'Brokeback Mountain' Author Annie Proulx Regrets Having Written the Short Story

Before it was an Oscar-winning film, "Brokeback Mountain" was a short story written by Annie Proulx that was published in the New Yorker in October 1997. She subsequently expanded the story for her 1999 story collection "Close Range: Wyoming Stories," which was a finalist for the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

Ang Lee's 2005 film version was adapted by Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana, who won the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay. Lee also won for Best Director, but the film itself, though a heavy favorite, lost to "Crash" in one of the most inexplicable Oscar wins in history.

While the film's legacy has been enormous, Proulx recently expressed regret about writing the story in the first place. In an interview with The Paris Review (behind a firewall), she said, "I wish I'd never written the story... it's just been the cause of hassle and problems and irritation."

Pink News reports that "Proulx told the Paris Review she is regularly sent rewrites of her original story 'including all kinds of boyfriends and new lovers and so forth after Jack [Jake Gyllenhaal's character] is killed'. She says it 'drives [her] wild'."

"That's not the story I wrote," she said hitting back at the fan fiction authors: "Those are not [your] characters. The characters belong to me by law."

Adding: "They can't understand that the story isn't about Jack and Ennis [Heath Ledger].

"It's about homophobia; it's about a social situation; it's about a place and a particular mindset and morality."

In 2008 she was approached by American composer Charles Wuorinen for the rights to an operatic version. Not only did she agree, she wrote the opera's libretto, which premiered in Madrid in 2014 in a production directed by Ivo van Hove. In reviewing the premiere, the New York Times critic Anthony Tommasini called it "a serious work, an impressive achievement. But it is a hard opera to love."

Asked why she decided to work on the opera, Pink News reports that Proulx said, "I figured one of these idiots who loves happy endings would come along and start messing with it. I want to keep the story as it is.

"It's a strong story and it shouldn't be mangled into everybody lives happily ever after."

But recently discussing the film, Gyllenhaal felt differently. "It became so much bigger than what we thought it would be," Gyllenhaal told Yahoo Entertainment during a 2014 Role Recall interview. "It became so much more than what we expected. It was no longer ours, really, at a certain point. It was sort of everyone's, in this way, and we were just a part of it."