Paul VanDeCarr visits the sets of Milk, Gus Van Sant's biopic starring Sean Penn as Harvey Milk, where throngs of unpaid extras have been recreating the protest marches and public gatherings on behalf of gay rights that were a feature of Milk's political career in San Francisco in the 1970s. Half a dozen years after Milk's assassination, Rob Epstein made him a nonfiction movie star with his classic 1984 documentary The Times of Harvey Milk. That picture was screened at the Castro Theater for the extras to help "educate and inspire" them and get them in the right frame of mind. Also coaching from the sidelines was Milk's political protege, Cleve Jones (who's played in the movie by Emile Hirsch, who Penn directed in Into the Wild), who "is here tonight too to get the hundreds of extras into character. He tells the crowd the original marches happened in response to the repeal of gay rights ordinances in Florida and Kansas. It was bad enough that gay rights were being curtailed elsewhere, but the bigots were headed for San Francisco, the one place in the country gays and lesbians had carved out for themselves. An initiative by State Senator John Briggs was being put on the ballot to ban gays and lesbians from teaching in California's public schools. 'So the mood on the street was pissed off,' explains Jones. 'And that's what you are tonight. 'You're pissed off!'"
Wading into the crowd, VanDeCarr met a lot of people who don't sound as if they needed the coaching. One of them, Anna Damiani, fled Florida after anti-gay legislation was passed there in 1977 and came to San Francisco "as a refugee from Anita Bryant." Another extra recalls that, "I always knew I was gay, but Harvey Milk's assassination made me come out." The movie's producer, Bruce Cohen, takes pride in how "this shoot has really connected with people here. Every day some person stops by or remembers where they were, or were friends with Harvey, or have a story to tell, or their lives were touched. And when you're surrounded by that — the director, the writer, the actors — you can't quantify the value of that to the soul of the film."
