After delays, ‘Milk’ may be right on time

Long before making “Milk,” the film due Wednesday about the life and death of openly gay San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk, director Gus Van Sant imagined a scene in which the voluble, charismatic Milk was dressed as Ronald McDonald. In that version, Dan White, a fellow city supervisor who shot and killed Milk and San Francisco Mayor George Moscone in 1978, was deep in a “sugar-infused rage” and “envisioned himself as the Twinkie sheriff and he shot Mayor McCheese, and Harvey was Ronald McDonald.”

Van Sant laughingly calls this his Charlie Kaufman take on Milk’s story -- though, perhaps it’s the sad nature of reality that White claimed during his trial that junk food had fueled his behavior -- the infamous “Twinkie defense.”

“I offered it to both Sean Penn and Tom Cruise but I was really inept as a producer,” says Van Sant, who says he then just sat and waited for them to call him back. And waited. And waited. And never followed up. “I completely dropped the ball from the very first and it sort of washed into a sea of however many offers they get every day.”

That was in the mid-’90s. It’s a decade later, the afternoon of the Los Angeles premiere of “Milk,” the more straightforward telling of the story that Van Sant made. Dressed in baggy jeans and a blue top, the 56-year-old director is sitting on the deck of his modernist, unpretentious Los Feliz home, fielding phone calls about what he calls “the wedding,” i.e. that night’s gala. His parents are here and the more traditional-looking Gus Van Sant Sr. is reading by the swimming pool.

Few American directors have a body of work as varied and idiosyncratic as Van Sant’s, which includes his early poignant looks at drug users and street kids (“Drugstore Cowboy” and “My Own Private Idaho”), a shot-by-shot remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho,” elliptical visions of Kurt Cobain’s final days (“Last Days”) and the Oscar-winning, feel-good drama “Good Will Hunting.” In person, Van Sant seems gentle, with a nonjudgmental air, a distinct adherence to live-and-let-live. His features are rounded, his dark hair limp and his eyes seem to pop out like a cartoon character.

As a gay director with an empathy for the marginalized, it’s probably not surprising that Van Sant has been offered -- and toyed with -- various incarnations of the Milk story, from an early effort spearheaded by Oliver Stone that Van Sant abandoned over script differences to the Ronald McDonald version he wrote himself, to the latest incarnation, the one he made with a script by Dustin Lance Black and starring Penn as Milk. Black’s script hews closely to the politics of the story, eschewing for instance a more psychological take that would perhaps plumb the narrative of Milk’s life from birth to grave, or a more sociological, party-like vision that would feature the raucous Castro scene complete with wild bath houses, which Van Sant notes might have been “pretty alarming . . . you know, thousands of men on the street picking each other up and having sex every night in sex clubs and drugs and all.” Even the “Twinkie defense” and White’s subsequent sentencing to seven years in prison are relegated to the end credits because, simply enough, Milk was dead by then.

Telling the story

While politics shape the narrative, “Milk” doesn’t play like a standard heroic-man biopic, in part because of Milk’s flamboyant demeanor, but also because of what seems to be Van Sant’s true passion -- the band of outsiders and the bonds among those on the margins who choose to make their own families.

For those who’ve ever assembled in a living room to fight apartheid, nuclear weapons, for women’s liberation, for civil rights or any social cause, Milk offers an acid flashback to what it’s like to live on that grass-roots mojo, the intoxicating mixture of idealism, fraternity and implied otherness. The mouthy, charismatic Milk, played by an unusually vulnerable and accessible Penn, is fomenting the movement and riding the crest of group yearning. He tends to his flock, portrayed on screen by such winning actors as James Franco (as his longtime lover), Diego Luna, Emile Hirsch and Alison Pill, as his lesbian campaign manager.

“Milk” has turned out to be unexpectedly topical as the culture wars over homosexuality have had a flare-up. The last bit of “Milk” is devoted to the supervisor’s successful crusade against Prop. 6, a California ballot measure in 1978 that would have banned gay teachers from the public schools. Thirty years later, Prop. 8, revising the California constitution to ban gay marriage, recently passed. But on a more optimistic, level, “Milk” reflects the grass-roots flavor of Obama-mania. Like president-elect Barack Obama, Milk used personal narratives to make political statements, encouraging his comrades to come out. He also trumpeted hope, giving speeches in which he declared, “I know that you cannot live on hope alone, but without it, life is not worth living.”

Milk also challenged the conventions of what was acceptable in politics. “He was really idealistic,” says Van Sant, who adds that Milk said things that even his supporters just dreamed of thinking, such as “We can be in office. We’re gay and we’re out and we can run for office.”

There’s a moment in the film when Milk discards all his hippie accouterments -- the jeans, the ponytail, beard and general scruffiness -- and emerges newly shorn, in a dingy-brown three-piece suit, new armor necessary to gain mainstream political allies.

Like Milk, there appear to be two Gus Van Sants, at least aesthetically. One is dreamy and experimental, elliptical and, to some, meandering, as if the director has single-handedly championed the American slow-film movement, with long, long takes. Those films include four recent ones: “Gerry,” “Last Days,” “Elephant” and “Paranoid Park.” The other Van Sant makes films with more conventional Hollywood narratives, like “To Die For,” “Drugstore Cowboy” and “Good Will Hunting.”

Bruce Cohen, who produced “Milk” along with his producing partner Dan Jinks and Michael London, thinks that “Milk” combines the two Guses -- “it has the epic sweep of a political saga” but the “authenticity” of his more experimental work. “You feel you’re actually experiencing the story rather than watching the film.”

Van Sant doesn’t really explain his poles of filmmaking except to say that the scripts demand different executions. In the case of “Milk,” Van Sant says, he’s not a particularly political person. Milk wasn’t “like the guiding light of my life.” During Milk’s heyday in the ‘70s, Van Sant wasn’t out of the closet, just living behind the Beverly Hills Hotel in Los Angeles, working for comic director Ken Shapiro (who made “The Groove Tube”). “I was like a hetero guy . . . not a very successful hetero,” says Van Sant, who moved to New York in the early ‘80s, and at some point started “to just not live a heterosexual life.”

Paths come together

The whole gay rights movement, he says, “was, well, it changed a lot of people’s lives.” “Mala Noche,” Van Sant’s first feature film, in 1985, focused on a skid-row convenience store clerk’s love for a Latino migrant worker. Gay motifs also run through two other Van Sant films: “My Own Private Idaho,” his most personal film, about male street hustlers, that’s loosely inspired by Shakespeare’s “Henry IV,” Part 1, and “Even Cowgirls Get the Blues.” Still, he says, “I haven’t done the ‘Ozzie and Harriet’ of gay stories. Middle-class gay couples. People that live just like straight people except they’re gay. I haven’t done that story.”

Unlike Van Sant, scriptwriter Black is much like one of the young people whom Milk used to talk about, gay youths who called him out of the blue and told him they could go on living because of the example he set. Raised in Texas as a devout Mormon who knew never to tell anyone of his gay feelings, Black was ultimately set on the path to openness when his new stepfather moved the family to a military base near San Francisco. In a local theater program, Black met a gay director who told him the story of Milk, “this out gay man who was celebrated and embraced by his community, all these things that were really shocking to me. It also makes you feel like there’s a little bit of hope and a little bit of light there.”

After Black graduated from UCLA film school, a friend who knew of his passion for Milk introduced him to Cleve Jones, a member of Milk’s original inner circle. With Jones’ help, Black, then a staff writer on the HBO TV series “Big Love,” spent weekends for three years researching the script by tracking down and interviewing Milk’s friends and colleagues. Jones also reintroduced Black to Van Sant -- they had met in 2001 -- and Van Sant quickly agreed to direct.

Black sat at Van Sant’s side during the entire San Francisco filming. “Gus really empowers the people around him,” Black says. “He lets people explore what they want to explore.”

Indeed, one of the hallmarks of a Van Sant film is an unexpected intimacy that seems to arise from the DNA of his creative vision. Van Sant says the vulnerability coming from the actors is “just what they think I’m thinking when I’m looking at them. I just act like the camera doesn’t really matter. I don’t really care if they don’t say the words that are in the script. I welcome their input and that sometimes makes them really happy and excited and they might do things that aren’t necessarily things that they would do. You just have to watch,” explains the director, “like actually be patient enough to watch. When the take is done, they’ll look right at you and if you’re looking over somewhere else, they know that you’re not really watching . . . and they can lose heart. They’re sensitive.”

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rachel.abramowitz@latimes.com