Trailer
Plot summary
Harvey Milk spends his fortieth birthday in New York in 1970 and meets Scott Smith, a younger man who becomes his partner. Two years later the couple leaves for San Francisco, hoping the city will treat their relationship more kindly. They open Castro Camera in Eureka Valley, a working-class neighborhood turning into the Castro, and the resistance they meet drives Milk into gay activism. Smith runs his campaigns but grows tired of sharing him with politics. Milk mentors Cleve Jones and takes on the city's cautious gay establishment. Races for a seat on the board of supervisors and for the state assembly end in defeat. In 1977 he wins a supervisor seat, the first openly gay man elected to major public office in California. Supervisor Dan White and state senator John Briggs, who sponsors Proposition 6, stand against him.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Milk (2008)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- A film about Harvey Milk was in the works long before this one: in 1991 Oliver Stone wrote a script for it called The Mayor of Castro Street, and by 1992 Gus Van Sant had signed on to direct a version starring Robin Williams as Milk.
- Sean Penn was attached to play Harvey Milk and Matt Damon to play Milk's assassin, Dan White, but Damon pulled out in September because of scheduling conflicts.
- Gay activists called on Focus Features to pull the film from the Cinemark Theatres chain as part of a series of boycotts after Cinemark's chief executive, Alan Stock, donated $9,999 to the Yes on 8 campaign.
- Samoa's principal censor, Leiataua Niuapu, gave the reason for banning the film: it had been deemed "inappropriate and contradictory to Christian beliefs and Samoan culture", and he said some of the sex in it was very contrary to the way of life there.
- Several of Harvey Milk's real associates played themselves in the film, including speechwriter Frank M. Robinson, teamster Allan Baird and politician Tom Ammiano, while Carol Ruth Silver, who served alongside Milk on the Board of Supervisors and was allegedly also a target in the assassination, appears as a fictional character named Thelma.
- To recreate the city's gay community of the 1970s, the production design and costume crew spent several weeks in the archives of the GLBT Historical Society in San Francisco, reviewing photographs, film, newspapers and Harvey Milk's personal belongings, donated by the estate of Scott Smith.
