Gus Van Sant

Craig ZADAN and Neil Meron have fielded all sorts of congratulatory calls in recent months from people excited to hear that after years of struggle, the veteran producers had finally found a way to get a movie made about Harvey Milk.

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.

Gus Van Sant doesn't pretend that his Harvey Milk is necessarily the "real" Harvey Milk, even though it creates the air of authenticity. "It's a political pantomime. It's like a puppet. It's a fake. It's fake. It's fake." This said, he seems happy with a scene that deftly captures the dichotomy of Milk's life, and how the personal and the political intersect and collide.

Gus Van Sant, who was arrested on drunken driving charges in December, has agreed to an alcohol diversion program in Portland, Ore., his attorney said Friday. Van Sant had a blood-alcohol level of 0.19%, more than double Oregon's limit of 0.08%, when he was arrested Dec. 21 on a main downtown street, police reports said The 54-year-old director, whose films include "Good Will Hunting" and "Drugstore Cowboy," appeared briefly in court Friday morning.

The idea probably looked great on paper: Do a sequel to the popular 2003 Jim Carrey comedy "Bruce Almighty" about a TV news reporter who is visited by a new-wavish God (Morgan Freeman), cast funnyman Steve Carell, who played Evan, the anchorman whom Bruce despised, bring back Freeman and beef up the budget to $175 million. The result, "Evan Almighty," debuting Tuesday on DVD, is less than a "divine" comedy.

A skinny guy sporting a stringy platinum pageboy and pajama pants wanders around the forest somewhere in the Pacific Northwest. He's muttering to himself as if arguing with someone he can't bring himself to confront. Later he jumps in a river and spends a night in front of a campfire alone, singing "Home on the Range."

Michael Pitt was 19 and an actor still fresh off the streets of New York when he first met director Gus Van Sant. Not long after, they started talking about making a movie inspired by the death of Seattle grunge rocker Kurt Cobain. Six years later, their trance-like, time-shifting collaboration, "Last Days," is being released, with a stringy-haired Pitt -- himself a musician -- dramatizing the final, rambling hours of the fictional Blake as he wanders around his woodsy estate.

There are worse ways to start a career than by co-starring in a film that wins the top prizes at the Cannes Film Festival. Appearing in "Elephant," director Gus Van Sant's look at a suburban high school, 17-year-old John Robinson attended the festival but missed out on the awards ceremony because he had to get back home to Portland, Ore., for the state lacrosse finals as well as end-of-term exams. Not bad, considering he originally auditioned to be an extra.

Gus VAN SANT has made acclaimed films about thieving junkies ("Drugstore Cowboy"), young male hustlers ("My Own Private Idaho") and one ice-cold, fame-seeking murderess ("To Die For"), but he knew that dramatizing a Columbine-like school shooting would cross a line with some filmgoers. "An event like [Columbine] is so grotesque that the taste level of doing a dramatic piece on something like that is brought into question because of the way we think of drama itself," Van Sant says.