Well, my mother finally persuaded my 70-year-old father to see "Brokeback Mountain" with her. So as not to disturb my father's football-viewing habits, they went today, to a Monday 1:30 p.m. matinee. They report only six or seven other people in the theater with them. (This was in a theater where the movie just opened with this past Friday's expansion, and of course, on a working day.) They saw the movie in upstate NY, about 20 minutes northwest of Syracuse, in what I'd call a fairly conservative area. My mother reports that she and my father liked the movie, and that my mother herself cried a little while watching it. My father "felt sorry for the light-haired guy [Ennis]." Since you don't know my family, this will mean little to you, but I should say that my father's fairly socially conservative, though a long-time Democratic voter, in the old, ethnic, blue-collar tradition. (I am their odd, "artsy" daughter who wrote poetry & moved down near Manhattan as soon as she could.) What I would say for Focus Features is that, if you have my father attending & approving of this movie -- true, after much concerted effort on the part of his wife & daughter
-- then you are beginning to truly reach an untapped market.
