Hollywood- please make a movie about Harvey Milk!

I first heard of Harvey Milk when I rented, based on the advice of a sales clerk, The Times of Harvey Milk, an Oscar winning documentary about his life and eventual assassination. I recommend that you check it out. It's a great film about Milk who became the first out politician in American history when he was elected Supervisor in San Francisco. He did this back during the 70s- a time when announcing one's homosexuality to straight America seems tantamount to announcing that you are a Satanist who drinks blood. To win, he created a coalition of different groups, including unions, African-Americans and neighborhood old-timers in the Castro.

So I was happy to read last year from various Hollywood trade magazines that a movie about Milk's life as depicted in the book, The Mayor of Castro Street (which I also highly recommend), had attached Bryan Singer. Singer is the director of The Usual Suspects and the X-men and Superman franchises. I hoped that Singer's name, like Ang Lee with Brokeback Mountain, would fast track the making of the film. The history of the project is that it's been in development hell or turnaround in Hollywood for years much like the biopic of Janis Joplin. Names like Dustin Hoffman, at one point or other, have been thrown in the mix to play Milk. With Singer attached, I thought- finally! someone is there who can spearhead this. Unfortunately, in researching a separate post this week, I read the news that Singer has tabled the Milk pic to work on another project for United Artists.

I understand why creatively Singer might want to work on another project. Sometimes, things work out like that in Hollywood. You go in the direction of the projects that have some heat behind them. I can imagine that happened here. However, I do have one thing to say to Hollywood in general: Please, make a movie about Harvey Milk!

Never has his story been more relevant than at this juncture. The ploy by many homophobes is to divide gays from the rest of the American experience as if we are naturally at odds with other groups- whether they are black, or Asian or unions or in the military. The comments by General Pace this week make it clear to me that we need to have images of the history of gay people that's about how much we've contributed to this society. Not in the clichéd sense, but in the big picture sense such as the African-American civil rights movement and being servicemen with long records of serving our country. A film about Milk would be controversial (read profitable) because it's a story that shows the belief that we aren't a part of this country to be a lie.

Despite the image of San Francisco being this bastion of extreme liberalism, many of Milk's constituencies were not liberal. He bridged the gap between different groups. Like the documentary on his life, a biopic about Milk's life has Oscar worthy appeal as a political drama that can reflect our times by showing the potentiality of what could have been versus what people are telling us this history is.