Maybe a gay
cowboy picture was too controversial after all, or at least
that is what the legendary Western writer who adapted
Brokeback Mountain for the screen thinks.
"Perhaps the truth really is, Americans don't want cowboys
to be gay," said Larry McMurtry, 69, who has spent his
career challenging the stereotypes of the
West--and generally won.
McMurtry won the
Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay with his partner,
Diana Ossana, but their film lost the prize for Best Picture
to Crash, a drama about urban racism.
The quirky Texan,
who is building one of the largest used-book store
complexes in the world in a rural town in his home state of
Texas, wore jeans along with a tuxedo jacket to the
Academy Awards. "I always wear jeans," he explained.
McMurtry has had
critical and commercial success exploring the gritty
real-life West in a series of iconic works such as Pulitzer
Prize-winning Lonesome Dove, an epic
tale of cowboys on a cattle drive. "I'm a critic of
the myth of the cowboy," he told The New York
Times in 1988. "People need to believe that
cowboys are simple, strong, and free and not twisted,
fascistic, and dumb, as many cowboys I've known have been,"
he added at the time.
Brokeback is based on a short story by Annie
Proulx that follows the lives of two cowboys who fall in
love as young men one summer herding sheep on
Brokeback Mountain. "It's the same West" as Lonesome Dove, he said on the red carpet going into the
festivities. "Always a lot of loneliness in the West."
McMurtry's
writing partner, Ossana, who also produced the film with
James Schamus, called the night "bittersweet."
McMurtry said voters had rejected his own rural-themed
movies, which include Brokeback Mountain and The
Last Picture Show and Texasville, but gave
the more urban-themed Terms of Endearment an Oscar.
(Peter Henderson, Reuters)