Long before making "Milk," the film due Wednesday about the life and death of openly gay San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk, director Gus Van Sant imagined a scene in which the voluble, charismatic Milk was dressed as Ronald McDonald. In that version, Dan White, a fellow city supervisor who shot and killed Milk and San Francisco Mayor George Moscone in 1978, was deep in a "sugar-infused rage" and "envisioned himself as the Twinkie sheriff and he shot Mayor McCheese, and Harvey was Ronald McDonald."
Van Sant laughingly calls this his Charlie Kaufman take on Milk's story -- though, perhaps it's the sad nature of reality that White claimed during his trial that junk food had fueled his behavior -- the infamous "Twinkie defense."
"I offered it to both Sean Penn and Tom Cruise but I was really inept as a producer," says Van Sant, who says he then just sat and waited for them to call him back. And waited. And waited. And never followed up. "I completely dropped the ball from the very first and it sort of washed into a sea of however many offers they get every day."
That was in the mid-'90s. It's a decade later, the afternoon of the Los Angeles premiere of "Milk," the more straightforward telling of the story that Van Sant made. Dressed in baggy jeans and a blue top, the 56-year-old director is sitting on the deck of his modernist, unpretentious Los Feliz home, fielding phone calls about what he calls "the wedding," i.e. that night's gala. His parents are here and the more traditional-looking Gus Van Sant Sr. is reading by the swimming pool.
Few American directors have a body of work as varied and idiosyncratic as Van Sant's, which includes his early poignant looks at drug users and street kids ("Drugstore Cowboy" and "My Own Private Idaho"), a shot-by-shot remake of Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho," elliptical visions of Kurt Cobain's final days ("Last Days") and the Oscar-winning, feel-good drama "Good Will Hunting." In person, Van Sant seems gentle, with a nonjudgmental air, a distinct adherence to live-and-let-live. His features are rounded, his dark hair limp and his eyes seem to pop out like a cartoon character.
As a gay director with an empathy for the marginalized, it's probably not surprising that Van Sant has been offered -- and toyed with -- various incarnations of the Milk story, from an early effort spearheaded by Oliver Stone that Van Sant abandoned over script differences to the Ronald McDonald version he wrote himself, to the latest incarnation, the one he made with a script by Dustin Lance Black and starring Penn as Milk. Black's script hews closely to the politics of the story, eschewing for instance a more psychological take that would perhaps plumb the narrative of Milk's life from birth to grave, or a more sociological, party-like vision that would feature the raucous Castro scene complete with wild bath houses, which Van Sant notes might have been "pretty alarming . . . you know, thousands of men on the street picking each other up and having sex every night in sex clubs and drugs and all." Even the "Twinkie defense" and White's subsequent sentencing to seven years in prison are relegated to the end credits because, simply enough, Milk was dead by then.
Telling the story
While politics shape the narrative, "Milk" doesn't play like a standard heroic-man biopic, in part because of Milk's flamboyant demeanor, but also because of what seems to be Van Sant's true passion -- the band of outsiders and the bonds among those on the margins who choose to make their own families.
For those who've ever assembled in a living room to fight apartheid, nuclear weapons, for women's liberation, for civil rights or any social cause, Milk offers an acid flashback to what it's like to live on that grass-roots mojo, the intoxicating mixture of idealism, fraternity and implied otherness. The mouthy, charismatic Milk, played by an unusually vulnerable and accessible Penn, is fomenting the movement and riding the crest of group yearning. He tends to his flock, portrayed on screen by such winning actors as James Franco (as his longtime lover), Diego Luna, Emile Hirsch and Alison Pill, as his lesbian campaign manager.
"Milk" has turned out to be unexpectedly topical as the culture wars over homosexuality have had a flare-up. The last bit of "Milk" is devoted to the supervisor's successful crusade against Prop. 6, a California ballot measure in 1978 that would have banned gay teachers from the public schools. Thirty years later, Prop. 8, revising the California constitution to ban gay marriage, recently passed. But on a more optimistic, level, "Milk" reflects the grass-roots flavor of Obama-mania. Like president-elect Barack Obama, Milk used personal narratives to make political statements, encouraging his comrades to come out. He also trumpeted hope, giving speeches in which he declared, "I know that you cannot live on hope alone, but without it, life is not worth living."
