A Haunting Tale of Real-Life Murders

The gap is widening. As the networks wallow in such ratings-sweeps trivia as NBC’s “Y2K” and CBS’ “Aftershock in New York,” cable’s HBO and Showtime continue producing television’s most daring and stimulating movies.

Not having to rely on ratings pays off for subscription-driven HBO and Showtime, and also rewards their viewers. Without these two, TV moviedom would be nearly all gruel.

Just last week, for instance, HBO presented “RKO 281,” which entertainingly recalled the turbulence that almost sank “Citizen Kane,” an Orson Welles classic most Americans haven’t even seen.

The networks would sooner run a movie about three-legged lepers--that’s probably coming next sweeps--than “RKO 281.”

Much less the provocative recent history that Showtime depicts Sunday. It’s “Execution of Justice,” a striking account of what led to the 1978 murders of San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and Harvey Milk, a member of the city’s board of supervisors and said to be the first openly gay elected official in the U.S.

They were gunned down in their offices by Milk’s troubled fellow supervisor, Dan White, a conservative former cop and fireman who bore grudges against both victims as much for their efforts to thwart him, apparently, as for their liberal philosophies. White didn’t outlive them long. He committed suicide by gassing himself in his garage after spending just five years in prison for involuntary manslaughter.

Based on a play by Emily Mann, and stylishly directed by Leon Ichaso, “Execution of Justice” is the video equivalent of a good book you can’t put down. It’s haunting, well-acted and especially distressing given the relatively light sentence White received for what seemed to be premeditated murder. He had to break into the building to reach Moscone, then reload before finishing off Milk. And after they were down, he applied a lethal exclamation mark by pumping a pair of additional shots into each of their heads.

White’s trial strategy in part was his exotic “Twinkie defense” in which his attorney argued that his mood swings--and subsequently murderous behavior--resulted from his periodic gorging of junk foods.

All of this aside, nearly as curious as the sentence is why a movie would be made about White, an empty polyester suit who stood for nothing, instead of about either of his victims, who were known as men of vision, ideas and influence, their legacies speaking for themselves. The subject of an Oscar-winning documentary in 1984, Milk was so magnetic and highly esteemed in San Francisco that hundreds of thousands mourned him with candlelight vigils. And even more profoundly, Moscone’s arrival as mayor set the city on a new social and political course that made it possible for Milk and openly gay politicians succeeding him to flourish.

On the screen in “Execution of Justice,” in contrast, is Dan White (Tim Daly) as unexceptional as his name. When asked what he believes in, on the eve of launching his campaign for supervisor, he can’t answer. And the rigid moral code that compels him to earlier act heroically against a fellow cop who savagely beats a helpless prisoner becomes twisted by hate into a gnarled campaign against “the malignancies that blight our beautiful city.” “Malignancies” appearing to be code for homosexuals.

White, civic activist Milk (Peter Coyote) and Moscone (Stephen Young) are elected together, and Michael Butler’s script defines the two supervisors, in particular, as opposites converging disastrously like two trains on the same track.

As Milk is shown here, perhaps too worshipfully, transforming the city’s predominantly gay Castro district almost as a Christ figure turning fish into bread, the seething White observes this new order through hard, angry eyes. At one point, Ichaso’s fluid camera circles White like a tightening coil, for he’s a watch-works of suppressed emotions ready to go boing at any time, embittered by feelings of isolation and resentful of the building financial pressures he faces.

Documentary style comments from former Moscone press secretary Corry Bush, current mayoral candidate Tom Ammiano and Marin County politico David Lumin are interspersed through the movie as historical footnotes. But these speakers are not identified, unfortunately, meaning that most viewers will not know who they are or in what context to put their remarks.

As penetrating as “Execution of Justice” is, moreover, it doesn’t approach the intensity of some of the real events associated with this grim chapter. That includes the emotional pitch of Dianne Feinstein, then the city’s deputy mayor, making her televised announcement of the murders. It’s a freeze-framed moment captured in news footage included in a brief documentary that Showtime is airing afterward as a coda to its movie.

“It is my duty to make this announcement,” Feinstein began unsteadily. “Both Mayor Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk . . . have been shot and killed. The suspect is Supervisor Dan White.”

Daly is very strong, and especially well supported by Coyote and Daly’s wife, Amy Van Nostrand, as White’s wife, Mary. Their good work merges in a movie that ends as powerfully as it begins, juxtaposing an audiotape that Milk had made (“If some day a bullet enters my brain . . . let it destroy every closet door”) with a despondent White attaching a hose to his car.

“Dan White could not live with himself,” someone says in the short documentary. That’s the way you’d want it. But was that really the reason? Or did he end his life because, to the very end, he felt cheated by his enemies?

* “Execution of Justice” will be shown Sunday at 8 p.m. on Showtime. The network has rated it TV-14 (may be unsuitable for children younger than 14).

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Howard Rosenberg’s column appears on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. He can be contacted by e-mail at calendar.letters@latimes.com.