A still from ‘The Times of Harvey Milk,’ about the
nation’s first openly gay elected politician; he was assassinated in
1978. This fall, Sean Penn stars in a new bio called ‘Milk.’ Photo
courtesy of Margaret Herrick Library.
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By Joelle L. Quartini
Friday, June 06, 2008
In honor of the Pride month, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences will screen the 1984 Academy Award-winning documentary “The Times of Harvey Milk,” about the life and death of the nation’s first openly gay elected politician in San Francisco.
Director Gus Van Sant will release a film this fall about the subject, with Sean Penn in the title role, but you can brush up on the topic next week, when the documentary’s director Rob Epstein appear as part of the "Monday Nights With Oscar" series to discuss his film.
Harvey Milk served on San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors for 11 months in 1977, before he was assassinated on Nov. 27, 1978, alongside Mayor George Moscone. A Long Island native, Milk moved to San Francisco in the early 1970s and opened a camera store on Castro Street, where he became the voice of neighborhood politics. Later, fearing for his safety, Milk tape recorded a speech one year before his death to be played in the event of his assassination. In the recording, he makes clear how he wanted to be remembered: “I wish I had time to explain everything I did. Almost everything was done in the eyes of the gay movement."
The Blade spoke to Epstein about his film and the legacy of Harvey Milk.
How did the original documentary come about?
I lived in San Francisco during the time of the events depicted in the film, and I actually started to mount the project before Harvey Milk was killed. I saw that Harvey’s story really embodied all of the initiatives that I was originally interested in exploring.
Harvey was significant because he was a man of his times and he understood what kind of leadership was necessary at that moment in history— that’s what makes important and meaningful political figures.
Why was Harvey Milk’s story an important one to get out at that time?
At the time, for those of us who lived in San Francisco, it felt like it was life changing, that all the eyes of the world were upon us, but in fact most of the world outside of San Francisco had no idea. It was just a really brief, provincial, localized current events story that the mayor and a city council member in San Francisco were killed. It didn’t have much reverberation.
How is ‘The Times of Harvey Milk’ still relevant to gay politics in America today?
If you don’t know from where you came, you don’t really have a clear sense of how you got there and where you’re going. For me, as both an artist and a gay man, the film was a continuum, part of a progression. What was going on then was kind of the second wave of coming to terms with what it means to be gay, and that was the first public declaration of what it meant to be gay and the consequences of that. Harvey’s murder was symptomatic of what it meant to be gay and what it meant to come out at that time. Now we’re further along the continuum. I’m in San Francisco now, where gay marriage just started [this week]. Legally.
Filmmaker Gus Van Sant is set to release ‘Milk,’ starring Sean Penn. Why is another version necessary?
“Milk” is certainly going to bring Harvey’s story to the whole world on a different level. The documentary got out there—it’s shown all of over the world and continues to show, but a dramatized version of that is going to get it to the multiplexes. There’ll be interest in that the real person should be in people’s minds as well. Both are important.
How do the documentary and dramatized movie formats differ?
In Gus’s film, you’re going to get much more about the personal life of Harvey. In the documentary, I made conscious choices to make it just about the public Harvey and what he represented in the world publicly. The feature will get much more into the personal. In that sense, they’re probably complimentary.
"The Times of Harvey Milk," part of the Monday Nights With Oscar series, 7:30 p.m., Monday, June 23, $5, DGA Theatre, 110 W. 57th St., includes post-screening conversation with director Rob Epstein. For reservations, call 888-778-7575.
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