One of the things I find particularly interesting about the whole BBM experience is that I totally separate the movie and the story.
Every other book I have read that has been made into a movie, I think of it that way--> book-->movie. I compare the movie against the book the vast majority of the time, the movie falls short. I always like the book better.
But BBM...there is the story, which I read and enjoyed. I only read it a few weeks before I saw the movie, actually. I don't have a subscription the the New Yorker so I missed it in 1997. But in the first few weeks of the BBM hubbub, the story was still online at the New Yorker and I read it there.
I really liked the story. I thought it was really really good.
Then I went and saw the movie, which as everyone here knows, was one of those events that knocked my socks off.
For the first few weeks afterwards, I went through that phase of comparing Movie!Ennis with Story!Ennis, Movie!Jack with Story!Jack but then...I realized that was not helpful to me. I came to the conclusion that there is BBM the story, and BBM the movie. Then there is the aftermath of BBM (which we are living here). That is why I refer to it as "the experience" of BBM--it is the totality of all of it, which includes making new friends, for me, beginning writing, and so on. For me, BBM has become much more than a story or a movie.
I liked the comment that someone made that the screenplay was the first fanfic.
Leslie