How the West Was Won Over
In certain events that leave their mark on pop culture, there comes a flashpoint when everyone's talking about the same thing. Call it the Bennifer blitz, the Monica moment, the Janet Jackson distraction. Ground down and fed up by news that matters, Americans lock their vision on a movie-star romance, a sex scandal, a Super Bowl oops as tabloid headlines and talk-show hosts exploit and orchestrate the public's evanescent fervor.
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In a more benign and constructive way, America is now experiencing the Brokeback breakthrough.
Brokeback Mountain, a western about two cowboys, Ennis (Heath Ledger) and Jack (Jake Gyllenhaal), and the convulsive, frustrating, 20-year love affair they endure, has quickly become the favorite topic of every late-night TV host. Jay Leno imagined Clint Eastwood and John Wayne as gay caballeros. Jon Stewart displayed a doctored Brokeback poster with Senators Ted Stevens and Robert Byrd. Letterman's website invited fans to submit their own "Top 10 Rejected Titles for Brokeback Mountain." (Among the winners: Oklahomo, Little Bathhouse on the Prairie and The Good, the Bad and the Fabulous!) Jack's plaintive cry to Ennis, "I wish I knew how to quit you!", is already on T shirts.
Critics' groups had heaped awards on the stars, director Ang Lee, producers Diana Ossana and James Schamus and screenwriters Ossana and Larry McMurtry. The scrolls gave way to statuettes, handed out at the Golden Globes in front of almost 19 million TV viewers. Brokeback won for Best Picture, Director and Screenplay. The film is the front runner for the Oscars. No film is even second. Brokeback has sucked all the helium out of the balloons.
The next step is to turn buzz into bucks, cachet into cash, and Brokeback has been doing just that. Opened in a mere six theaters Dec. 9, the film has expanded its screens each week, to 683 last week--still fewer than one-third of the number for Glory Road. Yet Brokeback outgrossed that movie and all others for three nights after the Golden Globes. Late last week, it had amassed $34 million--a take that could easily reach $100 million between the announcement of the Academy Award nominations (Jan. 31) and Oscar night (Mar. 5). It has now expanded to 1,190 screens, but theater owners are impatient. "They want us on 2,000 screens right away," says Schamus, sounding like the chef of a family restaurant that just got a four-star rave in a national newspaper. Schamus is double lucky. Besides producing the film, he is a co-president of the film's distributor, Focus Features, a Universal subsidiary.
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