Dustin Lance Black tapped Harvey Milk’s friends for the slain gay leader’s story

In Milk, which opens Wednesday (November 26) in Vancouver, gay men head to San Francisco in the early 1970s when they hear that there is an area of the city that is less hostile to homosexuals than their own hometowns. When they get there, a community leader named Harvey Milk tells them that the only way they will find freedom is to come out of the closet and tell their friends and family that they are gay. The film’s screenwriter, Dustin Lance Black, says over the phone from New York City that he first heard about Milk when he was 14, despite the fact that Milk had been assassinated before Black was born.

“When I was a kid, my stepfather moved us to California and I got a part-time job working in a theatre in Salinas. This director I was apprenticing under told me about him, and knowing at that point that I was gay, I became interested in the story. I started out directing car commercials for a company in Santa Monica, but eventually I started looking to do something that was personally meaningful in my writing.”

He wrote two films about gay men on personal journeys and then went looking for a family story he could relate to. A Mormon, he found it with the TV series Big Love and became a staff writer. That allowed him the time and money to do research on a movie about Milk, who became California’s first openly gay elected public official when he was voted to the San Francisco board of supervisors in 1977.

“There had been several attempts to make a dramatic feature, but I had to approach it with my own research. I got to know his friends and associates and began to see that his message was clear. He felt that he should come out and introduce himself to the people who were most likely to vote against him, because he felt that if they met him, they wouldn’t fear him. He thought that approach would work for other gay men as well, but I think we have slipped into bad habits and maybe lost some focus.”

Once Black had written his screenplay, he went back to the people he had interviewed during his research and asked them to allow him to use their real names. He was given the go-ahead by every Milk associate except Cleve Jones, who had gone on to create the AIDS Memorial Quilt. Black had told him he was looking for a director, and Jones had a friend he felt would do a good job.

It turned out Jones knew best. The “friend” was Oscar-nominated director Gus Van Sant. “Gus was very open to me being involved in the entire process and having an executive-producer credit. I was there when we cast Sean Penn [as Milk] and Emile Hirsch [as Jones, who had changed his mind about having his name used]. I was on set every day, which is really a testament to Gus and his approach to collaboration. Thanks to him, the film came together in this magical way.”