How the West Was Won Over

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The film has managed to carry the luster of its daring, as one of the rare Hollywood movies that are frank about gay sexuality, without provoking the sustained ire of social and political conservatives. Says Jack Foley, Focus' chief of distribution: "America didn't resist the film for a second." Well, maybe for a second: the other night on CNN's Larry King when conservative radio host Janet Parshall said, "What we're witnessing, Larry, is the homosexualizing of America." And there are plenty of liberal straight guys like Seinfeld co-creator Larry David, who wrote a puckish Op-Ed in the New York Times, confessing, "Cowboys would have to lasso me, drag me into the theater and tie me to the seat" for him to see it. But most of those who disapprove of Brokeback--or think they would if they saw it--have curbed their outrage. They believe it's a serious, sensitive movie.

All that for a gay western art film--a triple whammy of unfashionable genres. Brokeback is slow and studied. Jack and Ennis, who come together on the range one cold night in 1963, are neither heroes nor villains--and never masters of their fates. They cannot articulate to each other or themselves the love and need they feel. They express their passion as often through roughhousing as with caresses and incursions. "I ain't queer," Ennis insists, and he weds the doelike Alma (Michelle Williams). "Me neither," Jack affirms, and he marries a take-charge Texas gal, Lureen (Anne Hathaway). But during the '60s and '70s, the men keep their furtive rendezvous, betraying their wives and kids. The movie doesn't judge any of that. It observes, compassionately, and that's the secret of its hold on audiences of all social and political persuasions. The movie is heartbreaking because it shows the hearts of two strong men--and their women--in the long process of breaking.

The process of making a movie of Brokeback was long as well. McMurtry and Ossana bought the rights to Annie Proulx's 11-page story soon after it appeared in the New Yorker in 1997 and have nursed it ever since. But for years it seemed one of those Hollywood dreams doomed to eternal turnaround. Directors Gus Van Sant and Joel Schumacher were attached to it, then cut loose. Finally Lee shook off his grief over his first Hollywood epic, the massive, leaden Hulk, and signed on. The Brokeback story is set in Wyoming and Texas, but it was shot, reportedly for a thrifty $14 million or so, in Alberta. Lee and Schamus submitted the film to the Cannes festival--where their martial-arts collaboration, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, began its stellar career--but were rejected. Not until the fests at Venice (where it won the Golden Lion for best film), Toronto and Telluride, Colo., did the Brokeback team get its first sniff of roses.

Focus had a marketing strategy that may be called a modified limited rollout. It released the film at a pace as measured as Lee's direction. The studio purposefully sent the movie first to urban cinemas, but not necessarily the gay neighborhoods, and relied on word of mouth. But it also spent big, more than the movie cost to make, on marketing, especially to women. It figured the men would go along if they "do not want to look like a complete troglodyte to [their] girlfriends," says Schamus.

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