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The Mayor of Castro Street
Biopic on the man who made Clay Aiken’s People cover possible
Sean Penn stars in Milk (Photo: Phil Bray)
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Throughout most of his career, Gus Van Sant has successfully made small independent films about society’s misfits (Drugstore Cowboy, My Own Private Idaho, Paranoid Park), utilized Hollywood stars (Psycho, Good Will Hunting, Finding Forrester) and chronicled gay culture (Even Cowgirls Get the Blues).
In Milk, Van Sant does all three.
The story focuses on Harvey Milk, the first openly gay man to be elected to public office in California and a leader in the gay-rights movement of the 1970s. Dubbed “The Mayor of Castro Street,” his goal was simple: enter public life and thereby make homosexuality more open and acceptable.
Sean Penn plays Harvey Milk, along with an impressive cast including James Franco, Emile Hirsch, Diego Luna, and Josh Brolin as Dan White, the former San Francisco city supervisor who shot and killed both Milk and San Francisco mayor George Moscone.
Van Sant’s is not the first depiction of the slain city supervisor. The Times of Harvey Milk was a documentary that won the Oscar in 1985 for Best Documentary. The story had also been in other producers’ hands, with multiple other directors involved, for almost two decades before the Van Sant version came along. A biography and an opera have also been made depicting Milk, his accomplishments, his younger boyfriends and his killer, Dan White.
In an age where headlines about gay culture are common place—from Clay Aiken’s coming out for $500,000 on the cover of People to California’s Proposition 8 —Milk takes us back to a time when two individuals of the same sex holding hands was a political statement, not a public display of affection.
Milk opens in New York November 26, nationwide December 5.