In the February 23, 2005 issue of the New York Review of Books, Daniel Mendelsohn's "An Affair to Remember" praised the film Brokeback Mountain, while condemning its distributor Focus Features for closeting the film's subject matter. (Did anyone not know that Brokeback was gay?] The recent issue of New York Review of Books offers an exchange between producer James Schamus and Mr. Mendelsohn on some of the ideas in Mendelsohn's review. But the debate didn't stop there. A futher letter from James Schamus, that won't appear in NYRB, we have reprinted below.

Oy
James Schamus
19 March 2006

In his reply to the few corrections in my otherwise laudatory response to his review of Brokeback Mountain ['Brokeback Mountain': An Exchange, NYRB, April 6, 2006], Daniel Mendelsohn calls me, and my work as a producer of Brokeback and as the head of the studio that distributed the film, “discomfited,” “embarrassed,” “defensive,” “bluster[ing],” practicing “obfuscatory sophistries,” “actually falsifying [the movie’s] content,” arguing “with breathtaking disingenuousness” and “evasive coyness” my “heated but ultimately self-destructive protestations” against his charges that I and my colleagues have consistently sought to “closet” the film’s central gay themes in our marketing of it. Of course, our very success ($150 million in worldwide box office to date) is prima facie proof of the efficacy of our sinister methods “in so aggressively marketing this gay story to the ‘heart of America’”: how else could we have snookered so many millions of people into embracing such a gay film?
Mr. Mendelsohn was, as I so gently put it in my response, “unfair” in his original depiction of our marketing; he is viciously mendacious in his latest reply, and NYRB readers deserve at least a brief correction: it is important that, as gay subject matter continues to enter further into mainstream culture, parochial nay-sayers such as Mendelsohn are at least asked to maintain the minimum standards of honesty in discussions of such matters.
Mr. Mendelsohn hammers me for, among other things, claiming that the two wranglers quoted at length in the press kit are “clearly” identified as gay – as I pointed out, from day one it was important to us that the lives of real gay men be an integral part of the presentation of the film. Mr. Mendelsohn wants readers of the Review to believe I’m lying about how unequivocal our press materials presentation was: “But then, Mr. Schamus’s proffering of the same press kit as evidence of his company’s celebration of gay identity clearly indicates that there are many things we understand differently – not least, the meaning of the word ‘clearly,’ a word of no small importance when the subject is lying and half-truths…” Yes, it is true that in the introductory list of the “Voices of Brokeback Mountain” these men are not identified by their sexual orientation, but by their job titles on the film, as is everyone else listed there, from Ang Lee to Heath Ledger. But here is the first quotation from Shane Madden in the press kit: “Being raised on a farm, yeah, you had to hide it. It hurt to try and hide it. There were times I used to bang my head against a wall. [I read the story, and] I was losing it after the first six pages. It hit me deep inside.” He goes on: “Same thing that I’ve gone through; I fell in love with somebody, cared for a guy and we hid it from everybody. Society told me not to do it. Met a girl. Started dating the girl. Fell in love with her. Wasn’t happy because I wasn’t me.” Who is putting who, I wonder, back into the closet here?
The notes go on to point out that “[m]embers of the Calgary Gay Rodeo Association advised and consulted with the production, and also appear in several sequences,” and we quote Tim Cyr: “We’re the only gay rodeo association in Canada, but it’s part of a huge circuit throughout the U.S. We have the best turnout of the circuit, and to be a part of it is a great feeling.” Tim continues later: "Everybody has a right to love. Everybody should be loved. And if two guys get together or two girls get together, [there] should be no difference in it. Every movie that comes out where people are up there on-screen like this is a push towards more equality and understanding.”
Mr. Mendelsohn, believing he had the last word, assumed rightly that most Review readers would not read or have ready access to the press kit, and thus his vilifications of me could stand. But clearly, even a cursory reading of the press kit leaves no doubt that Shane and Tim are identifiably gay – in both senses of the word: they openly identify as gay men, and they are identifiable and identified as such. Yes, perhaps the subject is “lying and half-truths” – unfortunately the ones we read in the pages of the Review.
Mr. Mendelsohn’s attack on our marketing materials is equally bizarre. When I point out that neither Titanic nor The Bridges of Madison County called themselves the greatest straight love stories of all time, just as we did not trumpet Brokeback as the greatest gay one, Mendelsohn has this to say: “But of course, those films do advertise, relentlessly, the heterosexuality of their characters—as even a quick glance at the posters used to advertise, say, Titanic and The Bridges of Madison County will confirm. There, one can see what is, after all, the standard visual representation of erotic love between two people, which is a clear image of two yearning lovers embracing.”
Perhaps Mr. Mendelsohn is thinking of an image such as this one:

This “standard visual representation of erotic love” is the central image of the trailer for Brokeback, seen by tens of millions of people, accompanied by swellingly romantic orchestral music, and played underneath the now well-known lines spoken by Jake Gyllenhall: “It could be like this, just like this – always.” Open, proud, celebratory? Hell yes. But you'd never know it from reading Mr. Mendelsohn's attack. Meanwhile, our poster, which openly pays homage to Titanic’s, has become perhaps the most iconic representation of epic romantic love in modern American movie marketing history, and as such has, along with the trailer, become the most parodied piece of Hollywood marketing -- perhaps ever.


No, the poster doesn’t show its lovers in an embrace as the trailer does, but then, neither does the poster of another well-received romance we distributed last year: Pride and Prejudice. One can only imagine the homophobic plot Mr. Mendelsohn might spin from his forthcoming analysis of that poster!

As I wrote in my original response to Mr. Mendelsohn, “to ignore Mendelsohn’s disquiet at important aspects of [Brokeback’s] reception would be foolish.” His review did raise serious issues about what happens when gay-themed stories are mainstreamed, and about how some straight critics have tried to minimize the import of aspects of the characters' identities. But perhaps it was more foolish of me actually to pay attention to his disquiet: rather than engage in a reasonable dialogue about these thorny issues Mr. Mendelsohn has instead created a grandly absurd narrative, with the studio and me cast as the villains. For any sane person to believe his fantasy vision of our implacably dishonest marketing, one would have to believe that even one person could honestly take me up on the following offer:
I will gladly provide a full refund to any New York Review reader who bought a ticket to Brokeback Mountain, and who feels that he or she was misled by our marketing campaign into not knowing that the movie’s central story was an epic romance between two men.

Any takers?

James Schamus

# posted by Peter Bowen @ 3/24/2006 03:01:00 PM

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