LOS ANGELES — One morning in 1978 a disgruntled San Francisco politician, Dan
White, climbed through a City Hall window, assassinated Mayor George Moscone,
then shot and killed an openly gay adversary on the city’s Board of Supervisors
named Harvey Milk.
It was a fractured moment in a troubled time and place. Memories of it soon
will be roiling the Oscar race.
On Oct. 28 Focus Features expects to introduce its film “Milk,” directed by Gus
Van Sant with Sean
Penn in the title role, at a gala in San Francisco hosted by local
luminaries, at least one of whom — Senator Dianne
Feinstein, then the president of the board of supervisors — was just steps
away when Mr. Milk and Mayor Moscone were shot. The movie will begin playing in
some theaters on Nov. 26, just ahead of the 30th anniversary of the killings on
Nov. 27, then gain wider release as the awards season gets under way.
Already the film is drawing attention as an early contender in the coming
Oscar race. Following early screenings, for instance, Hollywood insiders and
others have been startled by Mr. Penn’s picture-perfect rendering of Mr. Milk, a
politician who was at once gawky, ambitious and unforgettable to those whose
lives he touched. “Sean’s portrayal of Harvey is so beautifully right,” Cleve
Jones, a Milk friend who is played in the film by Emile
Hirsch, said in a phone interview.
Yet the movie presents no small challenge for Focus, the specialty division
owned by NBC
Universal that two years ago pushed its gay-theme “Brokeback
Mountain” to the cusp of Oscar glory with eight nominations, only to see “Crash” win best picture.
This time around, studio marketers are wrestling with an inherently political
film at a time when audiences have been wary of them. Only last weekend the
combined star power of Leonardo
DiCaprio and Russell
Crowe was not enough to save an issues-oriented thriller, “Body of
Lies,” which opened poorly for Warner
Brothers.
Focus and Mr. Van Sant will have to connect millions of filmgoers with a
world that could seem weirdly disconnected, even back then. Only nine days
before the murders, for example, the Rev. Jim Jones, whose People’s Temple had
become influential in San Francisco politics, had orchestrated the death of more
than 900 followers and others at Jonestown in Guyana.
The publishing heiress Patricia
Hearst, meanwhile, was tucked in a Bay Area prison, the consequence of her
engaging in a bank robbery for the Symbionese
Liberation Army, which had kidnapped her.
“You’re giving me an acid flashback to all the chatter before ‘Brokeback,’ ”
said James
Schamus, chief executive of Focus, responding to a question about the
universal message in Mr. Milk’s struggles. Those could turn on matters as
weighty as gay rights, or as slight as an ordinance requiring dog owners to
clean up after their pets.
“Harvey said, ‘This is a quest for everybody’s rights,’ ” Mr. Schamus said.
“That was his genius.”
If the ranch hands of “Brokeback” were subdued, nothing about Mr. Milk was.
He loudly insisted that gay people should be out of the closet, at a time when
public homosexuality was largely confined to San Francisco and a few like-minded
enclaves.
Mr. Milk’s grandest political battle was his successful fight against a
California initiative that would have banned gay teachers from the state’s
public schools. His roughest was the backroom scrap in which he helped to block
Mr. White’s reappointment to a supervisor’s post from which he had resigned two
weeks earlier. Mayor Moscone was planning to discuss that decision publicly on
the day of the murders.
(Upon Mr. Moscone’s death Ms. Feinstein, as president of the board of
supervisors, became mayor, propelling her political rise. Mr. White would later
use a “Twinkie defense,” in which his junk-food diet was cited as representative
of his diminished capacity, to avoid conviction for first-degree murder; his
conviction on the lesser counts of manslaughter sparked the so-called White
Night riots in the city.)
According to the film’s producers and others, some of the political
intricacies were whittled from Dustin Lance Black’s script. Though the People’s
Temple had supported Mr. Milk, for instance, Mr. Jones was largely cut. “It
would take so much time to explain to people who Jim Jones was,” said Dan Jinks,
who with his business partner Bruce Cohen are among the movie’s producers.
What remained, according to Mr. Jinks, was the story of a “regular guy” —
before politics, Mr. Milk was best known as co-owner of a camera store in the
Castro district of San Francisco — who decided to make a difference.
The documentary “The
Times of Harvey Milk,” directed by Rob Epstein, won the Oscar for best
feature documentary in 1985. “Execution
of Justice,” shown on the Showtime cable network in 1999, was a drama based
on the murders.
Mr. Van Sant’s film came together suddenly last year after he and other
filmmakers, Bryan
Singer and Oliver
Stone among them, had struggled for two decades with various attempts to
find a feature film in Mr. Milk’s life.
Mr. Black, himself a director, bypassed those earlier efforts, many of them
based on Randy Shilts’s book “The
Mayor of Castro Street,” and began researching an original script with the
help of those who knew Mr. Milk. In early 2007 one of those friends, Mr. Jones,
showed the script to Mr. Van Sant, whom he had known for years.
Mr. Van Sant, speaking by telephone, said he signed on partly because Mr.
Black had managed to confine the story to the brief and heady period that
preceded Mr. Milk’s death. “He made choices,” Mr. Van Sant said.
Mr. Penn joined up, as did Mr. Jinks and Mr. Cohen. They next connected with
Groundswell Productions and its chief executive, Michael London, who in turn
joined Focus in financing a film that cost a relatively modest $20 million or so
to make.
Yet “Milk” acquired a kind of epic quality as much of San Francisco became
involved. “It took on almost Tolstoyan proportions,” Mr. Schamus said of the
movie’s familial sprawl.
A number of Mr. Milk’s aging associates are not only portrayed in the film,
they also have bit parts. Danny Nicoletta, who worked in Mr. Milk’s camera shop,
for instance, is played by Lucas Grabeel of “High
School Musical” and, in turn, plays Carl Carlson, an aide to Mr. Milk who
was one of the last to see him alive. In addition Mr. Nicoletta advised Mr.
Black on the script and worked as the film’s still photographer.
In one more twist this month’s premiere, a benefit for various gay and
lesbian youth groups, will open with a screening at the Castro Theater, near the
site of Mr. Milk’s old camera shop, and will end with dinner and dancing at City
Hall, where he died.
The moral in all of it, Mr. Van Sant said, is ultimately political. “It’s an
illustration of pretty extreme grass-roots politics,” he said of his film’s
message, “that you can do it.”
But others are hoping that he has found the beating heart in Mr. Milk.
“He wasn’t Mother
Teresa,” Tom Ammiano, a San Francisco supervisor who appears in the movie,
said of Mr. Milk. “He just connected with people, one by
one.”