I’m not sure what the time limit is for zombies, but I’ll hope this doesn’t qualify. Also, it’s exactly the same topic.
I just got a chance to see the movie last week. I liked it a lot. I loathe Penn’s public persona but as an actor he usually is and was in this brilliant. Franco was also great, though the greatest problem with the film was that his nude scene didn’t last anywhere NEAR as long as it should have.
I thought the movie did an incredible job of taking you back to the 1970s, which while I don’t remember them that clearly (I was a kid) the colors, the sets on the TV studio stage, the clothing, and all details seemed perfect. Brolin looked so much like the pics of White it’s chilling (Penn’s a lot better looking than the real Milk of course, especially when shirtless). It did a fantastic job of not making Milk into a saint but at the same time showing his importance and passion. While personally I was rooting for Langella, Penn didn’t steal the Oscar, he’s a worthy recipient.
All that said, I have a problem with the writing though and was curious what others who saw it thought. Both have to do with the two principal psychotic characters.
Josh Brolin was excellent and scary and a nuanced psychotic as Dan White, but I never understood what his motivation was or hatred of Milk was based upon. He wasn’t really that homophobic- compared to most city councilmen in the 1970s he was probably liberal- and Milk really did mislead him on the mental hospital bill. I don’t buy anything as simple or as trite as he was closeted- there’s enough closeted men in the U.S. to have their major city but most don’t go on killing sprees. He references his finances and the like along the way, but then he simply shows up at city hall after his resignation/attempt to unresign and kills the mayor and Milk. You don’t know if he went there with the intention of doing so, or if he snapped, or why he was so intent on killing Milk after he killed Moscone. The character went from A to B to C to J to M without the other letters.
Do you think this was poor writing- the character was simply underdeveloped- or that it was intentional- that they were trying to show the mystery and complete illogic of his actions? Either way it was one of the few things I didn’t think worked.
The other is also motivation/mentally ill character related. Diego Luna’s clingy psychotic Jack, like White a real figure but also not quite explained; clearly the character is unbalanced to begin with and has a damaging past and a substance problem, but what’s unexplained is Milk’s sick attachment to him; he had any number of warning signs that “this cannot end well”; the first (in the movie- I haven’t read an in depth bio of Milk) was their first night together. However, instead of taking the “get this nutcase away from me” procedures (have him arrested for breaking and entering for starters, plus in the Castro as in every other large neighborhood gay or straight there can’t be any shortage of people who’ve had stalker/creep exes who could give advice on ditching them) yet Milk didn’t even seem inclined to do so, even taking him with him long after he’d proven to be a completely unstable political liability. Do you think this lack of explanation was to add mystery to the character or just not well developed enough? (From reading the online bios of him Milk seems like one of those sad co-dependent people who simply can’t be single and any relationship is better than none: he was in non-stop live in relationships from his late teens on- and that’s probably the way Penn played it, but it’s certainly not made clear.)
Diane Feinstein gave an interview to the Chronicle on the 30th anniversary of the deaths. It’s here.
It dosen’t really answer your questions, and is one person’s 30-year-old memories. But it sheds an interesting light on the time by someone close to the action.
Right. Not only had Milk not helped persuade Moscone to reappoint White…Milk actively publicly campaigned against Moscone reappointing him. He had threatened Moscone, saying, “You reappoint Dan White and you won’t get elected dogcatcher.”, and that comment had gotten out in the press.
You should read, if you get the chance, and speaking of Randy Shilts, his “The Mayor of Castro Street”, his biography of Milk. It goes into a lot of detail about the events surrounding the assassination. White had been the swing vote blocking a lot of Moscone’s proposals and the liberal wing of the Board looked forward to getting someone on there who would swing the votes the other way. Also, White was backed in his attempt to get his seat back by the police officers, downtown businesses, and realtors and developers, all of whom were enemies of Milk, and who Milk had gotten elected campaigning against, so Milk saw White as a tool of his political enemies.
Meanwhile, Moscone was in trouble. The murder of Congressman Ryan and the mass suicide at Jonestown had happened earlier that year, and Moscone was starting to face criticism for his links to Jim Jones and the People’s Temple while they were still in San Francisco. At the same time, Moscone was under investigation by the FBI for a possible payoff from one of Howard Hughes’ corporations, and the FBI was looking at both Moscone and Milk over irregularities in getting federal funding for a gay community center. So, Moscone was vulnerable, and he wanted to keep Milk happy to nail down the gay constituency.
Meanwhile, White wasn’t entirely rational at the time. He was suffering from massive financial trouble at the time, and was convinced that Milk was part of a conspiracy against him to keep him off the board (which, as I pointed out earlier, was largely true).
I’ve got a somewhat off-the-wall question for those of you who’ve seen the movie: how was Dennis Peron depicted, and how much of a part does he play in the movie? I’m just curious, because Mr. Peron used to be an acquaintance of mine. and he’s a very interesting character in his own right, one who’s got a lot of charisma and has led a most color- and eventful life.
(And now here’s a bonus question for anyone’s seen the movie **and ** actually knows or knew the aforementioned gentleman as a person: how realistically do you think he was portrayed?)
He was a character according to IMDB (way way down the list) but to be honest I don’t remember him. He must have been one of the “group” people (so in other words something of a cipher).
A connection I thought surprising in real life- not mentioned in the movie- is that the man who saved Gerald Ford’s life in the Sara Jane Moore assassination attempt, Oliver “Billy” Sipple, was the ex-lover of Milk’s ex-lover in NYC, Joe Campbell. (Sipple’s life was very sad: he seems to have had mental problems already by the time of the assassination attempt, but the exposure and outing that came from the event [he wasn’t out to his family] ruined his life, and Ford’s only acknowledgement of his debt to the man was a thank you letter [not even a photo op] due he always believed [and possibly with reason] to his being gay.)
A good way to feel old is having to explain to the 30 year old (straight female) friend you’re with at the movie who Anita Bryant was. I was curious “whatever happened to” her- I knew she famously flopped in a number of nightclub and dinner theater ventures that left her owing money to everyone she met- and she’s now back in her native Oklahoma continuing the good work of alerting America to the gay agenda via Internet postings and volunteer work with Fundie organizations.
It seems quite clear to me (and I only saw the movie, haven’t read much about Milk himself) that Milk was so saddened by the numbers of young gay men who committed suicide that he *couldn’t *let go of any friend.
Milk (in the movie) seemed to be the sort of man who I refer to as a White Knight. He needs his partners to need him, and for them to just broken enough to always need his help. Jack certainly fit that part. Jack needed to be saved, and Milk was (usually) there to save him.
I think there was also an element of simple lust with regard to his attachment to Jack. Straight guys aren’t the only ones who can get led by their dicks.
Dan White’s motivations were not made clear in the movie, but I think that’s because they aren’t really known with any certainty, and I don’t think Van Zandt wanted to invent anything (he didn’t try to explain the motivations in his movie about the Columbine shootings either). He did show Harvey’s duplicity with regards to White, but didn’t necessarily try to conclude that was the reason. Harvey’s suspicion that White was “one of us” was not invented, but was also not necessarily pushed as an explanation for anything. I think Vn Zandt was just basically saying “Here’s what happened. Here are a couple of things we know. Your guess is as good as ours.”
I agree with Diogenes and The Devil’s Grandmother. Without knowing anything about Harvey Milk going in the first time (I’ve since learned everything I could) it was clear that his embrace of Jack was partially lust and partially a savior complex (meant in a good way, not a bad way).
[nitpick]Actually it only happened slightly over a week before, not earlier that year, which I guess is technically correct, but makes it sound as if it had happened months before.
I can only barely imagine the dark dark pall over San Francisco at that time. Here’s an NBC news report of the Moscone/Milk murders and also talks about Jonestown. The news story is first and then the report has a short biography of Moscone. Unfortunately it cuts off just as it starts to talk about Milk, but it’s still interesting.
And as long as I’m providing links, let me take the opportunity to once more post what I think is one of the most brilliant and moving videos on YouTube. It’s very short (2:01), but devastating. I’ve seen it multiple dozens of times and it still gives me chills and leaves me in a puddle of tears. If the music were just a little lower it would be perfect.
Thanks to this thread reminding me, just finished watching it this afternoon. Not too much to add, but I second the movie did a great job of recreating the look & feel of the times.
Of course, I didn’t make it to Castro until 1988, but I found my finger on the pause button so I could spend some time looking at old Castro. It didn’t look that different in '88. I remember my first visit there, parking my car right on Castro and being worried my car would get broken into or I’d get mugged or something. It was mostly my imagination I guess, but it seemed seedy and dangerous. I was afraid someone would see me or jot down my license plate for parking in front of a gay bookstore. How paranoid I was just twenty years ago. It’s funny too, because around '78 I was living near the Hillcrest area of San Diego and had tons of fun tooling around there, even though it was almost as gay seedy as the Castro. I guess I was too young to be paranoid anyone would think I was gay for being there.
I was only 14 at the time of Milk’s murder, and don’t really remember it, although I vaguely remember the press talking about the junk food twinkie defense.
Can’t remember exactly when I started hearing about the gay cancer, but I think it was around '81 or 2.
Perhaps this question is better suited to General Questions, but what the heck – I’ll throw it out here. To what degree was Milk’s election seen as a breakthrough in the gay community at the time?
Obviously, in retrospect, his election and his assassination is important and means a great deal to people, but was the election itself a momentous event? Were gay people talking about it in New York and Chicago and Boston in the days afterward? Did it have enough impact outside the gay community that even straights knew that a gay man had won an election?
It made news worldwide. In the “L&T of HM” documentary there’s news footage from the time of people literally dancing in the streets of the Castro and a copy of a London newspaper article is shown. Remember that this was during the Anita Bryantfruit pie tours when homos were in the news constantly and gay rights were first really gaining momentum, so in the tradition of “if it bleeds it leads” this was a time of “queers get ears” with the news audience.
I just checked the Time magazine archive. Harvey Milk was mentioned in 1974 as a leader of San Francisco’s gay community, three years before he was elected a city supervisor. The next mention isn’t until his death in 1978.
Milk’s unsuccessful runs for city office in 1973 and 1975 received no mention in the New York Times or the Washington Post. Perhaps he got coverage in California newspapers at the time.
“San Francisco political activist” Harvey Milk was quoted in an Associated Press article in 1976 about the San Francisco-based national gay publication The Advocate, which Milk called “a travesty” because he thought it was conservative and assimilationist. I wonder if that affected his coverage in The Advocate. The cover of the November 30, 1977 issue of that magazine, the first published after Milk’s election, mentioned stories on impersonator Jim Bailey, “Gay defeat in Massachusetts”, “Houston Battleground for Women’s Issues”, and other stories, but not Milk. He finally made the cover in the January 25, 1978 issue, two months after his election.
He was one of several people interviewed in a long article in the New York Times Magazine in November 1977 about gay politics in San Francisco, when he was running for a third time.
The Associated Press carried a five-paragraph story on Milk’s election to the board of supervisors that month; it was published in the New York Times, among others. He was mentioned in one paragraph of a UPI nationwide round-up story about local elections. The Washington Post, in a round-up story of local elections in November 1977, gave a paragraph to Milk’s election.