On the Milk Train

With the recent passage of California’s Prop 8 disallowing gay marriage, Gus Van Sant’s new film Milk, a chronicle of the last eight years in the life of San Francisco gay activist Harvey Milk — who was assassinated alongside mayor George Moscone (played by Victor Garber) in 1978 — is particularly meaningful to the re-energized gay civil rights movement. That fact is not lost on its star, Oscar winner (and former Broadway performer) Sean Penn. “As long as Prop 8 is 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,” he says. “I know playing Harvey has stayed with me even if I’m not quite sure how yet.”

“It was especially important to us to honor Harvey, but political stories can be boring,” adds director Gus Van Sant, who worked closely with screenwriter Dustin Lance Black on making a full-bodied film biography. Both men are openly gay, which is why they made a point of using some openly gay actors, including Stephen Spinella and Denis O’Hare in the pivotal roles of local gay bigwig Rick Stokes and arch-conservative state senator John Briggs, respectively.

Another prominent (though straight) theater star who appears in the film is Tony Award nominee Alison Pill. She plays Anne Kronenberg, who managed Milk’s victorious campaign for the Board of Supervisors, and is now Deputy Director of Administration and Planning of the San Francisco Department of Public Health. “I’m embarrassed that I didn’t know much about Harvey; and after I learned, I kept thinking how could I not know? That’s why this film is so important,” she says. Unlike many of the film’s stars, Pill had a chance to meet her real-life counterpart. “Meeting Anne and her daughter was amazing. All that background information filtered in to help me shape her as a character. We talked about how making a film is a lot like running a campaign. For both, you live in a vacuum and keep really long hours.”

Hollywood heartthrob James Franco, who plays the late Scott Smith, Milk’s long-time companion, says he was extremely anxious to be a part of the film. “I was born the year Harvey died, and I grew up in Palo Alto, not that far from San Francisco. So I sent Gus an e-mail saying that I’ll play anything, even the pool guy.” With Smith no longer with us, Franco had to rely on a different sort of research than Pill. “I watched some documentaries; but I had to depend a lot on stories about Scott from Cleve Jones, who was one of the film’s advisors (and is played on screen by Emile Hirsch) and Danny Nicoletta [a friend of the couple played by High School Musical‘s Lucas Grabeel]. Anyway, Scott was an actor, so I understood that aspect of him.”

Perhaps the hardest assignment belonged to Josh Brolin, who plays Dan White, the fellow supervisor who murdered Milk and then claimed his diet of fast food (the so-called “twinkie defense”) made him pull the trigger. “I talked to some cops who knew Dan White, he says. “I even heard his taped confession. It was a strange blend of arrogance combined with a sense of victimhood. So the question becomes: How did this basically decent guy get so frustrated he could load a gun?”