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Jan. 29, 2006 Ang Lee just won the Film Maker Of The Year Award from the Directors Guild Of America this past Saturday for his work on Broke Back Mountain. I know some of you are tired of hearing about this movie but I want to talk about it for a second. There is a large portion of America that doesn’t like the fact that this movie has come into so much critical acclaim. This movie is very in your face about a lifestyle that most Americans are very uncomfortable with. As far as money earned this movie is only doing well when compared with other small independent movies. You wouldn’t know it by the actors that were recruited for the movie, or the hype surrounding it but this isn’t a big budget movie. On the comparatively small earnings it is making it is already going to cover its production budget. Most of the figures cited to portray the movie as doing very well in the box office were citing per screen earnings before it was expanded beyond the initial release of 69 screens. After the expansion revenue went from just over $36,000 dollars per screen at 69 screens down to about $6,000 dollars per screen on 1,196 screens. Obviously if you expand the number of screens you are going to dilute the audience of your movie a bit and drive down the per screen average, but that is a large drop and is partially due to another effect. The studio knew that they would want to initially put the film in friendly markets, not only to pad their numbers as obviously happened, but also to start the rumor mill and word of mouth advertising. It was an entirely appropriate strategy. But they knew that when they expanded the movie to more screens they would also run into the problem of the feelings of the majority of the rest of the country regarding the lifestyle portrayed in the movie. Whether its fair or not, most of the country is still very much opposed to not only the homosexual lifestyle, but also personally opposed to homosexual’s themselves. Of course lesbian pornography still flies off the shelves. I am on a government computer so I can’t really be looking up the relevant statistics if I want to avoid running afoul of the law but lets not be naïve. The porn industry is booming in the states, and lesbianism is a major genre within the industry. Are lesbians really buying all this stuff? Of course not, we all know males, straight or not are the major buyers of adult material. What’s my point you ask? Its interesting that no one is willing to look at the human side of homosexuality, but when two attractive women start kissing all is right with the world. Given the numbers involved the scale of the hypocrisy is stunning. But I may have wondered from the point a bit. Through all this maneuvering BBM has still only grossed about $41m dollars. But you would never know it listening to the news and watching the award shows. The perception is that this film is huge. Yet it hasn’t even grossed a hundred million dollars yet. Compare this with films like Narnia, so far grossing more than $250m Dollars. Granted Narnia and King Kong and the like are on far more screens than BBM, but those screens are in the rural and mainstream portions of America that have primarily rejected BBM. That being the case there isn’t much expectation that expanding Broke Back Mountain to a comparable number of screens would result in a comparable level of earnings. So it is obvious, given these numbers that the scale of the success of this movie is drastically inflated. Sure everyone involved in the production of the movie is surprised even at its meager current success, but the strength of that surprise is nowhere in line with the inflation of the perception of that success. How well the film is doing seems inflated because in Hollywood, with the critics and the awards shows, this film really is doing just as well as these other movies. In the court of opinion among film makers, and critics, and awards committees, where the amount of money a movie is grossing only matters for a few specific awards, BBM really is doing every bit as well as King Kong and the other block busters of the year. The reason is again obvious. Hollywood is a liberal place. I want to point out that California is not all that way, just the urban concentrations where a good portion of the influence in the state is collected. In the rural areas the opinion of the film is following the trend of the rest of the country. But Hollywood and San Francisco and San Diego and all of those are plainly very liberal places. I don’t mean that in the political context here (even though that is also true) but I mean socially they are places that are very open to new and different things, much more so than a good portion of the rest of the country. Even with this in mind it is not enough to justify the success of the movie even in these markets. There has to be something that makes it different. Acknowledgement of the gay lifestyle can’t be the only thing going for it since Hollywood really hasn’t had a problem portraying gay people in movies for a long time. The thing that makes this movie different is the treatment that the lifestyle receives in this movie. The fact that the two main characters are cowboys, to my mind is incidental. They could have been taxi drivers or news anchors and it would not have changed the underlying story a lot. This movie is different not for main characters occupation, but for the intimacy with which the lifestyle is portrayed. Gay people have been in mainstream movies, but up to this point they have been more a caricature of themselves rather than real characters. Homosexuality has been included either in the interest of comic relief or just in the interest of including others. Please don’t fill my in box with counter examples because I am sure they exist. I only point out that this movie includes homosexuality as a much more explicit and integrated part of the character than most others. Moving on with the point, this movie is earning awards because the people who aren’t afraid to say so are trying to tell us something. Socially Hollywood and places like it have always been progressive. Whether it was with the way they dressed and looked, with examples like Marilyn Monroe, or their Anti-Nuclear option stance during the Second World War (By them I mean the scientists involved in the project who were always for the attainment of the requisite knowledge, but were against the weapons actual use, preferring a deterrent effect to justify the expense and research). Fast-forward to now and what do we see? We see that while the progressives in the urban areas led the way, the rest of the country eventually caught up and these views are now mainstream. I don’t want to imply that this is some sort of social law that will infallibly apply in this case, but it is a good indicator of the future leanings of the country. I really don’t think that the success of this movie is about money, or who isn’t seeing it. Honestly even if the lifestyle portrayed in the movie was more accepted, I’m not sure it would be doing much better. I don’t personally think it looks like a very interesting movie and I probably won’t go out of my way to see it. The point is that this movie has incited the people who are the biggest indicators of future social trends to literally cast their votes. The verdict is in. Social intolerance against minority groups is in full force currently, but in the future it’s on the way out. America is uniquely conservative in the industrialized world, and I won’t turn that into a discussion on my favorite subject, but the evidence is clear all around, that in the future the atmosphere of intolerance is going to lighten up. Social conservatives can kick and scream, and bubba can crush as many bear cans on his forehead as he wants, but eventually their kids are going to grow up. If recent history is any indicator, their kids’ opinions will be more tolerant as time goes on. I don’t know how long it will take, or if I will even live to see the results as applies to me, but the indicators are all there, and this movie is a strong one. That isn’t just good news for Gay’s since a rising tide carry’s all boats. People that belong to other minority groups will benefit indirectly. So look out red states, some day movies like this won’t cause any one to bat an eyelash, and it’s your own kids that aren’t going to blink. ------------ About the author: William A. Hurt is not a writer by any means, just an occasional participant in the debates that interest him. The author is currently serving over seas with the active duty military and is an active member of the Freedom From Religion Foundation. 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