From Book to Screen – Annie Proulx/Ang Lee, "Brokeback Mountain"

Literary adaptations have always been popular on the big screen. Mostly we think of all the things that have to be cut. But when movies are based on short fiction, there's the trickier business of expansion. American author Annie Proulx wrote first a short story, which she expanded slightly to be published in her "Close Range: Wyoming Stories". After innumerable drafts, she finally chose the title "Brokeback Mountain". The story centers around two cowboys, Jack Twist and Ennis del Mar, who are hired in the summer of 1963 to look after sheep in Wyoming. They are unexpectedly drawn together with a passion neither can fully understand. This is not your typical cowboy story. No hero riding into the sunset. Director Ang Lee turned the short story or "novella" into a full feature film. To do so, he had to fill the gaps, by showing us how the men's lives are at home, what their secret means to their wives. Films have the power to imply messages words cannot. With Proulx' text and key scenes of Lee's adaptation, we follow and discuss this particular way from book to screen. Level C1.