Van Sant's Milk Project Out Ahead of Singer's

By Katey Rich

Indie stalwart Gus Van Sant and blockbuster helmer Bryan Singer seem like unlikely adversaries, but they've been racing against the clock and each other in recent months as both tried to get biopics about the same person off the ground. It turns out that Van Sant won, and his project Milk will begin shooting in January. Singer's effort, The Mayor of Castro Street, remains in development limbo with a script that was not turned in before the writers' strike began.

Both directors are hoping to tell the story of Harvey Milk, who was one of the first openly gay elected officials in America when he became a city supervisor in San Francisco in 1977. Milk was assassinated a year later by political rival Dan White, and has since been venerated as a martyr by the LGBT community. Sean Penn is set to portray Milk in Van Sant's biopic, with a script from Dustin Lance Black (HBO's "Big Love").

It seems foolish for Singer to keep pushing his project now that Van Sant's has been greenlighted, though of course unforeseen production delays and problems crop up all the time. It's also interesting to speculate what each of the directors could bring to the project. It's hard to imagine two filmmakers with such vastly different current work, with Van Sant casting teenage non-actors and telling stories of high school alienation in movies like Elephant and Paranoid Park, and Singer ruling the box office with big-budget superhero flicks like Superman Returns and the first two X-Men films. It's tempting to accuse Singer of wanting to make some glorified, Hollywood version of Milk's life, but he's working based on the biography by Randy Shilts, a San Francisco-based journalist who also wrote the definitive account of the early days of the AIDS epidemic, And The Band Played On. Plus, let's face it, Singer's got the better title: Milk sounds like it could just as easily be about dairy farms, or that 1994 movie with Melanie Griffith as a prostitute.

Either project will undoubtedly grab attention, with well-known actor Penn playing a gay man in a story that still resonates even beyond the LGBT community. It's mostly surprising that this biopic hasn't been made already-- a 1984 documentary about Milk won an Oscar, after all. Even though the years since Brokeback Mountain haven't brought about the bevy of gay stories that some expected, there's always room for a tragic true story, particularly one set in the political world that likely won't include the kind of gay romance that some say cost Brokeback its Oscar. If Van Sant does it right, Milk can be both a mainstream success and a true tribute to its subject.