In His Own Write
Every movement needs a hero. As the years pass and the change that hero fought for has been effected, it is common to forget just how much one person made a difference.
Milk screenwriter Dustin Lance Black first heard about Harvey Milk from a mentor while working in theater in the early 1990s. A few years later, Black watched the Academy Award-winning 1984 documentary feature The Times of Harvey Milk. He remembers, "Harvey Milk is giving a speech at the end and he essentially says, 'Somewhere in Des Moines or San Antonio -' which is where I'm from - 'there's a young gay person who might open a paper, and it says 'Homosexual elected in San Francisco' and know that there's hope for a better world, there's hope for a better tomorrow.'
"I just broke down crying because I was very much that kid and he was giving me hope. He was saying, not only are you okay but you can do great things. This was during a really difficult time for the gay community, with the AIDS crisis. And that's the moment I thought, we have to get that story back out there, we've got to continue the message."
He adds, "I saw Milk as a charismatic leader and a father figure to his people - some of whom might have lost their fathers because of their sexuality - who accomplished so much in a short period of time.
"His legacy is telling people, if you're gay, don't closet yourself. You should see yourself as different in a great way, and you should aspire to something. Kids today might not know where these gains came from, but you see them aspiring to be out doctors, lawyers, actors. We've lost some ground in the past decade, but Harvey's message can still save lives."
A few years later, Black had gained a foothold in film and television, working as a writer, producer, and director. He felt that he could tell the story of the man who has been called "the gay MLK [Martin Luther King Jr.]." However, he notes, "I didn't have the rights to a book [on Milk, of which there are several] so I started to do research on my own. Several industry folks told me to forget about it, that it was too risky. But my credit card and I pressed on."
Although a quarter-century had passed, he was glad to discover that many of the people who were close to Milk and had been instrumental in his efforts were still alive. Black notes, "My strategy from the beginning had been to make use of firsthand accounts and stories. I knew it would mean a lot of interviews and trips, but I wanted to find out the details for myself rather than reading it somewhere else - things a writer can't get out of a book or an article. Finding that the people Harvey surrounded himself with were still alive and doing their thing got me excited. I thought, okay, I can write this."
The first person Black that met with was Cleve Jones, one of Milk's protégés and among his closest confidants. An activist on the front lines with Milk, Jones had (and has) led many marches, protests, and rallies. He is the founder of the Names Project and the designer and creator of the Project's AIDS Quilt, the internationally recognized symbol of the AIDS pandemic.
"[Dustin] Lance and I were introduced by a mutual friend," Jones says. "I was impressed with him because he's genuine, kind, and smart - and because he knew who Harvey Milk was."
When Black told Jones he wanted to pen the story of Milk for the big screen, Jones was immediately on board; he would ultimately remain with the project all through filming, as a historical consultant, on the set every day.
"Boy, is Cleve a gift for a writer," Black says. "I initially interviewed him over two days and filled eight hours' worth of little cassette tapes - all of which I transcribed myself, because I couldn't afford to pay anyone to do it..."
Over the course of a year, while writing on the first season of the television show Big Love, Black would drive up from the program's Santa Clarita base to San Francisco on weekends. Jones introduced him to - among others - Danny Nicoletta, Anne Kronenberg, Allan Baird, Carol Ruth Silver, Frank Robinson, Tom Ammiano, Jim Rivaldo, Art Agnos, and Michael Wong. All of these people knew Harvey Milk well and had been side-by-side with him in the political and sometimes personal arenas.
But, as Black says, "Initially, there was skepticism from a lot of these people." Others had come to them before with promises of telling Milk's story - and that of the gay rights movement in San Francisco - in a feature film, but still it had not happened in the nearly quarter-century since the Oscar-winning documentary. A 1999 Showtime telefilm titled Execution of Justice, based on the stage play of the same name, had concentrated on Dan White (portrayed in the telefilm by Tim Daly) and the slayings of Milk (portrayed by Peter Coyote) and Mayor George Moscone (Stephen Young) rather than on Milk's life and achievements.
Black admits, "It took a lot to convince some of Harvey's real-life contemporaries that I was someone who could make this thing happen and that they weren't wasting their time again. I made these assurances, but I myself wasn't really sure I could pull it off. Some of them became like family to me and confided in me some painful memories, and I was terrified of letting them down.
"Michael Wong, as a key advisor to Harvey, had kept an extremely detailed diary of his interactions with him. I knew that it would be incredibly valuable; I kept asking him about it. One night after dinner at a restaurant near City Hall, he flopped this big thick stack of photocopied pages at me. He said, 'Yeah, that's my journal.'  It was fantastic."
Wong's diary helped Black in his intent to tell the significant personal story in addition to the political one. The first-person interviews were further backed up by research; there was a wealth of source material from documents at the San Francisco Public Library's Gay & Lesbian Center's Harvey Milk Archives - Scott Smith Collection and the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender Historical Society's archives.
If anything, there was too much material; Black says, "You're always looking for the personal story. I uncovered so many amazing ones that Harvey was directly connected to. But I knew I only had room for maybe a handful of them, out of hundreds.
"I decided that the structure would be Milk's journey through a movement which he helped to create, from the time [in 1972] that he arrives in San Francisco until his assassination [in 1978]. There is a dramatic framing device with the assassination because I wanted to indicate right away that this was someone very important who something very bad happened to. That starts the clock ticking, which was in Harvey's head as well; in his recorded will, he voices his strong suspicion that he would be killed. Separately, to his friends, he had said, 'I don't think I'll make it to 50.'"
Just as he felt all of Milk's 48 years of life couldn't be covered, Black concentrated on which relationships were key to Milk and which ones were representative of the movement that was changing peoples' lives. As was so often the case with Milk, the two would converge.
Black muses, "The personal met the political, sometimes beautifully; Harvey Milk had had significant romantic relationships before Scott Smith, but that was the one that helped lift him into office. I don't know that Harvey could have done it without Scott.
"Harvey was personally connected to why he was doing what he did. It wasn't just about rights or electoral politics, it was about the fact that he was in love with Scott or he was in love with Jack Lira - and he wanted that to be okay. He didn't want to be judged for it. He wanted to have the right to be himself, because when he was a young man, and even when he first came to San Francisco, it was against the law to be in a gay relationship, to dance with a man, or to be in a gay bar. So, his is an intensely personal story, even when it is a political one. As a screenwriter, this was one of those rare chances to tell a story where the two are absolutely connected. It was politics for the sake of love."

DUSTIN LANCE BLACK (Screenwriter; Executive Producer) - Dustin Lance Black grew up in a devout Mormon military household in San Antonio, Texas. A remarriage occasioned a family move to Salinas, CA. He finished high school there, and became deeply immersed in the Central Coast's theater world.  He apprenticed with stage directors, worked on set and lighting crews, and acted. He graduated UCLA's School of Theater, Film and Television with honors.
Mr. Black started out as an art director before transitioning into directing documentaries, commercials and music videos. The success of his documentary features On the Bus and the Saturn Award-winning My Life with Count Dracula (the latter about sci-fi legend Dr. Donald A. Reed) led to two years producing and directing the hit BBC reality series Faking It, which aired on TLC in the US. Back in the U.S., he wrote and directed the short film Something Close to Heaven, which garnered him industry attention including the AMC channel documentary Gay Hollywood, wherein he was cited as one of "Five Filmmakers to Watch."
In 2004, he commenced work on the Emmy and Golden Globe Award-nominated television series Big Love as a writer and producer, working with the program for three seasons. The first season aired in the spring of 2006; the second aired in the summer of 2007; and the third airs in the winter of 2009. He was the sole Mormon writer and producer on the like-themed show.
Mr. Black's other works as writer include screenplays for Pedro, profiling the late AIDS activist and reality television star Pedro Zamora, which world-premiered at the 2008 Toronto International Film Festival; the feature A Life Like Mine, which Paris Barclay will direct; and the big-screen adaptation of the celebrated Tom Wolfe book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.
He will soon make his narrative feature film directorial debut on What's Wrong with Virginia, to star Jennifer Connelly, from his own original screenplay.

The Direct Approach(es)                       READ AN INTERVIEW WITH GUS VAN SANT
To put Harvey Milk into cinematic narrative terms, Dustin Lance Black went through numerous screenplay drafts over a nearly four-year period. "I gave up a lot of nights and weekends," he remembers. "During the week, it was, Big Love until 6 or 7 at night, then Milk from 7 to midnight."
Once he was done, he reveals, "I didn't have any money to make the movie myself, and I had to get everyone to sign off on my using their stories.'"
"I thought Lance's script was beautiful," Cleve Jones says. "It had a very simple, elegant structure. Harvey's voice was clear in it; I could hear Harvey saying the words Lance had written.
"I would say to Lance, 'When you're ready, I've got a director for you,' but I didn't tell him who it was. I knew that if my friend Gus were the director, the film really would be about Harvey and not about the director."
Black says, "When Cleve told me his friend who wanted to direct was Gus Van Sant, I said, 'Oh, that's good!'"
True to his word, Jones called Van Sant and set up a meeting. Black declined to give him the script at that meeting until he did one more draft, at which point it was sent to the Oscar-nominated director in Portland. A week and a half later, Van Sant called Black and said, "Let's make this movie."
Van Sant reflects, "The Times of Harvey Milk had set the bar pretty high, but I felt a dramatic version would be an important continuation. I knew pretty much about the story at that point I got this script, and there was always a difficulty in telling it because of the many elements of Harvey's life and the many other intersecting stories at Castro Camera. But Lance got it in line and wrote a succinct script that was largely about the politics and less about the day-to-day lives of the characters.
"Harvey Milk is one of the more illustrious gay activists, and since he died in the line of duty, he has achieved sainthood in the gay world. One reason to make this film was for younger people who weren't around during his time; to remember him, and to learn about him."
Given that many of the director's films have had as their protagonists people who are not being given their quarter by society, Van Sant allows that Harvey Milk "fits in with many of those other characters' outside-the-mainstream status. Yet this is also the story of someone living in the mainstream, or at least my mainstream."
Black was friends with the producing team of Dan Jinks and Bruce Cohen, Academy Award winners for American Beauty. Both knew of Milk when they were growing up; Jinks' father had been editor of The San Jose Mercury-News, which followed Milk's campaigns and triumphs.
Jinks notes, "I read that Lance had written a screenplay about Harvey Milk and that Gus Van Sant would be directing it, so I called Lance up to congratulate him and he said, 'You know, we don't have a producer. Would you be interested in reading this?' I said, 'Are you kidding? Absolutely!'
"I mean, here's a guy who made a difference in the world, fighting against prejudice at an important time in the history of gay rights. The movement had a leader in place who was effective at stopping something that really needed to be stopped."
Cohen adds, "When we read the script, we were unbelievably excited because we thought, 'Finally! This important story about a hero is going to get to the screen with a strong script and the perfect person to direct it, and if we can help to get it told that will be incredible.' It's both an intimate and an epic story.
"We felt that the film could be moving and entertaining, whether you know Harvey's story or not. This man was not your average politician; he came out to San Francisco with Scott Smith with the goal of expressing himself and living his life and being out and creating this new world for himself there. He didn't have a plan to go into politics, but he felt he could make a difference. And here we are, in a presidential election year where the theme is change…"
Jinks remarks, "One of the benchmarks of the script is authenticity, since Lance researched it extremely well. The script tells Harvey's heroic story so powerfully - but also hilariously, and sexily. Combine that with the confirmed involvement of a world-class filmmaker, and we immediately said, 'We have to be a part of this.'"
Jinks, Cohen, Black, and Van Sant convened to talk about their next steps. Van Sant discussed his plan to use archival and news footage at certain points in the movie, not merely before or during the end credits as most biopics do, an inspiration that Jinks found "marvelous."
For instance, the actual announcement by Dianne Feinstein (then the president of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, now a U.S. Senator) on the steps of City Hall of the assassinations of Milk and Mayor Moscone "is such an iconic image that we didn't want to attempt recreating it," says Jinks. Actress Ashlee Temple was cast as Feinstein for newly filmed narrative/linking scenes, but that 1978 announcement to the press was, says Cohen, "such a powerful moment in history that we decided the best way to convey the shock and horror of that moment was to let it speak for itself."
Joining the coalescing project was the new production and financing company Groundswell Productions. Groundswell principal and founder Michael London, an Academy Award nominee for Sideways, had found himself drawn in by the personal and historical detail captured in the screenplay.
He remarks, "In reading Lance's script, I brought my own history to it. I had gone to college in the Bay Area and spent a lot of time there. I was aware of how essential Harvey Milk was to the city, and to the community that was building there at the time.
"He was an extraordinary American hero - at a time when we didn't have a lot of them; we don't today, either. Very few times in your career do you get the opportunity to be involved with a story so powerful and timely with artists of the caliber of Gus Van Sant and Sean Penn."
Penn had leapt to the forefront of everyone's minds as the project coalesced. Cohen notes, "He has this way of just inhabiting a character where you couldn't find the actor underneath if you tried."
Jinks adds, "Sean likes to be surprising in everything he does, and I think he can do anything."
Van Sant knew the Oscar-winning actor - who now lives in the Bay Area - and sent the script to him. Penn responded even quicker to the script than Van Sant had, and within a week, Black and Van Sant were meeting with him to confirm the project. Penn wanted assurances that the filmmaking team would be as authentic with Milk's personal relationships as they were with his politics.
Black admits, "We were mindful of whether a lead actor would take risks. But Sean said 'Let's do it right. Let's tell it like it is.' Sean made a real effort to make it as true as possible. He is dedicated to accuracy, and he wound up completely embodying the mind and spirit of Harvey Milk."
Jones states, "When I heard that Sean Penn had agreed to do it, I started whooping and hollering and running around my living room like a madman. He's one of the great actors of our time."
Jinks said, "Every day on the set, it became this thrill for all of us to see Sean transform himself into somebody who was really so much Harvey. The people who were in Harvey's life and have been involved in the film were astonished at the transformation."
Van Sant comments, "Sean brings real old-time intense excellence in portraying a character on the screen."
Cohen says, "Milk lifts and soars on Sean Penn's performance as Harvey Milk, whom he embodies. There were moments where it was important to Sean that he deliver a certain line or speech exactly as Harvey did it. On the set, I had goosebumps watching that happen."
Penn remarks, "There was not only an excellent script to be guided by here. There was also a good amount of archival material. I fell in love with Harvey, with this person, this spirit of this human being, which transcended my own agenda as an actor.
"Gus Van Sant is a director who never makes a bad movie, so as an actor, one feels enormous faith in his process."
The production came fully together once Focus Features committed to co-finance the movie with Groundswell, and to take worldwide distribution rights. London comments, "Everyone at Groundswell and Focus had an emotional connection to the story; we all felt the urgency to tell it."

READ AN INTERVIEW WITH GUS VAN SANT

READ INTERVIEW WITH EMILE HIRSCH

Read more about shooting the film and the locations

Read more: Milk's Legacy Today and Memories of Milk

Read the synopsis, historical background: Timeline, and background on Milk/Castro

Read more: Real Life/Reel Life

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