It’s been 20 years since a couple of cowboys, Jack Twist and Ennis Del Mar, first met herding sheep on Brokeback Mountain – and 20 years since director Ang Lee, screenwriters Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana and stars Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger changed the course of queer American cinema with their adaptation of Annie Proulx’s 1997 short story.

Lee recently said “Brokeback Mountain,” which earned him the 2006 Academy Award for Best Director, is “uniquely, and universally, a great American love story.” The gravitas and delicacy with which he and his collaborators handled the solemn, soaring tale of two young men falling in love while working on the plains of 1963 Wyoming is what allowed the Focus Features release – initially known as merely the “gay cowboy movie” – to gross over $178 million at the global box office and become the landmark classic it is today.

But the film’s road to success was a rocky one, fraught with outside derision, homophobia and a charged reaction across the United States upon release. “Brokeback Mountain” is now not only lauded as a classic but is being re-released in theaters by Focus at a time when LGBTQ rights are under attack.

“Biases might disappear when you look into the heart of people. I hope that’s the case with our love story,” Lee reflected of the film’s message.

“Brokeback Mountain” went on to be nominated for eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture. It won three: for director, adapted screenplay and composer Gustavo Santaolalla’s minimalist, aching score. It would take another decade for the Academy to fully embrace a queer love story with Best Picture winner “Moonlight” in 2017.

But culture has progressed, and many argue the film would not be made the same way today, with two heterosexual men in the leads. Nonetheless, the movie is still revered with remarkable consistency across the board.

“I’m really happy that Ang was able to make the movie with Heath and Jake. He made an incredible story,” casting director Avy Kaufman told TheWrap. “And I’m not going to say: Would it be different if it was two gay men? It didn’t matter. He made a beautiful film.”

“The fact that it was so lauded, the fact that it was a big moment in culture, I think is really important,” GLAAD’s Raina Deerwater said. “You never know which films are going to be the ones that reach so many people, and ‘Brokeback Mountain’ really did.”

“Brokeback” is remembered as a case study in Focus Features’ bringing urgent, visionary work to the screen, and it was a turning point for former teen actors Gyllenhaal, Michelle Williams and Anne Hathaway to take on more complex, adult roles. For the late Ledger, who won a posthumous Oscar in 2009 for his supporting role in “The Dark Knight,” it is perhaps his greatest leading performance. 

The film is back in theaters this weekend to commemorate the 20th anniversary. Reflecting on the lasting impact Jack and Ennis’ story had in Hollywood and LGBTQ+ entertainment at large, TheWrap spoke to creatives behind the cinematic milestone – along with GLAAD executives, the author of “Brokeback Mountain (American Indies)” and more – to weigh in on the film’s legacy and the powerful experience of revisiting the work two decades later.

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You just can’t quit “Brokeback”

Screenwriter Diana Ossana’s journey with “Brokeback Mountain” began the minute she read Proulx’s short story in The New Yorker in 1997. She immediately shared it with McMurtry (the late author and screenwriter behind “The Last Picture Show,” “Terms of Endearment” and the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Lonesome Dove”) to ask if he would help her develop the story as a screenplay.

“When I think about the power of narratives, books and films, ‘Brokeback’ has that power,” Ossana told TheWrap this week. “It has the power to move people, to make them rethink their preconceived notions about things. If I were to tell you the single word that I think exemplifies the story — and it’s something that we have very little of right now — it’s compassion.”

Ossana and McMurtry immediately set out to option the story from Proulx, who gave them the rights despite having concerns over the story’s filmability. This began a difficult journey, with Ossana and McMurtry spending years searching for a director and actors willing to take on the topic. At various points, talents like Gus Van Sant and Joaquin Phoenix weighed in with their interest, but the creatives struggled to lock it in. Once, Ossana said HBO urged her to alter the story to focus on a relationship between a man and a woman.

“Somebody asked me last week, ‘Why were you so relentless about getting this film made? Why didn’t you give up?’” Ossana said. “I couldn’t quit the story or the characters. They got me, and they got me good.”

Ang Lee works with Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal on the set of “Brokeback Mountain.” (Kimberly French/Focus Features)

Now the film’s 20th anniversary re-release finds itself in the midst of a societal rollback. The place Brokeback Mountain represents a safe haven for Jack and Ennis to relinquish their fears of prejudice and violence from the outside world. Today such safe spaces seem hard to come by for minority groups — with moves are underway to urge the Supreme Court to reverse its ruling protecting same-sex marriage. Ossana called current attacks on immigrants, gay and transgender people “irrational.”

[Brokeback] has the power to move people, to make them rethink their preconceived notions about things.” – Diana Ossana, screenwriter

“Human nature doesn’t change,” she said. “The mores and the values and the rules and the laws may shift and change, but our wants and needs are the same. We experience love, hate, envy, jealousy, desire, need, emotional need, physical need. That’s no different than it ever was.

Heath Ledger and Michelle Williams star in “Brokeback Mountain” (Kimberly French/Focus Features)

“I know that [‘Brokeback Mountain’] will continue to live on, and it will continue to move people,” the screenwriter concluded. “There will be people seeing it again for the first time and having their responses and reactions to it. The movie itself, I believe, is evergreen. It’s a film that will sustain itself forever.”

Casting Jack and Ennis 

If there’s one aspect of “Brokeback Mountain” that faces harsher criticism under today’s standards for LGBTQ+ representation, it’s the casting of straight actors Gyllenhaal and Ledger to play its star-crossed lovers. It is a decision that, by casting director Avy Kaufman’s measure, would not be replicated in 2025.

“I think today would have been a very different story,” Kaufman told TheWrap, adding that in the years since, she’s cast “stories like this, and I’ve only cast gay actors.”

Kaufman, indeed, is responsible for the ensemble of last year’s Showtime critical darling “Fellow Travelers,” a limited series led by Jonathan Bailey and Matt Bomer and cast entirely with actors who identify as LGBTQ. Kaufman said she “didn’t think twice” about the decision to set those casting parameters.

“Brokeback Mountain,” however, was a different story. The film struggled to find actors willing to sign on to the central roles, with several potential cast members fearing the social ramifications of playing male lovers in Bush-era America. Plus, there were simply less out-and-proud actors on the docket. Kaufman noted that an actor’s personal preferences were hardly considered at the time the film was cast. She never would have asked Ledger or Gyllenhaal their sexuality, nor does she “remember thinking about it.”

Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal star in “Brokeback Mountain.” (Kimberly French/Focus Features)

“I think times have changed and I’m really happy that Ang was able to make the movie with Heath and Jake. He made an incredible story,” Kaufman said. “And I’m not going to say: Would it be different if it was two gay men? It didn’t matter. He made a beautiful film.”

The American West as a Trojan Horse

One of the assets of “Brokeback Mountain” that cemented its status as not just a queer classic but an American one is its setting: What is more quintessentially American than the expansive green and rolling hills of the great, wide West?

“It was a cultural flashpoint in discussion about American cinema’s capacity to deal with ‘gay stories’ outside of recognizable gay or queer film traditions,” said Gary Needham, author of 2010’s “Brokeback Mountain (American Indies)” and senior film lecturer out of the University of Liverpool’s department of communication and media. Needham described the Western as a “sacred genre to some extent,” and “Brokeback” captured those visual trappings of the genre’s iconography “without leaning into the Western as a set of genre conventions.”

“What it did was also make audiences think about the Western’s potential for gay readings given the strong tradition of homosociality in the genre,” he told TheWrap. “It posed a type of reflection on the U.S. past and the place of the Western in America’s fantasies about itself and about masculinity … It is steeped in such a strong history of visualizing American history through natural vistas and rural milieu and manly men. While attitudes to gayness are always changing, attitudes to the vision of the West seem to be unchanging.”

Jake Gyllenhaal and Anne Hathaway star in “Brokeback Mountain.” (Kimberly French/Focus Features)

And not only was the film toying with Americana traditions in a familiar but altogether unique way – it was also, simply, a great film, executed with Lee’s singular vision that raised the bar for queer cinema as a whole. 

“In many ways, ‘Brokeback Mountain’ was a better film than many of its gay contemporaries in that it was better directed and better acted,” Needham shared. “That might have been hard for gay audiences to admit, and the characters are reluctant to identify as anything that has a label, but there was a certain power in seeing the closet and homophobia and sexual desire through an outsider vision which was Ang Lee’s.”

Transcending the “gay cowboy movie”

GLAAD’s Raina Deerwater remembers when “Brokeback Mountain” first hit theaters in 2005. She was a teenager at the time, and recalls walking through her school’s halls filled with 13-year-old boys cracking jokes at the film’s expense. YouTube parodies mocking the audacity of two men loving each other abounded, fueling the boys’ snickers. To them, “Brokeback Mountain” was just that “gay cowboy movie.” It was the film’s resolute response to such knee-jerk dismissiveness that set it on a different path.

“If you look at the actual film and everyone who was on the production team, they stood behind it. They refused to make fun of it,” Deerwater said of the team’s extensive press tour and interviews. “The way it was made was, ‘We’re going to tell this singular love story.’ And they did … The fact that it was so lauded, the fact that it was a big moment in culture, I think is really important. You never know which films are going to be the ones that reach so many people, and ‘Brokeback Mountain’ really did.”

Deerwater now serves as GLAAD’s associate director of entertainment research and analysis; she authors the media watchdog’s studies tracking LGBTQ inclusion in entertainment. In hindsight, she attributes much of the groundswell behind “Brokeback” to that commitment from its on- and off-screen creatives. Though she acknowledged that a film like “Brokeback Mountain” may today angle toward casting queer actors, she praised rising movie stars Ledger and Gyllenhaal for the seriousness and sincerity they brought to their performances.

“If you look at it on paper, if you read the summary, you’re like, ‘Oh, another tragic gay whatever,’” Deerwater said. “But what the film did was it was told with nuance and compassion, and was really about these characters and the love that was there.”

Tragedy paves the way for queer joy

Twenty years after “Brokeback Mountain,” Jack’s demise on the side of the highway, beaten by hateful men with a tire iron, is one of the film’s toughest pills to swallow. In the end, love could not save Jack, and Ennis must go on without him. But Jason Roush, UMass Boston’s Honors College coordinator and faculty member who specializes in queer theory and media, thinks such endings, while difficult, are true and essential. 

“It is not necessarily a bad thing to have films that end honestly in a historical context. People did die, people did commit suicide, people were killed. It’s important to represent the history of damage and not try and cover up,” Roush told TheWrap.

“While I do, like everybody else, believe in the importance of queer joy and trying to spread feel-good images, you have to remain true to the historical context of things and not just override it. There’s a real value to knowing what happened to people and I don’t know that people’s deaths in those circumstances mean anything if you don’t address them honestly.”

Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal star in “Brokeback Mountain.” (Kimberly French/Focus Features)

What “Brokeback Mountain” did pave the way for, however, is a shift toward happy endings.

“A lot of films now end on a much more positive note,” Roush said, noting post-“Brokeback” LGBTQ+ releases like “In God’s Country” with Josh O’Connor and “Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe.” “At least for the audience, it gives you an ending that doesn’t feel as historically negative, and I think that is a reflection of the shift in society … People can have just as many happy endings as tragic endings in their lives.”

That wouldn’t have been possible without the death and heartbreak portrayed in Lee’s 2005 classic. It was through Jack’s death, Roush argues, that heterosexual audiences could self-identify in the cowboys’ unlikely love story. 

“That seems to be what resonates with [straight audiences]. Through Ennis’ loss of Jack Twist and how well that’s portrayed in the last 20 minutes of the film, they can understand what that would feel like in their own lives, in their own relationships, and that’s what sort of evens the score and makes it a really valuable film historically.”

Sharon Knolle contributed reporting to this story.