📖 Page vs. Screen: Brokeback Mountain 🎬

A short story first published in The New Yorker became one of the most discussed films of its decade. Here is how the page and the screen compare.

🔀 What Changed

The biggest change is scale. Proulx's story first appeared in The New Yorker in 1997 and was later collected in Close Range: Wyoming Stories. It is a compact work told in spare, compressed prose that covers two decades in a few dozen pages. Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana wrote the screenplay, expanding it into a feature film of roughly two hours and fifteen minutes. That length gives the story room to dramatize years that the prose moves through in summary. The film also gives more screen time to the lives of the two main characters away from the mountain, including their marriages and their families, so the wives are more fully drawn than they are on the page. And where the story leans on Proulx's language to evoke the Wyoming landscape, the film shows it through Ang Lee's visual direction.

🎙️ What the Author Said

Proulx wrote an essay about the experience, titled "Getting Movied," which appeared in the 2005 book Brokeback Mountain: Story to Screenplay alongside the screenplay itself. In it she reflects on watching her story become a film and on how it took on a life beyond the page. The essay is the most direct documented account of her view of the adaptation process, and it is worth reading in full for her own words.