when the film first came out, and live in the Chicago area now -- both cities in the Midwest. Seeing it was no problem in either place. But again, they're cities. And both extremely liberal.

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