Oscar-winner Dustin Lance Black '96: Writing from the heart, "Milk" to "Kool-Aid"

Read more about Black’s Oscar win, including the text of his emotional acceptance speech

"I'm not at my best," admitted screenwriter Dustin Lance Black '96, sounding a bit muffled when we called to talk about the years of research and writing that went into the screenplay for "Milk," the Gus Van Sant-directed biographical drama about martyred gay activist politician Harvey Milk that won him an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay on February 22.

Actor Sean Penn, who portrayed Milk in the film, was also honored on Oscar night..

We spoke with Black on November 5, 2008, the day after the national election, and the openly gay screenwriter explained that he had been up all night at a rally protesting the passage of Proposition 8, an amendment to the California State constitution that would effectively ban same sex marriage.

And then the very next morning he had to rush to the dentist for an emergency root canal. Half of his face, he said, was still inoperative. "But I would gladly have lost every tooth in my head if I could have kept Prop 8 from passing."

The irony is that in the wake of Barack Obama's victory, the push to repeal Proposition 8 became liberal Hollywood's new favorite cause, and this was widely seen improving the Oscar chances of a movie about a gay rights icon that was been greeted rapturously by critics.

The screenplay is being singled out in those reviews for its obvious depth of research and, in Variety, as "lean and disciplined." Black also gets a highly unusual single-card shout out in the film’s theatrical trailers, a gesture the writer attributes to director Van Sant's generosity as a collaborator. "Gus just wants everyone to be appreciated for what they do," Black says.

The spotlight on Black is well deserved, as the film literally would not exist if he had not embraced it early on as a labor of love. Black pursued the story at a time when the rights to the most celebrated existing source of information about Harvey Milk, Randy Shilts 1982 biography "The Mayor of Castro Street," were already owned by producers who were floundering trying to get a movie version off the ground. (At one point Oliver Stone was planning to direct Robin Williams in the title role.) A second, spec script on the same subject, by a somewhat less-than-world famous writer, was a long shot at best.

What enabled Black to finally begin researching and writing his own account of a man whose courage he had found personally inspiring for decades was the hard-won financial independence afforded by a gig as a staff writer on the controversial HBO cable series "Big Love," a surprisingly sympathetic program about a polygamous Fundamentalist Mormon household attempting to "pass" in a suburban section of Salt Lake City.

Raised himself in a devout Mormon household in San Antonio, Texas, and then in California's Central Valley, the young writer-director had taken on a couple of woeful projects right out of UCLA, just to survive, films he no longer likes to talk about. But when he heard about "Big Love," he says, he knew he had to pursue it. "There's a lot I still cherish and even miss about the religion," he says, "and a lot I disgree with passionately. But the people I grew up with, my parents and aunts and uncles, I saw as sympathetic, and they were the people the main characters in my scripts were based on."

Next up for Black is a return to his professional roots as a writer-director: early in 2009 he will begin shooting “What’s Wrong With Virginia?,” a mother-son coming of age story based on his own youthful experience, starring Jennifer Connolly and Liam Neeson.

How many of the great qualities people are noticing in the script for "Milk" do you think are a result of your going back to square one and doing all your own research?

Well, the rights to the Randy Shilts book were owned by different producers. But even if they hadn't been, I wouldn't have been able to afford to buy them. But I had just been wanting to tell Harvey's story for a really long time. I had first heard about him from a theater director I was apprenticing with in the 1980s — getting very nervous because I was still somewhat closeted and I was afraid this was his way of calling me out as gay! But I also went, "Oh, my God." I didn't realize there could be such a thing as an out gay guy, much less one who could accomplish anything—-'cause there weren't a lot of out gay people running around in San Antonio in the 1980s, not that I knew of.

And then for years I followed the progress of the various film projects about Harvey, just rooting for them to get made as a member of the audience—-and watching them fall apart. But then about four years ago, I was at a place where I could afford to start doing my own research, and around the same time I had the good fortune, through a friend, of meeting Cleve Jones, who was Harvey's political protegee and went on to create The Names Project AIDS quilt. He's still around and very much an activist, and really funny. His memory is very sharp. It was when I met Cleve that I knew I had to do this. [Jones is played in the film by "Into the Wild's" Emile Hirsch; James Franco portrays Milk's lover, Scott Smith, and Josh Brolin is his nemesis, Dan White.]

It was tough, I have to admit. It was slow going to re-create all that research. I looked at it as a challenge, but also as a gift, because within a few months I was getting close with all the people who were most intimate with Harvey, and you just can't get that from a book or a documentary, no matter how good they are. By surrounding yourself with the people who were closest to the person you are portraying, you begin to feel that person's spirit, you get a real sense of who he is.

I found that by putting people together in groups, two or more at once, they would help correct each other's memory and dig other stuff up. That's sort of my little trick as a researcher. Especially with a subject where a lot's been written, because you find that people's first answers will often be a repetition of what they've read about their own lives. And with this sassy crowd it would be like, "Bitch, that is not how you did that, and you know it!"

What did you learn about Harvey from this process that you didn't already know, or that surprised you?

One of the things I discovered was that Harvey, for most of his adult life, and in most of his endeavors, both personal and professional, was a huge failure. He failed as a lover, and I think he really felt responsible for that. He was also a failed businessman. He couldn't hold a job. All of these things that you might not find in other accounts, in the really glowing articles that idolized him, you do find when you start to do your own first-hand research. And to me, personally, that's where you start to fall in love with your character, when you find out that they are really human and flawed.

So he was a failure who relatively late in life found his true calling — which must have been an amazing experience for him.

I'm sure it was. I heard stories about his first visit to San Francisco, which was a bit earlier than the period of this film. He came back to New York knowing he had to return, and he never really told anyone why, because he was still a little bit closeted. But I had a feeling that on that trip something happened to him, he saw something, an openness he hadn't seen before. He was always a leader. He was just looking for the right crowd to lead.

Dan White, the city Supervisor who shot and killed Harvey and Mayor George Moscone in 1978, could easily have been portrayed as a monster. But you don't do that. And he's a scarier figure, in a way, because he remains human.

What he did was monstrous, but to make any character just evil, to me, is an over-simplification. Very few people think that they are evil in what they are doing. You have to get into your character's head and figure out why he thought what he was doing was a solution. This was a man who was not able to control anything in his life at that moment. What he did might have been a really vile attempt to regain control. What you want to get to are those moments where people in the audience start to see aspects of themselves in the character, to say, "Oh my God, I do that."

But the deeper thing is that for me this was always the story of Harvey Milk, and Harvey thought that Dan White could be taught. He felt for Dan and they struck up a friendship. And if Harvey saw something in Dan, for me to not find out what that was would have been a giant failure.

You're going to be working again with Gus Van Sant on "The Electric Kool-aid Acid Test," about the Merry Pranksters and their LSD adventures in the 1960s, one of the most celebrated collections of weirdoes in American pop culture.

Yeah, I love them. And thankfully most of them are still around. I was just in Portland two weeks ago interviewing Gretchen Fetchin' Slime Queen [Paula Sundstren]. In this case I do have Tom Wolfe's fantastic book, but there's still more to be discovered. It's fun to go back to events decades earlier in the Bay Area than the events of "Milk," to see that the creation of the psychedelic movement and the Haight-Ashbury eventually led to gay people creating the Castro—which is where "Milk" picks up a decade later. In style and tone, this will likely be quite different from "Milk," although there are definite similarities. They are both stories of revolutions and they are both about trying to change the culture. And they both center on very charismatic leaders.

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Keywords

"dustin lance black" "harvey milk" "gus van sant" 

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