Hey gang !!
I've posted this as a thread on the 'old' IMDb board. But I know that most of the veterans are here.
It's been mentioned in passing, but surely the First Anniversary of the world premiere showing of Brokeback Mountain deserves some recognition in a post of its own - and I admit it, I'm feeling an intense nostalgia.
It was one year ago this weekend, Friday, September 2 when it was first shown publicly at the Venice Film Festival. The rapture and intense interest with which it was received was duly noted in several wire press releases and the beginning of the immense avalanche of praise, tributes, and accolades which the film was to receive was initiated. It when on to win the coveted top prize of the Festival, the Golden Lion a few days later. On September 10 it had its North American premiere at the Toronto Film Festival to an equal amount of acclaim.
The rest of us familiar with the short story, waiting in keen anticipation for the film's release had to wait until December 9, at least those lucky enough to live in New York, San Francisco and LA for the tri-cities limited release and December 16 in a few more centres, Toronto and Vancouver on the Canadian front.
I was one of those, least fortunate I felt, who had to wait for the film's release in Alberta on December 23, the glacial pace of the film's release creating in me an inverse untold amount of excitement as accolade upon accolade was heaped upon the film.
It's a little known fact that there was an intermediate showing in November in Calgary of all places. Ang Lee, and several of the producers snuck into town on November 15 to screen the film for the local crew, extras, actors and production staff as a special gift and tribute to them, feeling they had given themselves totally to the film, championing its subject matter and immense innovative theme with their dedication, making it, Ang Lee declared fondly, his happiest and most rewarding experience ever working on a film. The screening was arranged, but, apparently, the presence of Ang Lee was left a secret.
According to the newspaper reports when the final credits came up the gathered partisan audience broke into massive applause at his end title and especially, it was reported, at Heath Ledger's. When Ang Lee himself walked into the room and was introduced as the lights came up the place erupted. A love-in all around.
But, I stray -- this post is to pay tribute to the First Anniversary of the release to the world of a film which has moved so many of us, confusing and bewildering us with its grip on our emotional and thoughtful lives.
It's nostalgic and touching to read the following Associated Press account of the film's first screening, in all of its naivite with the writer obviously not quite knowing what to make of the film. But the world would catch up --- How far we've come since witnessing Brokeback's tiny baby steps ---
Sep 2, 12:16 PM EDT
Kung Fu Oscar-Winner Tackles Other Genre
By FRANCES D'EMILIO
Associated Press Writer
VENICE, Italy (AP) -- Ang Lee, the Taiwanese-born director of mega-hit "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon," has leaped into another genre, the American western, but his "Brokeback Mountain" is no classic cowboy tale.
His new film, with hot young male stars Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal, has sweeping Western vistas, lonesome roads, lonesome men, bucking broncos, smoldering campfires and as many sheep as can fit on a screen. It also has explosive sex scenes between two men whose lives are changed, disturbed and entwined after being hired as sheep tenders for a summer in the Wyoming back country in the early 1960s.
Lee knows he was treading on delicate ground in two ways: making a Western outside the conventional formulas, and telling a romance outside social conventions.
"The love story has good vibes. I hope it will penetrate prejudices," Lee told reporters Friday, a few hours before the premiere to the public of the movie at the Venice Film Festival.
Setting the story in the 1960s in the conservative West "helped set up the obstacles, especially to gay love, affection."
Lee said that more difficult than interpreting a love story between men - virile cowboys at that - was getting beyond cliche perceptions about the American West.
"My biggest enemy was the (cowboy) movie genre which was invented," said the director, who met with ranch hands and cowboys in preparing his work.
The sexual, romantic story is stitched onto an authentic rendering of small town, often bleak, American West lives, complete with people who also eke out a living stocking grocery shelves and not just by lassoing steers.
The stars spoke openly of their nervousness of having to make love on the screen - the first sex scene is a sudden rush of passion in a tent on a frigid hillside.
"I just knew that the theme of sexuality would be secondary and that the primary theme would be that of love...the real idea of love, not cliche. I knew Ang would protect us," said Gyllenhaal.
Ledger told APTN: "I was really lucky that my character was uncomfortable with it and knew it too. So I could use my own level of discomfort, because it was new and strange for me, and that worked for me."
Said Gyllenhaal in the APTN interview: "When it came time to doing it, it was, like, 'Are you ready?' 'Yeah, are you ready?' and then 'Jump.'"
"There was definitely anxiety involved," Gyllenhaal recalled.
The film by the maker of Oscar winner "Crouching Tiger," the most popular foreign film in U.S. history, is one of 19 contenders for the Golden Lion, the top festival prize which will be awarded on Sept. 10, the closing day.
The film is based on the 1997 short story in the New Yorker by Annie Prouxl.
"Brokeback Mountain" cowboys cry, trade bloody punches, marry, have children, dance to country music, swig from the bottle and wrestle with what is true and what lies they can live with.
Across a span of a generation, Ledger, as man of few words Ennis Del Mar, and Jake Gyllenhaal (of cult classic "Donnie Darko" fame), as ex-rodeo rider Jack Twist, keep their bond. But one is more willing than the other to risk bucking conventions, and the emotional and psychological toll of that unevenness lends the story a workable tension.
Asked about homophobia, producer James Schamus said the film was not made to be a political statement.
"We are using the codes and conventions of romance that are applied to straight people," Schamus said.
That "Brokeback" is about love between two men "makes it all the more romantic, if you're willing to take that fall," said Lee.
The movie lasts 2 hours and 15 minutes, with a lot of that time, it seems, spent on the men's packing for the old-fishing-buddy trips they tell their wives they are taking.
The majestic mountain that becomes a kind of "Same Time, Next Year" rendezvous venue for the cowboys is actually in western Canada, and not in the Wyoming Big Horn Mountains as in Prouxl tale. The movie was filmed in Canada because of financial incentives and a better exchange rate.