NONETHELESS, FROM THE late fall of 2005 we on the Brokeback team had a very hot picture to promote and release. We accordingly traveled to several premieres and semi-premieres. Journalists hoevered over us like locusts over a wheat field. We did one whole day of junket-type press in New York, and another whole day of television press in Austin.
There is, thankfully, only so much one can say about a given motion picture, and Diana and I and our teammates not only said it all, we said it all several dozen times.
We went to Denver, to open their new opera house. We went to Santa Barbara, to be welcomed, I guess. In Denver, Ang Lee met Annie Proulx, who (in Western terms) lived right up the road.
Then we did the big ones: New York and L.A. Diana and I stayed at New York’s Regency, the hotel whose famous breakfast room I had been kicked out of for appearing in a turtleneck instead of a tie. This upset my host, Alan Pakula, but it didn’t get me in the breakfast room, which seems to have relaxed a bit.
There the junketeers arrived, wave after wave, each allowed about fifteen minutes.
The New York premiere was packed and a consequence of the crush is that I somehow got swept into the executive’s car, and ended up in the meatpacking district, where we were allowed to eat at Mario Batali’s not yet opened new restaurant, which had so much floor space that one could have landed a DC-10 in it.
In the car, on my way back to join the rest of the team at a less surreal dining establishment, I happened to look up as we were crossing 24th Street and glimpsed the penthouse where my friend Susan Sontag once lived. It was her last home, and I was in it once and once only.
I didn’t last long at the other post-premiere meal up the street.