Dustin Lance Black, Oscar-winning screenwriter for Milk: The Voice of Equality (2008), stated that before the feature film was actually produced, it was declined by “almost all” of the studios to which Black proposed the script based on the life of the iconic LGBT rights activist Harvey Milk (1930-1978).
In a recent podcast interview Out with Suzi Ruffell, Black said that the film was a “labor made of love” and that he fought hard to get Gus Van Sant and Sean Penn in the positions of director and lead actor, respectively – which really helped the production to be carried out.
“[At that time] Studios weren’t asking for gay characters or gay-themed stories,” he said. “[But] Now you have executives and [distributors] like Netflix, so they know they want to serve a diverse audience. We didn’t have this conversation before.”
Black also reported that the success of The Secret of Brokeback Mountain (2005) contributed to the acceptance of Milk. “So first of all, I went to Focus Features and said, 'They know this isn't a dead end.' Everyone was telling the project, by the way. And I was right. They saw something in the script, and did an incredible job with it.”
