Brokeback Mountain

The mountain in Ang Lee’s film is not a place. Brokeback is assembled in the cutting room from Windtower, Three Sisters, Moose Mountain and Fortress, peaks near Canmore in Alberta. Cowley stands in for Signal, Wyoming, Fort Macleod for Riverton, and Rockyford supplies the Texas rodeo; Lee also pushed the region’s hard wind into the sound design. Getting the story onto a screen took eight years. Diana Ossana and Larry McMurtry optioned Annie Proulx’s story with their own money and finished the script before the end of 1997; McMurtry recalled agents warning clients that a gay role would be career suicide. James Schamus, then running Focus, remembers the project circulating for years as an industry joke, the gay cowboy movie. Ossana’s daughter suggested Heath Ledger after Monster’s Ball, and the studio pushed back. Lee added a second tent scene that is not in the story, while Proulx stayed out of the adaptation and told him that turning her prose into cinema was his problem. A good fit if you accept that the summer on the mountain is only the first part and the rest plays out inside two marriages, with Alma and Lureen as participants rather than furniture. Not a fit if you need the ending to explain or repair something; it closes inside a closet, on two shirts.