Last Thursday, I attended a special screening of Brokeback at Central Missouri State University, followed by a Q&A session led by Diana Ossana. Below is a "report", which I also posted on the Main Discussion thread:
On April 13th at Central Missouri State University, Warrensburg, MO, about 300 people attended the screening of Brokeback Mountain, followed by a Q&A program led by Diana Ossana. The audience, viewing the movie on two screens in two combined conference rooms, included a dozen or so people under 40, included people from other towns whose theatres had not run BBM and one woman from Sedalia (known for the State Fair and Scott Joplin history) who remarked that a theatre owner there “is proud of showing ‘controversial’ movies but they get such a short run there it’s easy to miss them.” However, about 270 of the 300 people were college students with a mixture of male, female, straight, gay and representing more than 8 student and University organizations.
Ms. Ossana had been invited to CMSU by Art Center Gallery director Michael Crane. Ossana and Crane had both attended Roosevelt High School in St. Louis, graduating in 1967: “usually,” Crane joked, “when you hear of old high school classmates in the news it isn’t good news! this was an exception.”
Ossana gave a short history of her collaboration with Larry McMurtry, whom she met “at an all you can eat catfish place in Tucson” in 1985. Until the early 1990s McMurtry led a nomadic life, owning a number of bookstores while travelling around the country and staying with friends. A major heart attack and personal issues that followed it changed that, and an unannounced visit to Ossana “that was supposed to be for two weeks lasted for two years.” Their subsequent collaborations included Brokeback Mountain’s trek from short story to screenplay to movie, which took more than 8 years.
After a friend gave her a copy of the New Yorker’s short story to read, in October 1997, Ossana stayed up all night to read it and recalled thinking “that was really odd – what was that?” afterward. She recalled giving it to McMurtry to read and his reaction “this is a masterpiece” as “the only time he’s agreed with me the first time” about a script.
Ossana emphasized that they’d had to fight to get the script done every step of the way, and that her decision to insist on being not only co-writer but co-producer stemmed from long experience with scripts being drastically altered once they left her hands. That degree of artistic control was something that took persistence with the studio, which had wanted a “our way or the highway” approach early on and had been skeptical about her being co-producer although her experience with film productions was hard for them to argue with. That was, she noted “a hint of the opposition” to the film that lay just under the surface in Hollywood. Ossana outright dismissed conservative pop culture’s catchphrases about Hollywood’s supposedly being a bastion of liberalism, noting that the relentless dissemination of trivializing ‘humor’ about the movie hinted that the fabled “liberal news media” constitutes the same kind of popularly-accepted fiction. Her only reference to the Academy awards came in the form of an oblique answer to a question as to whether her Oscar is in a special case. She described a shelf constructed especially for the awards she’d won, citing several won for Brokeback but not mentioning the Oscar statue. Instead, she remarked that she and McMurtry had been relieved that Annie Proulx’ reaction to the film treatment was so positive as they knew how outspoken she could be: “What she said about the Oscars was a pretty good example.”
Ang Lee, Ossana remarked, was definitely a hands-off director. He talked with the actors very little once shooting started, and she recalled both Heath and Jake asking questions like “how did I do in that scene”, only to get “the river looked great behind you!” as an answer. She encouraged both actors to use the screenplay as a kind of roadmap and to make use of the guides suggested, citing Ennis’ finding a gutted sheep the morning after the first tent scene as an example. “A look of shame crosses his face” was the direction for the extended reaction shot used in that scene. She even gave both Heath and Jake an outline of how she, McMurtry and Proulx saw the characters and scenes. Nevertheless, she said, Ang Lee ‘intuits emotion’ when directing and had a very clear sense of what worked and what did not.
Ossana was asked the usual questions about ambiguities in the plot and whether the film had a ‘message.’ Ang Lee had originally wanted Jack’s death to be presented definitely as a murder, but she and McMurtry convinced him that the open question left in the short story should be in the movie as well. “The scene where Jack is being killed is in Ennis’ mind – it’s his worst fear come true”. Elaborating on the expanded roles of the women, she remarked that while there are some obvious differences between Alma and Lureen, the fact that Ennis’ marriage ended in divorce and Jack’s did not despite its long decline “says more about the differences between the two men than between the two women” as Jack was more open to human connections and better able to give and accept affection.
Ossana and McMurtry, as well as Ang Lee and co-producer James Schamus, wondered about the movie’s acceptance and whether people would go to see it, but just had to believe in the project and hope for the best. McMurtry hoped that people would come away from the movie “with a sense of compassion.” Ossana noted that while Brokeback is universal in its themes of disappointment, loss and the persistence of love, the aspect of two men being in love challenged the homophobia that had been part of most of human society for centuries. “Some people might want to deny that homosexuality exists”, promoting illusions about ‘cures’ and ‘sin’, but “it’s a fact.” She was convinced that stereotyped sex roles basically trivialize human beings in general; and that the nervously humorous public reaction to two overtly masculine gay characters was an illustration of how these trivializing stereotypes are applied to gay people in particular. Much of the discussion after the movie involved how society’s attitudes toward gay people have or have not changed, with one of the last speakers in the Q&A session noting that a dialogue was at least going on and thanking Ossana for contributing to that dialogue at this particular gathering.
