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Excerpts from an e-mail press release I just received, Thursday afternoon: In an unprecedented show of support for "Brokeback Mountain," a website discussion board has spearheaded a campaign to collect donations from around the world to place ads in trade and national publications in support of the movie. In the first 48 hours, the group raised nearly $16,000 from over 400 contributors, and a team of volunteers designed a full page color ad to run in the March 10 Daily Variety.
The ad campaign was started by members at the Ultimate Brokeback Forum as a
positive way to deal with their emotions surrounding "Brokeback Mountain"'s
loss for Best Picture at the Academy Awards. Instead of responding in anger,
members wanted to find a way to thank the cast and crew of the film and to find a way to highlight Brokeback Mountain's unprecedented string of Best Picture wins.
"I think most fans of the film were stunned by the Best Picture surprise, which raised the question of how and why the Academy could have been so out of sync with virtually every other organization that awarded Best Picture honors," site organizer Dave Cullen said in explaining why so many diverse people worldwide were donating to the campaign.
According to industry watchers, no movie has generated this sort of fan response after a loss for Best Picture. Fans are happy their support for "Brokeback Mountain" is becoming part of industry lore. They hope that others looking for a way to honor Brokeback Mountain as the Best Picture of 2005 will contribute to the campaign, so more ads can run to help raise awareness that the film garnered nearly every Best Picture award bestowed for 2005.
"Only one major organization did not name 'Brokeback Mountain' as Best Picture," says campaign chair Peter Greyson.
In part, this one snub for Best Picture was why those involved with the
campaign wanted to... remind people of the spirit of the film as expressed by Ang Lee: "[Jack and Ennis] taught all of us who made Brokeback Mountain so much about not just all the gay men and women whose love is denied by society, but
just asimportant, the greatness of love itself."
The organization spearheading the ad campaign is the Ultimate Brokeback Forum, hosted at davecullen.com/forum. The forum has 2,500 members and in only three months of operation is averaging 12,000 unique visitors each day and over 200,000 page views. For more information you can find them on the web at "Brokeback Mountain Thank You campaign."
A copy of the Daily Variety ad can be found here.
