"Milk" distributor in public tiff with trade paper over marketing efforts

Focus's Andrew Karpen and James Schamus (L&R) with San Fran Mayor Gavin Newsom and wife

A minor skirmish has broken out between The Hollywood Reporter, which ran a piece on Tuesday suggesting that Focus Features is keeping the much-anticipated Harvey Milk biopic Milk on the down-low, and Focus CEO James Schamus, who fired off an angry letter to the trade publication defending the movie and his company’s marketing plans for it.

THR’s Steven Zeitchik launched the first broadside on October 28, when he noted that “The opening of Milk, director Gus Van Sant’s account of California’s first openly gay politician, is four weeks away. Yet you wouldn’t know it.”

Zeitchik goes on to compare the launch of Milk to the launch of another Focus film, 2005’s Brokeback Mountain; by this point in the year, Brokeback had already screened at the international film festivals in Venice (where it won the Golden Lion) and Toronto and was already accumulating staggering word-of-mouth praise.

Milk, by contrast, had barely been screened at all before its world premiere in San Francisco Tuesday night and hasn’t been the topic of much discussion in the media. Zeitchik said that Focus’ strategy of avoiding the politics inherent in a gay film — selling Brokeback as a love story and Milk as a movie about hope and change — made more sense with the former than with the latter, which is about a landmark political figure.

Schamus immediately sent a response to the Reporter, saying that Focus couldn’t be accused of “hiding” the film since it hadn’t been completed until just a few weeks ago. He says that word-of-mouth screenings will be taking places in cities all across the country starting next week and that there will also be gala premieres in New York, Los Angeles and Portland.

James Schamus
 

Finally, notes Schamus, the trailer has been getting raves in theaters and on the Internet for weeks, so it’s not like Focus is trying to keep the movie a secret.

If Harvey Milk were alive, he’d no doubt get both sides to calm down a little. In any event, given that Milk is currently on the cover of The Advocate and that Oscar buzz is getting deafening around Penn’s performance, we’re bound to be hearing a lot more about this film before it hits theaters on November 26.

Especially after this little election thing stops taking up so much space in the newspaper.