Benjamin Purvis lives with his single mother Judith, who designs tacky clothes and makes rock-hard popcorn balls. Judith and Benjamin make ends meet by working at a women's retail clothing store. Benjamin spends his spare time writing science fiction stories, and has recently completed Yeast Lords, which centers on a hero named Bronco, modeled after his long-dead father. At various times, portions of Yeast Lords are seen as Benjamin imagines them. Bronco is obliquely masculine, and he valiantly struggles with a villain over yeast production.
While attending a two-day writing camp for aspiring fantasy and science fiction authors, Benjamin attends lectures by his idol, the prolific and pretentious writer Ronald Chevalier. Chevalier announces a contest for the writers, in which the winner's story will be published nationally. After encouragement from fellow camper Tabatha, Benjamin submits Yeast Lords. Tabatha shows the story to her friend Lonnie Donaho who runs an ultra low-budget video production company. Lonnie gives Benjamin a post-dated check for $500 and begins adapting Yeast Lords into a film.
As Chevalier reviews the stories from the campers, he gets a call from his publisher, rejecting his latest manuscript. Panicked, he picks up Benjamin's story, and it sparks his imagination. Chevalier changes Purvis' Bronco into Brutus, an extremely effeminate and comically flamboyant hero, changes the other character names and title, but otherwise leaves the story intact. His publisher loves it, and the novel is rushed into production under the title Brutus and Balzaak. Portions of Chevalier's version are now seen playing out alongside Benjamin's original vision of the story.
At the local premiere of Donaho's version of Yeast Lords, Benjamin is nauseated to see how badly Donaho has adapted his work, and abruptly leaves the film with Tabatha. They go to a bookstore where he discovers Chevalier's plagiarism after reading a paragraph from Brutus and Balzaak. Benjamin confronts Chevalier at a local book signing, and assaults him with some merchandise Chevalier had offered Benjamin in exchange for keeping his theft quiet. Two policeman hustle him out of the store and he is placed in jail.
Judith comes to visit her son in jail to give him his birthday present. She hands him a box of manuscripts, all officially bound by the Writers Guild of America. Judith explains that she has been registering all his stories with them since he was seven years old, thinking they would make a nice keepsake for his children. Yeast Lords is one of the registered stories. After Chevalier is exposed as a fraud, copies of Brutus and Balzaak are unceremoniously dumped from store shelves and replaced with Yeast Lords.
In early August 2008, work on an Internet viral marketing began, which had a video introducing the character of Ronald Chevalier.[7] A second video was released in October 2008.[8] A trailer was released on August 19, 2009. Some of the artwork in the opening credits is by fantasy and science fiction artist David Lee Anderson.
Release
Gentlemen Broncos was intended to be released theatrically on October 30, 2009, but due to poor reviews the national release was pulled from theaters.[9]
Reception
The film received mostly negative reviews and holds a 19% rating on Rotten Tomatoes based on 79 reviews by critics and the sites consensus reads: "Unselfconsciously juvenile and overwhelmingly quirky, Gentlemen Broncos offers a lot of potty humor but isn't terribly funny".[10]Metacritic gave it a generally unfavorable 28 out of 100 based on 21 reviews.[11]Roger Ebert gave the film 2 out of 4 stars, writing that "Hess invents good characters, but they quickly become lost in a disjointed and meandering story.” [12] However, Richard Brody, writing for The New Yorker, lauded the film, and in 2018 described Gentlemen Broncos as "a truly great film, with no asterisk whatsoever".[13]
Home media
Gentlemen Broncos was released on DVD and Blu-ray on March 2, 2010.[14]
