Milk Press Conference
I know there has been a ton of Milk posts recently, but this press conference has a lot of great questions that haven't been asked too much and really good answers by the cast, director and writer. It's very long, but interesting, if you are a huge Milk fan, like me.
Get ready to read a lot
The Milk Press Conference! The Talented Cast & Crew Talk about the Biopic of the First Openly-Gay Elected Official, Harvey Milk
By Marlow Stern
After more than a decade stuck in studio limbo, the biopic of slain politician Harvey Milk, the first openly-gay elected official, will finally see the light of day, and it’s all thanks to novice screenwriter Dustin Lance Black.
A planned Harvey Milk biopic, based on Randy Shilts’ 1982 biography “The Mayor of Castro Street,” has been in limbo at Warner Brothers for the past 16 years, with everyone from Oliver Stone to Bryan Singer to Gus Van Sant attached to direct. Due to the political climate, early incarnations of the film focused on the plight of Milk’s assassin Dan White who, due to his notorious “Twinkie defense,” was convicted on a paltry charge of voluntary manslaughter, sparking an uproar in gay communities across the country. However, budding screenwriter Dustin Lance Black wished to craft a film honoring Harvey, the first openly-gay citizen elected to public office, and since Warner Bros. still owned the rights to the biography, he wrote an original screenplay based on stories he heard from Milk’s surviving Castro Street pals. Then Van Sant came onboard, then Sean Penn, and the rest was history. The film would eventually find a home at Focus Features, the specialty division of Universal, who have a history of distributing gay pictures such as 2005’s Oscar-winning flick “Brokeback Mountain.”
Milk, directed by Gus Van Sant (“Good Will Hunting”), is the story of California's first openly gay elected official, Harvey Milk (Sean Penn), a San Francisco supervisor who was assassinated along with Mayor George Moscone by San Francisco Supervisor Dan White (Josh Brolin). Milk is aided in his campaign efforts by former street hustler Cleve Jones (Emile Hirsch), and first love Scott Smith (James Franco). Milk's successful effort against a California proposition 30 years ago that would have barred gay teachers in public schools closely parallels today's battle against the recently passed Proposition 8, which banned gay marriage in the state of California. The film is creating major Oscar buzz, especially for star Sean Penn in the lead role.
MMM was at the New York press conference for Milk, where stars Sean Penn, James Franco, Josh Brolin, and Emile Hirsch, screenwriter Dustin Lance Black, and director Gus Van Sant talked about the film, and the man.
Q: All of you came from a wide variety of vantage points to make this movie. I wanted to ask if you would be willing to speak from an aesthetic or artistic standpoint, what was it that [made you say] ‘I have to make this movie’ or ‘I'm scared of doing this movie but I have to do it.’ What was the flashpoint for all of you in terms of committing and being a part of telling this story?
SEAN PENN: I don't know if there's such a thing as being ‘scared’ to make a movie. There were challenges in this that were exciting. It started with Gus Van Sant. I think all of us here, and any actor with a hunger to be in something fantastic, wants to work with Gus. And then he gave me Lance's sensational script, so it was a no-brainer. And of course, I could lay on top of that all the values that this story and Harvey Milk's life have, but that would take a long time. It was a wonderfully written script with one of the great directors.
DUSTIN LANCE BLACK: Well, for me it's a pretty simple answer: it was a very personal story. I heard his story at a time when I needed to hear it as a teenager, and now it's not out there anymore. I asked my friends, “Do you know who Harvey Milk is?” and they're like, “I dunno, some dairy salesman or something?”-they have no idea. It's important that [the story] be out there, and that his message be out there. I think that's pretty clear after the past couple of weeks. So it came from a personal place and it's still very, very pertinent.
JOSH BROLIN: [I had a] very visceral reaction to the script. I think Matt Damon was supposed to have played Dan White at a certain point. I read the script and cried at the end of the script. Gus had also sent me the 1984 amazing documentary [Rob Epstein's Oscar®-winning “The Times of Harvey Milk”] that I watched with my daughter, and both of us were crying at the end of that. It was one of those things that was less about the character and more about the story [and] we were so moved by it. I think the last time I felt like that was [when] I did a movie a long time ago called “Flirting with Disaster.” I remember watching it, and I'm so happy to be in the film. I'm able to objectify and go, ‘I'm just happy I'm in this film, I love that this film exists.’ It was the same feeling with this.
JAMES FRANCO: I was in London and my agents called me and told me that Gus was going to make this movie about a guy named Harvey Milk. I grew up in the Bay Area-Palo Alto, 27 minutes from San Francisco-and I didn't really know who Harvey Milk was. I did a little research, and I was surprised and sad-I was amazed by who he was and his message, and sad that no one really talked to me about him [before]. I was born the year that he died, 1978.
EMILE HIRSCH: Trying to rat me out.
[Laughter]
JAMES FRANCO: It was just an incredible story. Without even reading the script, I wrote Gus an email from London and I said, “I'll do anything in this movie just to be a part of it.” I would have played the Pool Guy. Gus is very low-key and his emails are very low-key, and he [wrote] okay, maybe we'll met in L.A. if you're there. And we did, and then fortunately, he gave me a much better role than the Pool Guy.
GUS VAN SANT: I've done a few films that had gay characters, but not super-positive gay characters. I heard about the project through Rob Epstein, who had heard that Oliver Stone was no longer going to make a version of the film that was at Warner Brothers. So I was interested in it, and I got wrapped up in studying it.
But I think that political stories are always really interesting to tell, but they're often avoided because they can get-I guess boring, basically. Harvey's personality was a way to have a character that resembled someone-like Abbie Hoffman, almost-who was running for political office and at the same time represented his gay community. So it seemed like an amazing opportunity to have all these things in one story.
EMILE HIRSCH: I, of course, wanted to work with Gus and Sean and all the other actors. I didn't know anything about the gay community in San Francisco or Harvey Milk at all. But I did know many gay people growing up, and some were very good friends of my mother's family. One of them actually had died of AIDS when I was about 15, and I'd known him ever since I could walk. He was a really great guy named Mark. This was a chance for me to . . . learn more about the history of some of my family's really good friends and kind of learn where they were coming from. I really wanted to be a part of it.
Q: Several of you also mentioned San Francisco. We should point out this film was filmed not in Canada, not it other cities-it was filmed entirely on location in San Francisco. I was wondering if members of the panel would like to speak of some of the experiences they must have had being there, with people who remembered it all, lived through it all, in locations where things happened?
JOSH BROLIN: I stayed above Castro. I was staying in my ex-wife's brother's apartment and I was on the hill overlooking Castro. I was afraid, when I would go down to the grocery store, that I was going to be shot. The whole thing was that San Francisco embraced this movie so much. When I would go shopping and all that, I was actually afraid of how people would react, because I know all of San Francisco loved that this movie was being done, period. What ended up happening was, people would say, hey, oh, you're playing Dan White, you're doing the movie Harvey Milk, and they were so incredible. I mean, the city itself as a whole were so supportive, and that obviously bled over into-we just had the premiere there, when was it? A month ago? A couple weeks ago?-
Voice: October 26th.
JOSH BROLIN: It was a incredible feeling, the ambience. This was before the election, so Prop 8, that whole thing... Just as a whole, it was an incredible, incredible, goose-pimply experience to be able to do it there.
JAMES FRANCO: It was also great-I mean, I was so excited to find that we got to do it there, and that we got to do it right around all the people who had been spending all these years with him-like Danny Nicoletta and Anne Kronenberg, and Cleve Jones came up to San Francisco. So to have like the real people who this film is based on around for us to use as resources is an inspiration. It's invaluable, so I think it helps build an even more extended family that reached out to the truth of where this story came from. That was really fantastic.
Q: I was wondering if you could speak about what just happened in California with Proposition 8, and in the movie what happened with the defeat of Proposition 6. How do you think a movie like yours could possibly speak to the fact, or raise awareness, that civil liberties in this country are still being put to the popular vote?
JAMES FRANCO: I have sort of strong feelings about that. I think that, sadly, Proposition 8 ended up looking a lot more like Dade County in the film, where the gay movement went down, than it did Proposition 6, where Harvey Milk, through his strategy, was successful. I think it's like gay people and the gay movement need a history like this so we don't keep repeating the same mistakes. I think if you were watching the ‘No on 8’ fight, you really didn't see a lot of gay people representing themselves. There weren't gay people in the commercials, it didn't say “gay” or “lesbian” in a lot of the literature, and that was really one of the lessons of Harvey Milk. So in that way I hope it's helpful, and I hope it motivates the gay and lesbian community to start that outreach and education and have some pride in a way that gets us to ‘meet your neighbors’ again, and put a face to who's being hurt. I imagine that will help them in future fights.
Q: This is a question for Mr. Penn. I thought you caught Harvey Milk's mannerisms and gestures really well, and was wondering how you prepared for that, other than watching the documentary or talking to Cleve Jones?
SEAN PENN: Well, the documentary and then some additional archival footage, which I'm sure were very helpful. I say that a little vaguely because with that sort of thing, the best way you can use it is watch it a lot, the same way you play music all day in the background and not necessarily be thinking about it. I kept it on all the time. And when you go for a period of time, little synapses start to connect and if you listen carefully, you can hear the music of that and you kind of dance with it. But that, and then, of course, with what Lance wrote, and it comes from all directions.
But it was clear, at least in terms of-for lack of a better term-“character choice,” that the most exciting version of Harvey Milk, to me, was Harvey Milk. If you see the documentary, the guy is a movie star in that documentary-he is electric, a warm guy. So you just reach and reach and reach, and never assume you're going to get it all the way there. But you figure that with the help of the director and the screenwriter and all the other things that a movie is, that you can get the spirit of it out there the best you can.
Q: Since the film is based on a true story, did you speak with some of the real-life character you portrayed in the film? And what sort of things did they mention about Harvey, about Dan, etc. that you took away and used, that were important to you?
EMILE HIRSCH: I played Cleve Jones in the film. He was there every single day and I was able to spend a lot of time with him beforehand, and the first thing I got from Cleve is that he's very mischievous and very funny. So that was something I thought would be very important.
And also, it was really a way that he, I think, probably bonded with Harvey over humor and they would kind of go at each other, I think. He had amazing stories about Harvey. Harvey was just the most amazing guy to him. He feels like Harvey really shaped his life and put him on course for who he was going to be as a man. Cleve was also very instrumental to me in just learning about Castro and learning about San Francisco and the movement, and what it was like psychologically to be a younger gay guy back then. And he also wanted to kind of debunk some of the myths about Castro, like the bathhouses. He was like, to me, “You probably heard of these bathhouses things,” and there's a lot of myth about that, but he was trying to tell me, “Listen, back in the 70s, this was like the most fun thing in the whole world. There was no HIV. We were these really repressed young guys who got an opportunity to go into the ultimate candy store. . . . We had an amazing time.” So he was able to debunk a lot of the myths, I think, about the community.
JAMES FRANCO: I played Scott Smith. The real Scott passed away in the mid-90s, so I never had a chance to speak to him. I read a bunch of stuff, and watched the documentaries, and they were very helpful to get a sense of the time. But Scott, as important as I think he was to Harvey Milk, there wasn't a lot of documented material on him. So I really did have to depend on stories from people that knew him-Cleve Jones, and Danny Nicoletta worked in the camera shop with Scott, and other people, Frank Robertson. I guess the sense I got and the side of Scott we were depicting in the script was, for the most part, a supportive guy. And just based on the facts of their life, Scott was there through the big moments of Harvey's life. When they met, Scott was a struggling actor and Harvey was in the closet, working in investment banking. So Scott was there when Harvey decided he wanted to come out and to change his life. He was there when he moved to San Francisco with [Harvey]. And he was there when Harvey decided he wanted to start a political career, and was Harvey's campaign manager, and not knowing anything about politics. So the fact that he was there for all of that shows me that maybe he didn't know exactly what he was getting into, but he was, at least to a certain extent, willing to support Harvey and just do whatever he could to help Harvey achieve what he wanted to do. And that's how I played him.
Q: Did you speak to anyone who knew Dan White?
JOSH BROLIN: I think the most informative-I don't know if I'm even supposed to say this or not-but the most informative thing for me was, I talked to some cops who had known him, and it ended up one of those cops actually taped his confession. So I heard the confession, which was extremely revealing to me because there was a sense of arrogance in it, but there was also an incredible sense of ‘victim’ to him. You know what I mean? So, look, the whole thing with him-I mean, Sean at one point called me, we were on the set, and he said, listen-[Sean] had gone out to dinner with Charlie [White], who is Dan's son-and [Sean] said, “Do you want to meet him?” and I was like, ‘Ahh, man, I don't know.” And also, it was the day that we were doing the baptismal scene, so it was him [Charlie], we were baptizing [Charlie], basically, in the scene. So [Charlie] was in Sean's trailer and I went to go meet him, and there was as severe as you can imagine, a severe reaction when I walked in with the mutton chops and the clothes and the whole thing. But I think that he was-no, he hasn't seen the film, I know that-but I think he was very happy once we spoke for a while, that his dad was not being portrayed as being-in the result of what he did. It was more a question of how did this really decent guy get to the point, the incredibly frustrated point, where he felt like the only power he could muster was doing something tangible like loading a gun and shooting somebody, in a cause-and-effect kind of thing. But Cleve was great to have on the set all the time. When I saw Cleve the first time-first of all, I could tell, when you look in somebody's eyes, Cleve looked, “He's playing Dan?” Like, “He's not very good. That's not right.” And then I went away, which was kind of a great instigator for me, and motivator, so then I came back and then we did the dress and haircut, and the mutton chops, and the whole thing. The next time I saw Cleve, this was the reaction: [Brolin puts his hands to his mouth and gasps.]-which was a great, great-it gave me a lot of confidence to be able to go, okay, I think I'm going in the right direction here. Yeah, so that was a great motivator.
Q: Sean, this was such a seamless performance, a gorgeous performance. I'm wondering how did Harvey stay with you while you were playing him? Did he seep into your daily life at all? And also today, how has he changed you as a person?
SEAN PENN: The answer is he did stay with me.
How, I'm not entirely sure, I haven't given it a lot of thought. When something comes in that you become aware that it's there, you think, oh, don't go away. In terms of humanly, one likes to think that with each day and each person that comes into their life directly or indirectly, that there's some growth of some kind, hopefully in a positive direction. Certainly with him, there would have been but I can't identify it. Certainly in a very immediate way, there's a lot of-let's say-timeliness to this story that we've all been hearing about, in reference to the recent experience that we had. But I can't be more specific than that.
Q: But why are you playing him like he affects you in daily life? Did you recognize him-
SEAN PENN: No. My daily life consists of getting up at 6 o'clock in the morning, making sure I've got my words together, that my kids are got off to school or are going to wake up in time if I leave before them for work, and then I'm at work all day. And then I'm exhausted going home and learning a bunch of lines for the next day. So I don't know that I had a daily life other than what's on the screen.
Q: This is primarily directed to Sean and Gus, although anyone else can comment. I believe the gay movement now has become the new issue for civil rights. And this movie can have the possibility of charging reaction and stimulating a lot of response. Do you believe that, and can you talk about how you hope that happens, and how it might get people to be much more conscious of a lot of these issues that I think are very well defined in the film?
GUS VAN SANT: Yeah, especially right now, with Prop 8 and the reactions to Prop 8. It's mobilized and brought together the gay community-particularly, I think, the younger gay community. It's their time and they have taken to the streets. I think there was just now an interview by a gay writer in Los Angeles, and he had been to the first rally response to Prop 8 in Los Angeles. He went to the West Hollywood gathering, and there was a speaker, and everyone kind of walked away and walked up the street to Sunset, to his surprise. Because he had been to many rallies in West Hollywood, and this had never happened before. And I think there's a new energy that's inspiring. And I think our film is about a new energy of a different time-a sexual liberation from the Sixties developing into people who found their gay sexuality and banded together in Castro, which had a lot of young energy of that time. And also the nuts and bolts of the political strategies are hugely informative and inspiring in the movie-and mostly inspiring, I think. When it gets to play theaters, I think it will definitely play into that gay civil rights energy of today.
Q: And Sean, your thoughts on this?
SEAN PENN: I go with what Gus said. I can't help but-even the word “issue” about this; I mean, it's only an issue because of ignorance in the first place. I think if you could criminalize-we don't have an excuse of being ignorant of the law. If we could have no excuse for being ignorant of human history, then in fact any support, for example, of Proposition 8, would be minimally manslaughter. Because no human should [judge?] teenage boys who are going to hang themselves out of a reach for an identity that they can't get, in part because of things like the “issues” like this-precious words like this, and all the things that the whole history of any civil rights movement has had. So as long as it's an "issue," it's an obscenity. And if this movie is part of an engine to help reveal that, that's going to make all of us really happy and proud.
Q: For Mr. Black and Mr. Van Sant, please. I wonder about the use of archival footage in the film. Was that part of the script originally, or was that something that the director brought? Where was it obtained, and how difficult was it? And could you comment on the mix that's occurring-not only in this film but in many films that are biopics or about historical figures-between the narrative feature and the documentary elements that are crossing back and forth, and how that is intended to influence upon the answerer's response to the film?
DUSTIN LANCE BLACK: I'll answer the first part. For me, the archival stuff came out of trying to write Anita Bryant [a singer who campaigned against homosexuality in Dade County, Florida, and figures into the film], and it's difficult. I mean, you start to just transcribe her words and it's rather unbelievable. I think to a modern audience it's really tough to believe that someone said and meant the things she said, and said on such a national platform. So I worried, I thought she might come off as caricature, or she might come off as evil, and kind of this black-and-white portrayal, and I didn't want that. We wanted her to be the real person, and I thought, “Well, just let her speak for herself.” So I wrote in the script, “Actual footage of Anita Bryant.” And that was my little contribution to that, and then Gus ran with it from there.
GUS VAN SANT: I think for me, yeah, it was probably indicated in the script. There [were] a couple of other things. There was a question of whether we would be able to assemble marchers, and so I thought we could just use maybe footage that was shot by the news showing a large number of marchers. I knew that Rob Epstein had some images of the candlelight march, so it was possible that we could ask him to let us use that in the film. But when we started looking for these marches, we often looked under anything that said “Harvey Milk” on it. So we ended up with . . . 12 hours of footage, and even wanted more. I think we went to the Harmell Library and the Gay and Lesbian Archives in San Francisco, and looked at home movies that were of the Castro, and started to play with it when we were editing, and really liked what was going on. We also started to shoot the film with the idea that we would use-we would actually shoot in 16mm. That got changed while we were working on it. We really were going to go for the full-on documentary look throughout, which got changed. The documentary footage inspired that.
Q: First, why did you decide not to use 16mm? And secondly, how does this combination of archival and regular footage impact on it? What's your intention?
GUS VAN SANT: I think for me it was to bring-it was all that verisimilitude and bringing the audience right into the actual period. The documentary footage always succeeded, where it was always harder for us to succeed where you're reality watching the period, and it was always a trick to draw the audience into that period. The 16mm idea got waylaid because of fears that we were shooting in a format that was unstable, or not as detailed as maybe our studio wanted us to be. But we kind of made it match the way-the film stocks we used.
Q: As referenced by a couple of questions earlier, since November 4th there has been a dramatic escalation of tensions and discord between the gay and “faith” communities, and I'm wondering how you think that might impact the performance of the film at the box office, for even an ostensibly sympathetic figure like Harvey Milk, when we're seeing so much raw hatred against gay people every day on the streets and in the press.
GUS VAN SANT: Well, I think that we're seeing both. There's the raw hatred and then there's also the support. I think both sides are playing out in press and in the community. It's the nature of the battle, and it's encased in the film as well.
DUSTIN LANCE BLACK: Harvey Milk was great at grabbing headlines, getting attention, and getting it out there. So whether positive or negative, it's in the public dialogue again and I think that that's so important.
I mean, if that gets people to see the movie, fantastic. But I think it's just great that it's something that we're all talking about again. I know that between both the Democratic National Convention and the Republican National Convention, I was so disappointed in both, because I thought, where are we? Where are our gay and lesbian people? It felt like we were off, we weren't something anyone cared to talk about. So in that way, it's exciting. I don't care if it's positive or negative, it's a dialogue-and that's what's really important right now.
SEAN PENN: I also think it's important, though, to remember that the tension is not between the gay and the faith communities. The tension is between the community which in fact really is gay, and a pseudo-faith community which has nothing to do with God, love, or anything of real “faith” and it's really just hypocrisy and hatred. So any faith community that deserves the title “faith community” really won't have a problem with these issues.
Q: Were the gay actors in the film a choice, or was it an audition process? How did you come up with them?
GUS VAN SANT: There was an audition process. We did try and enlist the talents of as many gay actors as we could. There weren't that many that were of box office stature when it comes to the bigger studios. So when it came to roles like Rick Stokes and John Briggs, those guys fit in very well and were great.
Q: Just to clarify that: Stephen Spinella plays Rick Stokes, who was in fact an openly gay lawyer who was running against Harvey Milk in the supervisor campaign, correct?
GUS VAN SANT: Yeah. He was an openly gay lawyer who ran for supervisor against Harvey.
Q: This is primarily for Sean and Gus, but I was wondering if you could comment on the parallels between Harvey Milk and President-elect Barack Obama, in terms of being galvanizing figures and the parallels between their two campaigns, the platform of hope, etc.
SEAN PENN: Well, I think that's the first thing that hits any of us - hope. I think at that moment in time, particularly relative to the gay community of San Francisco that he was running to represent, it was such a necessary part of what he was offering. Similarly today, for the whole world in every issue, anything that represents hope might be our last shot at hope. So yeah, there's those obvious parallels. But I'm not going to tell you anything you're not going to write without me.
[Laughter]
Q: This is a question for Gus. Could you talk about the cooperation of working with DP Harris Savides?
GUS VAN SANT: Harris Savides, our Director of Photography. We've shot a number of things. I first heard about him doing a commercial. The persons that were putting the commercial together were looking for a DP, which is such a crucial thing. They had shot with Harris in Europe, and they showed me the commercial and it looked pretty good. And then the clincher was that they said Madonna wouldn't work with anyone else. She needed Harris. And I thought, well, she must be pretty discerning, and I kind of had the Madonna thing: “I got to use Madonna's DP.”
SEAN PENN: And her ex-husband.
[Laughter]
Voice: Her film is not nearly as good as yours.
SEAN PENN: Whoa…
Q: One of the things I thought was really successful in the movie was the sexuality. You did it so nonchalantly and casually, and I thought that was really effective. I wanted you to talk about that, and I wanted Sean and James to talk a bit about it because you just made it seem so natural and interwoven into the film that you didn't really think about it.
JAMES FRANCO: Yeah, I think there were a lot of moments of intimacy in the movie that were either suggested or not suggested in the script between us, especially Scott and Harvey. The original “tryst” that they have in Harvey's New York apartment was actually our last day of shooting. By then it was an interesting choice, because it was quite quick, it was almost one shot. But on the other moments, some of the sex scenes, you know not to think about it or else you're going to screw everything up. Speaking from my point of view, at least, and then probably the actor's point of view as well, you know that over-thinking is going to screw everything up. We just went ahead as if it were just one of the scenes.
Q: Could you guys comment on it?
SEAN PENN: Well, Cleve Jones said something really great. Early on, we had put together a dinner for a lot of the people that had been involved in Harvey's campaign. He said one of the myths is that we're all just the same, it's just the sex that's different. He said, “In reality, we're very different, it's just the sex that's pretty much the same.” And the difference, of course, is living with bigotry and oppression and all of that shit. And that was where the focus went. And the rest of it is, some people, a guy gives them a boner, for somebody else it's a woman. So it was an approach, the sex is the sex is the sex is the sex, but the other part was really the heart of the picture.
Q: Question for Mr. Penn: do you have any thoughts on how the world might have been a different place if Harvey Milk hadn't been assassinated?
SEAN PENN: I think less people would've died of AIDS. I think Ronald Reagan would've been forced to address it. It was a tragic loss. He wouldn't have stood quietly. He was a leader, and he happened to be focused on the gay movement. The impression was-there was a popular notion initially that this was a “gay disease.” Certainly huge numbers of homosexuals died related to it and all that. I think he would have advanced that argument a lot sooner. I think people are dead because he died too soon.
Q: Gus, we're heading into the holiday season. Do you think this will “play in Peoria?” I mean, this isn't “La Cage Aux Folles.” Do you think straight audiences, straight guys in particular, might feel queasy seeing "Milk"?
GUS VAN SANT: I don't really see it that way. Maybe, ultimately, there's some challenge, but I think it's a very intense movie, very positive and uplifting. I don't know about the holidays.
Q: But this is a very competitive marketplace right now.
GUS VAN SANT: I do think it's one of a kind within the marketplace.
JOSH BROLIN: The one gay guy in Peoria can't wait for this movie.
[Laughter]
Q: This is somewhat two-fold. I want to hear more about the process of writing the script, and how much research you did and how long it took. I also think, with the hope at the end and Barack Obama getting elected, and there's also the fact that politicians are not even seeing gay when they talk about gay politics right now, it's strange, because there are some parallels but there's also some differences, I think, and I just wanted to hear people explicate a little more on Harvey saying, “Hey, we need to come out, say we're gay” etc.-things like that.
DUSTIN LANCE BLACK: Well, the first part of the question: I started writing it in spring of 2004. It was meeting Cleve Jones that made me go from being a fan of this legend of Harvey Milk to being in love and endeared to the real guy, who I was starting to get to know through these real-life people's stories, these more specific stories. So it grew, after a lot of work. I got up to San Francisco a lot on weekends to meet this great family of people who helped me get to know who this guy was, until it got to the point where I really felt like I was little bit haunted by this man who I'd never met. And at that point you start writing. So what is that, like four years and some change since then. And the second part, I don't know. I sort of talked about it a little bit. I think yes, this looks a lot like-Proposition 8 looks a lot more like Dade County in Wichita, and not just because it was a loss to the gay community, but also because the strategy was so similar. The strategy in Dade County was to send straight allies from California and the Bay Area to Florida and have them represent the gay community instead of the gay community having these leaders represent the gay community themselves. So I think that is one of the lessons of the film, is to the gay leadership and the future gay leadership today.
Although I've got to say, it's really exciting. I was there on Wednesday night after the election, and the young guys and young girls out in this audience that walked away from the stage, like Harvey said, You know, they probably don't know this history yet, but essentially they knew it was time to get out of West Hollywood and march up to Sunset Boulevard in the straight area and put a face to it, and say “Hey, it's me that got hurt last night.” So I think there's some really good instincts in the young community. I'm hopeful.
source: MMM (Manhattan Movie Magazine) - http://getmmm.com/webdata_mmm-home-page-test.pl?cgifunction=form&fid=1228115960