The Race For Harvey Milk's Life

Sean Penn	Matt Damon

The race in Hollywood to complete a film adaptation of the Harvey Milk story, the first widely known openly gay elected official in the United States, is heating up. Oscar winner Sean Penn has agreed to play Harvey Milk, with Matt Damon playing fellow San Francisco Supervisor Dan White. White assassinated Milk and San Francisco Mayor George Moscone, and after employing the infamous "twinkie defense" received a lenient sentence which led to riots in the Castro district and other areas of the City. In 1982 openly gay reporter Randy Shilts published an amazing book recounting the details of the Harvey Milk story called The Mayor of Castro Street: The Life and Times of Harvey Milk which Mad Professah can not recommend highly enough.

However, the film adaptation of the Randy Shilts book is not the movie that Matt Damon and Sean Penn are attached to. That film is to be directed by openly gay Bryan Singer (Superman, The Usual Suspects), produced by openly gay producers Craig Zadan and Neil Meron (Hairspray, Chicago) from a script still to be re-written by Chris McQuarrie. It is currently set for a 2009 release, acccording to IMDb. The Penn-Damon film is set to be directed by openly gay Gus Van Sant (Good Will Hunting, My Own Private Idaho, Elephant) and produced by the openly gay team of Bruce Cohen and Dan Jinks (American Beauty, Big Fish, The Nines) with a script by Dustin Lance Black.

So, the question is will there be two films of this amazing story, and will the better film reach the screen first? Recall that there were at least two films about Truman Capote in recent years. Capote was released before Infamous and won and Oscar for Philip Seymour Hoffman while the latter basiclly disappeared without a trace, despite receiving encouraging reviews.

The Harvey Milk story is incredibly important to the gay community so I hope that the competition in Holywood to get the film to the screen succeeds in getting the best film to the screen first.