history

Some ideas take a long time to shape into a coherent documentary narrative. The narrative structure of THE TIMES of HARVEY MILK seems obvious in retrospect, but in fact it took years to develop before we even began production. In the mid 1970’s gay people across the country were coming out in droves and waves of people were arriving in San Francisco. This new migration pattern converged on a neighborhood in San Francisco then known as Eureka Valley, an Irish working-class neighborhood that would soon become known as “the Castro”, after the name emblazoned on the neighborhood movie palace marquee (and shared by the main shopping street). A recent migrant myself, I lived in the neighborhood and knew Harvey Milk casually, mostly as a friendly neighborhood shopkeeper and affable flirt. I would bring my film to be developed at his camera store; he knew me as he knew the name and business of everyone who passed through his door.

In 1978 voters elected Harvey Milk to the Board of Supervisors, San Francisco’s city council, making him the first openly gay politician elected to public office in California. These unprecedented cultural upheavals provoked a national reaction. Anita Bryant – a former Miss America, orange juice jingle singer, spokesmodel, and born-again Christian – took the anti-gay lead. In California, a little-known state senator named John Briggs saw an opportunity and took up the fight as well. He crafted the California ballot proposition “Prop 6”, which would ban openly gay people from working in the public school system.

My initial impulse was to make a short film about this campaign and the issues it embodied, and this is where the project started. But as I got more deeply into research and initial production, I began to take note of Harvey Milk. Tirelessly debating Briggs across the state with wit and humor, he ultimately exposed Briggs as misinformed and witless (and lacking a sense of humor). On election day 1978, Prop 6 was surprisingly voted down by a wide margin. Milk was a hero. And three weeks later he was assassinated in City Hall.

What was then for the rest of the world merely a current events news blip, was for many of us in San Francisco earth-shatteringly significant. Harvey’s story became emblematic of something much larger. I knew there was a bigger story to tell, and I had some notion of how I wanted to tell it (essentially, with a handful of people, each of whom represented a part of Milk’s legacy, cast from a vast pool of oral history pre-interviews Richard Schmiechen and I had conducted on video in the years before and after Milk’s death).

But as the director, the challenge became how to make a film with the immediacy of cinéma vérité, but one that is told in retrospect. I had in mind such potent films as Barbara Kopple’s HARLAN COUNTY, U.S.A., Jon Else’s THE DAY AFTER TRINITY, and Pontecorvo’s THE BATTLE of ALGIERS. In fact, when we first put together the candlelight sequence, we used Ennio Morricone’s soundtrack from THE BATTLE of ALGIERS as a temp score. There was something about the elegiac and deeply mournful quality of that music that seemed appropriate. In editing we became so attached to the Algiers music that we couldn’t possibly imagine coming up with anything better – until Mark Isham came on board.

I knew Mark’s work from Carroll Ballard’s film NEVER CRY WOLF, which was Mark’s first film score (and my first feature job as an assistant sound editor). I invited Mark to see a rough cut of HARVEY MILK; he liked the film and agreed to do the music. The score was written and recorded in Mark’s small basement, exclusively performed by Mark, with just one guest musician on oboe. Harvey Fierstein’s voice as the narrator was also a very significant contribution. We wanted the actor with a connection to the dramatic arc of the film. One day I came into the office to hear a message from Harvey Fierstein – in his inimitable voice – saying, “I’d love to be part of the movie”. We had so little money that the recording was done in the closet in Harvey’s Brooklyn apartment.

Lastly, much of the “I” referenced here is really “we”. In addition to Fierstein and Isham, the film is also a reflection of two other sensibilities: my collaborators Deborah Hoffman, who co-edited the film, and Richard Schmiechen, who produced and is dearly missed.

-Rob Epstein