‘Brokeback Mountain’ Started as a Punch Line. 20 Years Later, It’s an Undisputed Classic

“It was a laughing stock—the ‘gay cowboy’ script.” That’s how producer James Schamus remembers the reputation surrounding Brokeback Mountain as it first started making the Hollywood rounds in the late 1990s. An adaptation of Annie Proulx’s lauded short story, the screenplay by Diana Ossana and Larry McMurtry had long been languishing in development limbo by the time Schamus, then best known for producing the films of Ang Lee and Todd Haynes, acquired the rights in 2001. “A producer who shall not be named, but who’s currently on a rehabilitation tour, let the rights lapse,” Schamus says. (He presumably means Scott Rudin, who’d briefly backed a version of the movie to be directed by Gus Van Sant.) “But every single possible variation on this thing—everyone passed. And so the option lapsed.”

This was the aughts, of course—a different era for Hollywood and American culture. George W. Bush was president; same-sex marriage was outlawed at the federal level. “Gay cowboys” were an easy target. “I don’t think people got over the punch line,” Schamus says.

Until they did. We’re speaking in anticipation of the splashy 20th-anniversary rerelease of Brokeback Mountain, the Oscar-winning 2005 drama ultimately produced by Schamus and Ossana, directed by his longtime collaborator Lee, and starring Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal. (Screenings take place on June 22 and 25.) Made for under $15 million, it grossed north of $178 million worldwide and redefined queer cinema for a broader audience. It’s widely considered a major film of the 21st century, an impeccably acted and strikingly beautiful love story with timeless appeal. At the Oscars, its best-picture loss to Paul Haggis’s social drama Crash remains a signature example of the Academy getting it flat-out wrong.

Schamus’s initial pitch to studios and financiers from two decades ago rings truer than ever. He told them, “This is the essence of the great Hollywood romances.” They didn’t listen; he got dismissed out of every room. “But I knew there was an audience for a story of that kind of ethic and operatic scope just waiting for us,” he says now. “I had no doubt about that.”

They weren’t cowboys, by the way. Ennis (Ledger) and Jack (Gyllenhaal) were shepherds, hired to work for the summer on the pastures of Wyoming’s Brokeback Mountain, circa 1963. One night, Jack makes a drunken pass at Ennis, who’s relatively deep in the closet. They have sex. It’s the beginning of a rich, loving, all too brief romance that lasts through their time working together. They go their separate ways and get married, but their relationship haunts them both as life goes on. “The movie spoke to me in a very existential way. It was very emotional, prohibitive love. They don’t have vocabulary to process what went on with them,” Lee says. “It was so haunting to me.”

Schamus hoped to hire a gay director at first. But Van Sant had moved away from the project, and others weren’t quite right. “There was a period when I was trying to work with [St. Elmo’s Fire and Batman Forever director] Joel Schumacher, which was hilarious,” Schamus says. Eventually, the producer said “screw it.” Lee may have been married to a woman, but he was Schamus’s close friend. They’d worked together for so many years, including on a great gay movie in The Wedding Banquet—why not him?

Lee read the script and fell for it, but had to choose between Brokeback or Marvel’s Hulk, a natural next step for a director who’d just helmed an Oscar-winning, commercially successful martial-arts action drama in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. He chose Hulk, which Schamus also cowrote and produced.

“I was quite exhausted. Actually, the idea of retirement came across my mind,” Lee says. “At the end of Hulk, I was even more exhausted, thinking about retirement. But Brokeback kept gnawing at me. It had been three years since I read the short story, but I just couldn’t forget it.”

While Lee was off filming Hulk, Schamus established Focus Features, a specialty production and distribution arm of Universal Pictures cofounded by David Linde. When Lee wanted to return to Brokeback, his producer had additional resources to actually make it a reality. “Suddenly I was on the other side of the desk,” Schamus says. “I realized, Oh, wait. Am I going to be the asshole who passes on this movie, or am I going to figure out how to make it?” He secured the option again, partnered with Bill Pohlad’s River Road Entertainment, and was “off to the races.”

When it came to casting, Schamus had spent much of his career fighting against “all of the filters that studio executives used to cover their asses. Remember Q ratings? Now it’s ‘How many followers do they have on Instagram?’ or whatever the hell. It’s all BS.” Now that he was a studio executive, Schamus could keep things simple. He auditioned actors with Lee and casting director Avy Kaufman out of his faculty apartment at Columbia University, where he still teaches film history and theory.

Neither Lee nor Schamus get into specifics on who turned down the roles of Jack and Ennis—but many did. Mark Wahlberg reportedly told WENN in 2007 that he was “creeped out” by the script after meeting with Lee. Matt Damon revealed to Entertainment Weekly that he’d passed back when Van Sant was attached, telling the director, “Gus, I did a gay movie [The Talented Mr. Ripley], then a cowboy movie [All the Pretty Horses]. I can’t follow it up with a gay-cowboy movie!”

Lee felt the collective discomfort around that “gay cowboy” label: “That idea scared people back then. The cowboy is an American hero symbol. Something about it, people felt funny. I don’t know why that came up.”

In any case, the final assembled cast wasn’t too shabby. Anne Hathaway, who played Jack’s eventual wife, rushed over while on a filming break for The Princess Diaries 2: Royal Engagement—and auditioned in her full Genovian garb. She “nailed it,” Schamus says, nabbing her biggest dramatic role in a movie to date. The project offered similar breakthroughs to Michelle Williams, who played Ennis’s wife, and Gyllenhaal; both stars received their first Oscar nominations for the film. But Ledger’s subtle, taciturn, heartbreaking performance proved most revelatory. It’s a defining role for the late, great actor, who died in 2008.

Schamus opened the door to his Columbia apartment turned makeshift casting office, watched Ledger walk in—and instantly, he knew. “I thought, Oh, here he is!” the producer says. That feeling only deepened as he got to know the actor: “He was literally one of the best chess players you would ever meet in your life. It’s still kind of wild to think of his combination of pure intelligence and pure presence.”

Lee, however, was less sure. Ledger was known for leading the rom-com 10 Things I Hate About You, but played supporting roles in prestige projects like Monster’s Ball and The Patriot. “He needed to be able to carry this movie,” Lee says. “I knew he was good. It took the movie to realize how good he is.”

Ledger pulled it off by doing a lot of hard, at times lonely work. Shortly after Ledger’s death, his agent Steve Alexander discussed with Vanity Fair how the actor felt “very isolated” filming Brokeback Mountain, stressing the difficulty of figuring out his enigmatic character. “Heath worked really hard at it, and it was exhausting. He thought Ang Lee was an incredible director, but Ang is a taskmaster, and he doesn’t coddle his actors.” Gyllenhaal recently told Vanity Fair that Ledger’s “consummate devotion to how serious and important the relationship between these two characters was—it showed me how devoted he was as an actor, and how devoted we both were to the story and the movie.”

Lee wound up bringing Ledger into his process in a way he typically dislikes doing with performers, allowing Ledger to watch his work on camera monitors between takes. This proved invaluable. “Most of them don’t even want to watch it—I don’t like an actor to do that. They get self-conscious,” Lee says. “But he watched it, and then his next take was better. He’s the only one ever where I saw that. Usually, it’s worse when they watch it!”

Brokeback Mountain features frank sex scenes, including the stunner in the tent captured by Lee and DP Rodrigo Prieto in a single take. Lee shot it 13 times, and proudly tells me he used the 13th take.

“At that time, it was considered ‘brave’ for an actor to portray gay characters still, even though there had already been many notable examples,” Schamus says. A few weeks before the film opened, a New York Times piece was published under the headline “The Winner Is…Only Acting Gay,” noting that Ledger and Gyllenhaal were in the Oscar conversation alongside Capote’s Philip Seymour Hoffman, Transamerica’s Felicity Huffman, and more straight, cisgender actors playing gay or trans parts. “Our awareness of these nonfiction roles makes it easier and maybe more acceptable for middle-class heterosexual viewers—a group that does, after all, include most of us in the audience—to embrace characters whose sexual preferences we don’t share,” the piece claimed.

And as it turned out, the Brokeback discourse was only getting started.

After Brokeback started breaking box-office records in limited release, The Wall Street Journal asked of its expansion across the country, “Will Brokeback Play in Peoria?” Sure enough, reports of theaters in the heartland refusing to screen the movie soon sprouted. But the fact is, especially for a nascent company like Focus, Brokeback was a huge success story: critically adored, widely embraced by audiences. It grossed more than five times its budget in North America alone. And it was undeniably groundbreaking. None of this was guaranteed, even leaving aside the years of Hollywood unwilling to take a risk on it.

“The film was passed over by the Cannes committee,” Schamus tells me. Only when it won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, where it was selected to premiere after the Cannes rejection, did the team realize just how big Brokeback could get. “It’s a good movie—I couldn’t tell at the time,” Lee says. The film started dominating an awards season that had been unusually centered on smaller movies, with Steven Spielberg’s Munich the only big-studio player in the top races. “There was an embracing of Brokeback that was undeniable,” says an awards strategist who was unaffiliated with the Brokeback campaign.

Still, there were whispers among the industry’s heavy hitters. Larry David said in a comic essay for The New York Times that he would not see the movie—lest it give him any ideas. “If two cowboys, male icons who are 100 percent all-man, can succumb, what chance…do I have, half to a quarter of a man, depending on whom I’m with at the time?” he wrote. The op-ed stirred debate; a column in the Chicago Tribune argued that “David’s essay amounted to the smiley-face liberal version of what is being said more bluntly in conservative circles.” This wasn’t wrong, as other Hollywood stars, like Tony Curtis and Ernest Borgnine, weren’t exactly tongue-in-cheek about their refusal to watch the movie. “If John Wayne were alive, he’d roll over in his grave,” Borgnine later said.

This leads us to the unfortunate full-circle road traveled by Brokeback Mountain—the last revenge of its initial, widely mocked “gay cowboy” label.

The movie lost the best-picture Oscar to Crash. Lee, who had won the best-director award just before best picture was to be announced, was told to hang backstage by an overly confident stage manager. “Everybody expected us to win,” Lee told Deadline—including presenter Jack Nicholson, who was visibly surprised as he read out, “Crash.” Backstage in the immediate aftermath, Nicholson told my colleague Anthony Breznican, then a reporter for USA Today, “I didn’t expect it because you heard so much about Brokeback.” Nicholson then turned while covering his mouth with the envelope: “And that’s who I voted for.”

Latent industry homophobia seemed like the obvious culprit for Brokeback’s loss. “The ‘gay cowboy’ thing just was a bridge too far for them,” the strategist says. “They were ignorant.”

Schamus adds, “We live in the real world. Of course, how do you not notice these homophobic people saying homophobic crap? It was part of what we were dealing with.”

But Brokeback’s soulful, artful queer romance also had to compete against the blunt anti-racist messaging of Crash, which did resonate with the largely white and liberal Academy. “They did a very, very good job with their campaign,” Schamus says. So good, in fact, that once Oscar voting ended, Schamus set a company meeting over video conference—pre-Zoom days, of course—to warn the team that he thought they were not going to win best picture. “I’m glad that we did that, because people were really upset,” Schamus says.

Crash’s victory has not aged well in the eyes of most. Michelle Williams perhaps said it best earlier this year when, after late-night host Andy Cohen asked her about that infamous Oscars upset, she replied, “I mean, what was Crash?” Brokeback Mountain, by comparison, is known as a modern classic, appearing on several rankings of the 21st century’s best films. The British Film Institute named it the fourth best LGBTQ+ movie of all time. Countless filmmakers who have emerged since its release cite it as a major inspiration for their work. And it’s still the closest that Focus Features, which Schamus left in 2013, has gotten to that best-picture Oscar—though the likes of Milk, Belfast, and last year’s Conclave have come close too.

When Schamus reflects on Brokeback’s legacy, he thinks back to a then radical, now baseline bit of strategy in the movie’s marketing: using the internet. “We built a web page. Back then, you went, ‘Let’s build a web page,’” Schamus says. It asked viewers to share their stories—queer people who connected to the movie’s themes of longing and repression and passion, but also parents and spouses and anyone else for whom the film resonated. More than 10,000 people posted on the site. “The impact was not just the movie. It was created by a very early online culture that was not as fraught as it is today,” Schamus says. “That was the single most moving part of the whole experience.”