This is part of a letter I wrote to Ang Lee when I discovered that he was making one of my favorite short stories Brokeback Mountain into a film about 200 miles north of where I lived:

Dear James Schamus and Ang Lee

My name is Terry J Cyr, I was born in the paperback section of the Mineral County Library in Superior Montana in 1961 and raised on a cattle ranch in the western mountains of Montana. I first read “Brokeback Mountain” while I was photographing the Jazz singer Eden Atwood in Singapore. Her mother (the daughter of AB Guthrie) and a friend to Annie Proulx and had sent us a preview copy of the story. We sat, one afternoon, in our hotel having tea and reading the story, by the end we were both sobbing. It is one of the few pieces of literature that has moved me so deeply that I bought copies and gave them to all my friends. To me it’s a poetry that I understand, was raised in, and soars within my spirit.

I have spent the past seven years back in Montana working as a personal assistant to a very dear friend. He was an extraordinarily, kind, gentle, older gay man who had a great passion for the arts, especially movies, but was afraid and tormented by his homosexuality. He owned a great deal of real estate and had one of the most remarkable gardens and Victorian houses in the region. Two years ago he developed a brain tumor and we were able to keep him home until his passing last June. I have since spent the past year helping to close out his professional and personal affairs. The bulk of the estate goes to 4 major arts charities in Montana.

I am now open to go in a new direction, on to another remarkable adventure. So I began researching your “Brokeback Mountain” project and would love to work on the film crew. I have a vast amount of experience with this kind of work. I worked in professional theater for 10 years as an Equity stage manager touring with productions of “Romance/Romance”, “The Real Thing”, “The Glass Menagerie”, “The Heidi Chronicles”, and “Lend Me a Tenor”. I have managed many different theatrical production companies. I am efficient with scheduling and keeping a production on target. I am a good arbitrator and communicator between the technical departments and acting members of the crew. I am good at textural analysis and understand the structure of scripts. I have an extensive understanding of lighting, sound, costume, hair, makeup, and even construction (I spent a year in Dallas building skyscrapers). I have lit, photographed, and designed several student films. I am currently working part time as a professional free lace photographer focusing on Arts and Entertainment. I love shooting theatrical productions and now do it for the entire region. I do a lot of work documenting the process of theatrical production for lobby displays. I am most interested in the Pictorialist portrait movement of photography. I have enclosed some of my images.

The past five years, Cinda Holt (one of the original organizers of “The Sundance Film Festival”) and I have organized a film festival here in Missoula called “The Five River’s Festival of Film”. We choose a theme and then select a weeks worth of feature films and documentaries to screen. We generally bring in two to three professional filmmakers for each film: cinematographers, directors, art directors, costumers, and gaffers to talk about their process. We recently have begun to draw national recognition and had Kenneth Turran host our last festival titled “Native Americans in the Mythic West”.

It would be a dream come true to get to work on a film. I am interested in any part of the process. I am very congenial to work with, adapt and learn quickly, and can handle the stress and pressure of long hours. My favorite part of theatre was tech week. I would love to work on “Brokeback Mountain” if at all possible because of my strong connection to that story, but if not it, keep me in mind for other projects. I love your style of filmmaking and story telling. The dialogue on “Ride with the Devil” was so fantastic.

Please contact me if you need references or would like me to come for an interview. I will be in New York City April 22 through May 3

Thank you for the consideration.

Well I did not get a job on the production, but I did get a call from Ang Lee who said he was very moved by my letter. He had recently lost his father and identified with my loss. He was sorry but he could not hire me, because they where shooting in Canada and they were not allowed to hire outside of that country and that perhaps I could with him on another project in the future. Thank you Mr Lee for doing justice to a remarkable story and making it into an extraordinary film.

Something strange began to happen to me last weekend when I went up to visit my brother and his family in a city two hours north of where I live. My sister-in-law Pam sort of knew what I am doing, working on this project, and had read a couple of the postings. She found some of the images a bit shocking, especially the ones with “The Full Monty” exposed. She felt a bit uneasy reading it because it was so intimate, and she felt she should have known about what I write about, that I should have talked to or told her about them in person. I am not sure where my brother stood on it or even I he had seen what I am doing. I feel a closeness them I have not felt in years but I must admit there are still a few scars that haunt me when I visit. This past weekend I was having a great struggle in my head and felt I spent a great deal of the weekend defending and explaining what it is I am doing, because I wanted to be apologetic. I actually felt a little bit of shame for becoming so honest and forthright with my images of naked men and my exposing my personal thoughts. I began to see that I am putting so much of my life and energy into something that perhaps should remain hidden. I began to see how intimate and personal the project has become. So why would I feel shame for being myself? For letting the world see my inner struggle. Perhaps a lot of my life has been lived in shame. What is it I am trying to prove? Being isolated and alone, writing and producing images in my studio without any real connection to the world but what I filter in via the Internet. How narrow that focus and world has become. I did not realize the depth to which I had gone. It is easy for me to just put my thoughts out there, because I have a big heart and believe in being frank, upfront and honest. It’s what brings me to the heart of my imagery and very quickly gets me to the core of revealing my subjects.

In many ways my brother Mark is the reverse mirror of myself. He represents all the things that should be perfect in the world, the ideal American Dream. Our lives have been a race though time as polar opposites, our own “A Tale of Two Cities”. He settled down early, took a job of security, raised a very large family that is tight and strong, that will carry on his name in tradition. They have an extraordinarily beautiful home, are happy, content and satisfied. His children are grown and are now having many children of their own. They all just returned from what seems like a perfect all-family vacation to Disneyland. I have not seen so much joy, warmth and connection in a family as theirs. I felt like a stranger on the outside looking inward for in many ways they are all strangers to me. Why am I not a part of their cozy world? They have always been so far away and I afraid to interact, because I was so different. My brother is one year and a day younger than me and has already retired and is now onto a second career. It seems that I have always compared myself to him and often it makes me ache that I did not follow in tradition, especially as I get older. There is no legacy from me that will be carried forth; it will end with my life. But I feel while I am here I must explore and let someone know my life did have meaning and purpose. That I have touched other peoples lives in my little remote corner of my own sheltered world.

This journey is really about me, and my relationship to thoughts, imagery and issues I have struggled with thought out most of my life. I have reached a stage where it is time to reveal a history of who I am and the experiences I have lived, the darkness included, because there is so much darkness that has defined it.

Dickens opens A Tale of Two Cities with opposition. “It was the best of times… It was the worst of times…” This got me thinking the other day when I used it as the title for one of my project’s posts that perhaps I should also look into the opposition. As an artist I can see the vision and can connect to it globally, but it is so easy to lose my focus and self with such powerful media constantly at my fingertips. I need to figure out someway to filter the information and contacts. I need to somehow bypass all the gunk that seems to bog me down that becomes irrelevant. Some of this information I want but much of it I don’t. It’s becoming too overwhelming with hours and hours wasted on trying to sort though it all to get to what I really need. My heart aches some times because though I have this vast network of people, inspiration, and potential connections that can help me, I still can not seem to get to the core of those dreams because I am overwhelmed by the technology from which it’s channeled. The Internet and Facebook are so new that we have not been able to harness them as viable tools yet. Right now it seems to be a mass of splatter as world, thoughts, and concepts collide into a mass of infinity. Facebook is definitely clunky and difficult to maneuver, and it seems the more they try to simplify for general consumption, making it easier for everyone to use the further it gets away from actually becoming practical. It seems that everyone on Facebook has hundreds of friends. The real question is how do we maintain and manage so many friends. I can no longer keep track of all the people I am communicating with and it’s becoming even more frustrating to establish and cultivate a relationship with them, when everyone else seems as overwhelmed with this as I am. I spend a great deal of time trying to wade though it all and respond and keep on top of it, but it completely sucks the time out of my day to do so. For it to become a viable tool it must first become something that we can organize. It needs a page that is private to the user that easily allows us to filter and group our contacts and friends, make notes on these connections, and be able to track how we have interacted with them in the past. I am meeting some of the most amazing people; I would like to maintain that connection but I only seem to see them briefly and they disappear. There are some built in tools in Facebook but they are not user friendly or easily accessible without jumping back and forth between multiple pages. We must be able to filter it more specifically to our needs, be able to define the parameters of what it is we want or need to see and not just be bombarded with masses and masses of information constantly streaming toward us. My focus this week is to figure out how to secure and make better use of these networking tools and somehow find a way to organize them. I guess I am feeling a bit frustrated lately and know I need to keep focused on my work and the process of creation while maintaining my balance.

I used to have the most intense passion for cinema and thought my life would take me to some kind of business working in that industry. I grew up on an old family cattle ranch in western Montana. We lived in the mountains where we didn’t get television. We moved into town my freshman year in high school because my mother didn’t drive and was tired of being stuck out on the ranch. My first job, when we moved to Superior was as a projectionist at an old family run movie theater called The Strand. The Strand showed two movies per week, one Thursday & Friday and another Saturday & Sunday. I was only fourteen at the time and my mother had a rule that I could not run any movies that were R-rated until I turned sixteen. The Strand was an old small town movie theater run by the Jenson family that had been in operation since the 30’s. During the days of highly combustible silver nitrate film The Strand burned, a common occurrence in those days. So a temporary screen and projection system was set up out in one of the Jenson’s pony barns while the old one was being reconstructed. The automated process of projecting film today is much different from the human run days when I started. Film used to come in big metal cans that weighed about 50 lbs each. Each can contained 3 twenty-minute metal reels and most movies were in two cans. As the projectionist I would load the reels into the top of the projector, loop it thought the mechanical housing, and feed it to a reel below. The light for the projector came from a carbon arch. A stream of high voltage electricity flowed between two pieces of carbon that ignited when they touched and maintain an intense glow of pure white light as the two pencil size rods of carbon burned toward each other. Part of my job as a projectionist was to maintain that distance and keep the brilliance of the light consistent. Then I would stand on a box, because I was to little to be able to see out the portal, push the button to open the curtain. My heart raced as I got the projector up to speed and opened the shutter to allow the brilliant light to fill the screen with magical images. A reel of film lasted about twenty minutes and had to be change back and forth between the two projects though the course of six to seven reels per movie. The process as archaic as it sounds was quite precise. I would load the film, wind it up to a specific number on the leader strip, ignite the carbons, and wait for the first signal to start the next machine, then watch for the second signal to change the picture and sound over in perfect synchronization without missing a frame. People always asked me how I knew when to change the reel. In the old days every reel was marked with a series of dots up in the top right corner of the screen that would only appear for five frames. On the first dot I would get the next projector up to speed and 5 seconds later, when I saw the second dot appear on the screen, I would open the shutter on one and close it on the other and switch the sound in one single motions using both hands to run all the manual rigging. I ran films for the Strand theater all during my four years of high school and saw a lot of films. It stired a deep passion in me for film and it has always inspired me with awe. When I was growing up I always wanted to go to film school and become a filmmaker. I loved the idea of telling stories though the process of moving light: frame by frame, crafted, beautiful, brilliant; full of life, passion, and emotion. A solitary moment of human existence captured in a single frame. Unfortunately I came from a poor family who lived in Montana and could not afford to go to film school. I did eventually work in theater. I have made several films that I drag out every once in a while and take a look at and remember a time long gone when my dreams were so different.

Today is Oscar Day in the US. It used to be the biggest event of the season. My friend Gilbert used to gather a house full of gay men and it become the “Superbowl.” of the film industry. The one day of the year when glitz and glitter ruled supreme. With our ballots cast, we competed for bragging rights of who was movie savvy for the year. Some how that magic has been lost over the years, the tradition died with the passing of Gilbert, and somehow the industry has also changed. Gilbert and I used to watch every single movie released throughout the year and were equipped with knowledge of their magic for comparison. These days the Oscars have lost their significance because many of the movies nominated have not even made it to our theaters here in Missoula. I have only seen two films nominated this year. My vision has changed as films no longer captivate and hold my appeal. Have movies changed that much? Have I changed that much? Perhaps it’s a bit of both. People always remark on the cinematic quality of my images. I guess I still feel the power of it’s influenced, after all, I always dreamed of becoming a cinematographer.

“What a remarkable time to be alive”, my friend Buck kept saying last night, “what a remarkable time to be alive”. I really began to think about it and he is right, this is turning in to remarkable era in the evolution of humanity. With the use of the Internet we can instantly look up anything that has ever happened, see what’s currently happening anywhere in the world and communicate globally to anyone in any language. I hadn’t really thought about it until that moment the significance and profound this time had become. Here I am a man with little wiring skills or training able to communicate with so many people on so many levels. I have a young 16-year-old painter friend in a small town in New York that I have grown fond of named Dakota who I talk to daily about his dreams of becoming an artist. I share my insight, look at, and evaluate his images, and give him direction to follow his passion. “Paint what you know and feel a connection to what you paint.” My friend Giorgio in LA is going to the Academy Awards tomorrow night and I am able to hear about the experience and his process of shopping for an elegant outfit for the event. A friend Michael in Palm Springs who is painting the most remarkable images of what I would call classic pop American homoerotic art, who suffers because he has recently lost his partner and is dealing with the anxiety of recovering from such sorrow. Ramon in Costa Rica is in the travel business and lives in the most beautiful little village and has such a spiritual connection with his images to people and place. I get a post that warms my day from my dearest friend Rus in Tuscan who is a brilliant writer and frustrated teacher and my past creative soul mate. I look at a painting of a flower emerging from the ground from my friend John in Australia and know and my heart aches for spring that is know is just around the corner. I also connect to Gianni a gallery owner in Italy that is interested in using my images in some of his upcoming shows. Language is no longer a barrier, thought and ideas are eternal. Every single day of my life I meet and connect with someone remarkable via Facebook, and you don’t just connect to them you enter their world: seeing pictures of who they are, learn what kinds of things they are interested in and best of all you send them a message and they respond back generally within a matter of hours. I am inspired every day by a new idea or concept, remember something about my life I loved but had forgotten, discover something new about myself through the mirror of how I interact with others. It’s remarkable how I am able to honestly talk about my fears, anxieties and desire and share this connection to so many others who have experienced the same. I now connect to so many artists from nearly every country around the world that shares my struggle. This Project is becoming a testament of that global community because as much as I gain from others it is paid forward to someone else. From this remote mountain city in Montana I feel like Leonardo DiCaprio when he stands on the bow of the Titanic, with his arms outstretched soaring thought the air as if in flight and yells “I AM KING OF THE WORLD”. I realize it is great to be this age, have the vast experience of life behind me, and share my dreams with a world that truly gets who I am. You are right Buck this truly is a remarkable time in which we live. We are lucky to have conquered the world in such a way. This weekend I am heading north, to connect with my brother and his family, have great food and share where we have been since last year. This is the brother I have written about as a point of contention in this project that I love and adore so dearly now and long to hang out and just be together again. I do not think my family is aware of this project and what I am doing, hardly anyone around me does, but that’s actually kind of the fun of it all.