Pioneers of Queer Cinema: The Times of Harvey Milk | Rob Epstein, John Cameron Mitchell

hi um uh i'm so thrilled to welcome rob epstein and our moderator on stage and i'd like to introduce them first with john cameron mitchell john i'm going to introduce you and please come up after i finish with rob's introduction as well you'll both come up on stage and we'll get started and we'll also have questions from the audience during the q a so please keep some in mind john cameron mitchell co-created and starred in the stage film musical hedwig and the angry inch for which he won best director at the 2001 sundance film festival um it rece he received the golden globe nomination for best actor and four tony awards for that film john's uh for had beginning range um john's films include short bus released in 2006 and released in 4k this past january rabbit hole the 2010 feature which garnered an oscar nomination for nicole kidman and how to talk to girls at parties in 2017 starring nicole kidman and ellie fanning he appears in hulu's shrill paramounts the good fight and in 2022 will be seen in netflix sandman and as joe exotic in peacock channels joe versus carol starring uh kate mckinnon co-starring mckay mckinnon in 2019 john released the musical podcast 10 episode series anthem homunculus featuring glenn close patti lupone cynthia rivo and marion coutillard in 2020 and 21 he released his ongoing collaborative album new american dream and his the origin of love world tour continues this year rob epstein has been making groundbreaking socially relevant films for over four decades his works include landmark films such as word is out made with mariposa film group and screened earlier this series the cellulite closet which received the emmy award for non-fiction directing and paragraph 175 for which he received the directing award at the sundance film festival academy award nominated short film end game and linda ronstadt the sound of my voice winner of a grammy award for the best music for best music film rob has received two oscars for best documentary feature for common threads stories from the quilt and of course tonight's film the times of harvey milk working with filmmaking partner jeffrey friedman his dramatic work includes the narrative features howell which received a national board of review freedom of expression award starring james franco and john hamm and lovelace starring amanda seat amanda seyfried peter sarsgaard and sharon stone rob epstein is the recipient of the ida pioneer award the frame line award the alphest achievement award and the cinema eye legacy award he made oscar history as a first openly queer director to accept the award for an lgbt-themed film with the times of harvey milk epstein is a professor in film at california college of the arts please welcome join me in welcoming both john cameron mitchell and rob epstein at the stage i'm going to use my broadway skills to keep this moving rob epstein you made one of the classic films of queer experience ever who had not seen this film before wasn't it [ __ ] amazing isn't it beautiful isn't rob right up there with the measles and [Applause] penny baker [Applause] i we met at sundance i think in 92 maybe that's right were you showing something then we're showing where are we yeah oh yeah yeah and um it was funny because i was like a little actor from new york and and uh without portfolio i wasn't there with a project i had my pictures and resumes and there was three groups of queer it was also the year of the queer and derek jarman there was a famous panel and the new queer cinema was ascendant but in some ways rob was like an elder statesman you know and and as was it was it's just that he'd been making films for decades you know and derek jarman too and they smiled over the young people like todd haynes and tom kalin and chris mooch and all these great filmmakers um and i was watching and i was watching them you know as a non-participant and seeing three types of people groups there was the cool new yorkers christine bashan and todd haynes they were in black they were so punk unapproachable though christine told me later that i did give her my picture resume late impression clearly later she produced hedwig and then there were the la people who were fun and crazy and all their films were about l.a except chris mooch who always wrote different things and his hours and times was playing and then there were the san francisco people and those are the ones i wanted to hang out with there was rob and jeffrey and marlon riggs and jenny olson and all these people who were i don't know they'd been at it longer they were often working in non-fiction there was patience there was intensity but it wasn't getting carried away you know with the coldness or the uh you know the la effervescence it was a different thing and i really was attracted to that and that's of course where i came out and rob do you remember that time when this when the fictional films were starting to come at that time um which there was not as many coming out of san francisco at that time though there was that who was the guy who made that film that used the busy darte uh speed wasn't he from san francisco i don't know but when at that time were you kind of seeing what were you thinking about the stuff that was coming out of course this was all coming out of aids the new narrative stuff right but how are you feeling at that time well so that was 92 yeah so well we had just made an aids documentary we did common threads and um i think we were looking to for a relief from that which is why the film we did that was at sundance that year was where are we which was just a road movie yeah we literally took to the road and decided to do something much more improvisational and jazz like something that was not as predetermined as common threads and harvey milk so we kind of went in a whole other direction at that point it was also the not the last years of aids but it was the most intense years thinking about that strange moment between harvey when uh let's see richard richard schmikin died i think yeah wow producer of this film uh who uh this film would not have happened if not for richard but that's a whole other story well i'd love to hear that story um yeah i would love to tell that story because as i referred as i mentioned in the introduction i even though i had worked on words out and i was one of six co-directors on that film i had really never been responsible for a project before and that was word is out came out in 1977 harvey milk was elected in 77 and all the events that are depicted in the film happened at that time and i initially set out to make a film about the briggs initiative i after her afterward is out which was so much about the um you know the personal nature of being gay it was 26 people queer people from across the country telling their own stories which had never happened before in that way a film made by queer filmmakers for the mainstream on the heels of that the backlash started to happen and i was interested in doing a film as a follow-up to word is out that would be about the politics of being gay all of which was playing out in san francisco and in eugene oregon wichita kansas and miami-dade county felt like the briggs initiative in san francisco really embodied that kind of dialectical thing that was going on then um but i'd never made a film before so i said okay i'll start by making a slideshow and i went out with dolores newman as a still photographer and i had an audio recorder and we were just going to all these activist events of which i was a participant and also a documentarian and thought that would get me to the first step to do a film about the briggs initiative so there's actually a sequence in the film that's very representational of that early stage of the project which is the proposition six victory night harvey's speech that was me with my recorder and dolores with the photographer and that whole sequence is really cut with that audio and stills so in that sequence that's kind of the kernel of the beginnings of the project three weeks after that night harvey was killed and then you know and then i knew the world had changed my world had changed but the world didn't know the world had changed and it felt like that was now my mission was to to tell that story so i put together i got a little bit of money started doing some filming put together a 20-minute trailer which outlined the story with the interviews and archival footage i met a newscaster kind of took me under his wing and snuck me into the news station at night and we were pilfering news news material to use for this clip and and i shot the candle light a year after so uh the candlelight footage was really the first big production shoot with four cameras anyway with all that material i put together 20 minute reel and did a fundraiser this was now probably [Music] maybe 1979 80. um did a fundraiser in new york hosted by veto russo my good friend vito russo the author of the cellular closet and vito hosted a night in a gymnasium where he showed all of his vintage judy garland and barbra streisand clips and it was just an amazing night because of that because of vito and everything that veto was and offer the world but also i showed this clip and was the first time i was presenting it to an audience and got a response and it was a room it was a packed room and and that was that was you know the affirmation and richard was there that night and richard uh schmikin was a filmmaker in his own right a producer had much more experience than i had at that point in time and said you know i want to help i want to help get this film made and he joined me on the project and actually moved to san francisco for a year and just helped professionalize the whole operation and got us the kind of funding that we could really get going in making the movie was was there um a lot of private money in that the film cost three hundred thousand dollars a hundred thousand was raised from community fundraisers i mean literally like practically you know gofundmes of the moment yeah which were like you know potlucks yeah um and you know just really 25 50 100 contributions got us to a hundred thousand dollar level and then a hundred thousand dollars in grants and then the last hundred thousand came from wnet public television initiative that was then i was called non-fiction television no longer exists but that was the bulk of the production money wow when's the last time you saw it with an audience um it's been a while and every time i see it i'm still stunned that dan white got out of prison before we finished the film it's like i forget it every time it's like what what and what it took us longer to make the film than he served present time he died how long ago he died in i think it was like within the last nine no no he committed suicide right forgot and that was in 96 i think just couple years after he got to jail did you ever meet him no no that moment when his wife came to the set of milk i heard that his son came to this set of milk wow is howard here his son did you ever hear that story that dan white's son came to the set of milk yeah that's about as much as i know what a legacy yeah to be yeah what did he say yeah what do you what but he was there it's amazing wow wow it's all just so [ __ ] sad yeah but it's a beautiful film it's beautifully made i love that you the way you use the sound with the images that don't need to sync up because the spirit is so strongly there it's just amazing i think i first saw it when i moved here in the late 80s video was starting to come up you know so i could see it wasn't easy to find after you know in that first 10 years after it came out well it has yeah it's had a story distribution history what was the first distribution like well let's see we finished in 84 and got into telluride and new york and the first sundance i think it was first queer it was a first queer film at sundance because it was the first sundance um and every distributor turned us down oh you know all the art house then there were art houses and all the art house distributors turned us down so the distributors there were done it was done and they saw it yeah do you know why is it they just think i have a big audience or what i don't know you know who can second guess but i obviously they didn't think there would be an audience that they wouldn't make money um some of them eventually came around afterwards so we we were with a very small fly-by-night distributor called um teleculture and i think they went bankrupt the day we won the oscar i think like i think they were gone like the next morning um but we've kept it going you know over the years somehow we've kept it going and now it's with criterion which you know that was a dream come true i know thank you yeah future proofing it did uh when they went bankrupt did you did the rights go away for a while no we were able to interrupt pretty fast get the rights back but short bus we had you know think film went bankrupt and we couldn't get it back for 10 years or something i think they were so fly by night that yeah they didn't just separate the wrong contract yeah yeah um when you watch it uh i'd love to know about some people might not know what happened to some of the most articulate people in there tom mamiano of course research from thompson egg yeah he of course went on to tom ammiano was an assembly california assembly member well first the super first first school board this is the school teacher he's right the school teacher with the poinsettias in the background then city council and then assembly person and now as he said he said today um i'm an altercocker now but still kicking ass and tell tell me more what happened to uh sally gerhart and after that and other people we might want to know about the you know the dyke on the bike to forget her name uh sally died this year oh she did yeah yeah but somebody's making a film about her yeah and we're helping them with the figure um ann cronenberg got married and raised a family still very active in city hall endeavors um very community minded um jim elliott the and cronenberg was the campaign aide jim uh elliott the machinist uh i haven't been in touch with but he is he alive i don't know probably not he was so articulate and so he told a wonderful story which we had in the film to the very end but it just you know tell us kill your darlings yeah um he tells the story of coming back from the candlelight march that night and he got a call from his daughter and she's weeping she's crying she's crying crying and then as he tells her the daughter is crying and the wife is crying and the dog is crying and anyway she's a lesbian so she was coming out to the family at that time at that time yeah wow so he told the story much better than i did talk about the begin the other thing that i felt when meeting you and jeffrey and marlon um was this idea of community and so and the bay area was always about chosen communities certainly there were unchosen ones that had to do with your family and your ethnicity but the chosen family of you know the as illustrated by you know hippie communities queer communities of all kinds um the fact that this the city which was the the port city you know where the where you could you know you you know what happened in san francisco stayed in san francisco from way back um there i feel that in the filmmaking and i feel that in the work and it is community based and incredible documentarians uh incredible you know history of drag being not just drag but being political and storytelling and being in the coquettes and and uh sylvester we're still waiting for that story aren't we i mean how long is that one going to take please sylvester film biofilm please come um but i but and i i came out there too you can't help but if you go to nobody tried to do that one for years what of the silence did you everybody has tried i don't know who's gonna take billy porter um there's a but i i you can't help but go to the bay area and become queer it's just it just happens it's like you know it's the air i was in san francisco uh coming from college to visit my brother at ucf at the usf uh and uh i was staying in the frat and i felt that there was more to san francisco than the frat i was staying in must be something more out there so i went to polk street this is like an 84. and i arrived just as aids hits the city and i went to the salon bookstore which was a huge dirty bookstore on the dirty street of polk and a hot guy named doug racic gave me a flyer for like a radical fairy solstice party flying penises on the flyer i was like hey was just still in the closet in northwestern and i was like i don't know if i can go to that party but but i picked up my carriage and i said doug who was his hot auto mechanic from thunder bay i said do you want to go on a date and he he said yeah i picked me up in his jacked up hot rod with the rear view mirror that goes all the way across and we went to see an albert brooks movie there were two people there and he said you want to go over across the bridge do you want to go to the east bay and i was like i really do and we went across the bay bridge and i didn't there were no phones i didn't have my brother's phone number i disappeared for a number of days in the house of the golden bull in berkeley near milky way and they they're getting ready for the party and there was the acid punch and i didn't know what to make of all of this and the you know the sex room was getting prepared with parachutes and there was a paper mache golden bull and and i was too scared to have sex but it was san francisco so everybody whoever got laid that night got the nice bedroom and everyone else made them breakfast in bed after you get laid that was san francisco you know what i mean that doesn't happen in new york it's la anywhere else so that and i came back to my brother where were you we thought you were dead you know i'm no i'm gay and i i've got someone who can fix your car and he's like oh okay fine and that was the magic of that place that you capture in this film which which also shows the beginning of everything that we're dealing with today and also is the antidote of things we're dealing with today you the the beginning of what today we call inter sectionalities like we all have common goals of equity and opportunity and and and identity but not getting drowned in the identity to the point of separating us nowadays there is a a panic trying to do the right thing that ends up kind of separating us is a little bit like that's not your story to tell and i'm gonna do my thing and this is me and i'm not you you know how dare you a white gay man talk about this black lesbian over here and it's like dude when you have things when you have dan whites of the world and when you have aids of the world and when you have these things that affect all of us covet whatever we've got to find the things that bring us together whether it's grief or joy you know the most moving moment i think is when those those candles are rise up it's unbelievable you know that's all that's going to get us through this is that group of people whose faces you can't see raising their light to make things better instead of just this is mine that's yours that's [ __ ] that's going to get it that's exactly what trump wants i'd love to at to get questions from any um do we have mics or should we just use oh here we have a few just one on this side but if you got a stentorian stage trained voice feel free any questions yes i'll repeat that it's okay i can repeat that uh yeah i would love to know how you dealt with dealing with the subject the characters that you interviewed how did you approach them how did you approach your interviewees some of whom you knew of course well we did a lot of pre-interviews before we selected those eight people in the film so we did maybe somewhere between 75 and 100 video pre-interviews which we did that's right in part to just get us as full a sense of the story from as many different perspectives as we could in the research phase of the project but also to to really help select these archetype people that represented specific aspects of harvey's story so as uh john mentioned some of some of them i knew tom amiano i actually the day of the assassinations i went i was out with dolores newman the photographer that i was working with on the slideshow and we were in a coffee store buying coffee and heard on the radio harvey milk and george moscone had been killed and i went right down to city hall and was standing there with tom you know that we were just there together um you did know him i did know him because we were you know we were involved in the briggs initiative activist events together um street initiatives so it was a mix but but we did go through this very involved process of a pre-interviewing to make those selections but also i'll say one more thing another thing i'm struck when i when i see the film especially as i get further and further away from the experience of having lived it is um you know we did those interviews four five four or five years after the event and it was still so you know the emotions were still so raw still so immediate for all of us then hello hello yeah it's working okay sorry um so you kind of partly answered what i was gonna ask but when you were there what was your first immediate feelings and and you kind of answered it now but in a little bit more detail you know you've worked on it that whole time looking at the material seeing it over and over reliving it and then talking to people who were starting to break down right in front of you i mean what what type of strains does that do to you emotionally physically psychologically and do does that still affect you to this day like do you kind of reminisce back just watching it now well i'll start with the then um you know this is it's such a personal film for me because i was just about every every one of those events i was there you know every every one of those moments where harvey's speaking debating briggs i was there so and that's what was driving the project as well because i felt it in that very personal way and uh felt that the story just wasn't hadn't been told before so in terms of living it for all those years that that made it easy because it felt like a mission um [Music] you know i mean that makes it sound a lot more noble than i was really experiencing it but it was certainly you know it was a driving factor and i think all of us working on the film felt that way and especially once we started doing work in progress screenings we would do you know we did we screened it for our community in san francisco in an auditorium of this size and just the power of that kind of collective response just continued to give us the sense of well this you know this we need to do this we need to get this story out there so that was then um as i experience it now you know now it's so complex and so layered because uh i you know i think about richard who i spoke of early earlier who um and so many people who were instrumental to the film who didn't um get the benefit of of seeing it continue to reverberate out in the world as i have so um really what i feel is gratitude right now it's also unusual to get that credit for the producer and the director having made it which is kind of beautiful it reminds me of the michael powell you know press burger thing it's nice um hi thank you let me um i i had a question about queerness and the future of um of queer cinema and what it means i suppose um i really hope i worked this correctly um so i i uh i have had i have partners and lovers of that belong to many different communities um most of those communities are queer one of those communities is not um and i uh and today i identify as a as a straight heterosexual man but i um and i but i grew up fearing um i left my hometown in north georgia not because i was gay but because i was thought to be gay i was afraid growing up there i suppose my question is that um you know if you look at you know all these amazing colors of the rainbow that we have and this sort of um and how it becomes larger and they're just more and more colors every every day uh the beautiful thing about the rainbow is it's inclusive but it is also contrasting and i suppose my question about the future of this whole thing of what i'm seeing here for this images from the past is is there a color for me in the rainbow i mean is you know i mean am i am i as a as a as a man who who loves women am i am i a contrasting gray sky or will there ever be a time in which queerness is not necessarily a contrasting concept but an all-embracing one that includes people like me um that's more of a philosophical question i suppose but you guys are both brilliant people and i wanted to ask it i thought about that and i i yes you are welcome i mean do we all know people who are and queerness is not just about sexuality right it's about a way of looking at the world through gender through understanding of otherness being othered through an understanding that of power um knowing that gender has biological elements it has social elements and it has personal elements and sexuality is interwoven sometimes with with gender but we all know people are straight friends who are much queerer than some of our gay friends you know it's just it's the case you know and those are the people i want to hang out with you know this unfortunately a lot of i mean sometimes it's just inherent but there's also people who want to imitate their oppressors if you know what i'm saying or they just you know it's straight acting for gay people was sort of higher currency social you know for gay men you know it's like masculinity was social currency because the the world was it was a straight man's world just like for black people for so long the term high yellow comes where you're closer to the the ruling class so therefore you have more social currency high yellow is the same as straight acting and it's [ __ ] it comes just comes from being stepped on and that that's just my thought so welcome yeah i thought you articulated beautifully what you said you answered your own question no in a good way uh thank you so much uh for that incredible film uh just absolutely just i i learned so much and at the same time it felt i hate to use this word because it's like what you see in all the marvel films and everything like a multiverse because when i saw the images of an angry group of people breaking down windows fighting against something i thought of january 6th and then you see that african-american gentleman who correctly said if that was me if that was me who shot how would i we're asking the same questions today the same thing is happening again for our young queer straight whatever label it's all we're all just human beings we all bleed red it doesn't matter what color we are we all bleed red do you see have you seen will you see a movie like this that will be used in a way to teach it's great that we're having this opportunity to see this but history is repeating itself it's just a different kind of discrimination but it's still discrimination how can a powerful movie like this do you see it being used where it's yes it's great that it's in an archive it's great that somebody can maybe check it out and it's great that it can be seen every so often but this has to be used as a tool for teaching us and i'm not sure if that opportunity has been done or it will be coming thank you thank you yeah no it's very disconcerting to [Music] witness what's going on in florida in texas and yeah i couldn't show this film legally yeah i mean it would go to the supreme court and then amy coney barrett would shoot it right back down wouldn't she like attendees gonna hopefully take care of her um yeah i mean we just seem to go in these incredibly vicious cycles don't we and just when you think we're on one side of the cycle and we're not going to go back around we go back around and that's certainly what's happening now so that's an answer to the question earlier that's certainly something i was thinking about tonight just how you know when we were you know in the streets responding to all those the backlash against those uh gay rights initiatives that were being repealed and then the victory of briggs you know at that moment you feel like okay you know we've we've made progress we're moving forward and and then there seems to be some people that you just can't reach in terms of making that kind of change institutional change yeah there's someone with mike right there hi um in your introductory remarks you had alluded to uh the directors of the two of you thank you i didn't want that story to get away so could you tell us about how uh pat rocco and artie bretson's films uh or filmmaking made their way into the documentary tonight yeah they both made significant contributions so there's footage you know there was very little once we were underway and and looking for footage material of harvey where you actually got to experience him speaking where he really got a sense of his personality and his energy and his charisma and his intelligence there wasn't a lot so it was pretty scrappy but uh pat rocco uh has a uh is represented in the film with something he shot of harvey at a rally in los angeles and it's when uh harvey's director directly addressing president carter and trying to get him to make a statement on the briggs initiative that's pat rocco's footage and artie bresson so i mentioned that i i filmed the candlelight march a year after the assassinations there was the first anniversary march and it was huge and i was you know i had a little bit of means at that point to pull together uh four camera people actually everybody was working volunteers who was paying for the film stock at that point you know you could only shoot in film so it was 16 millimeter and it was peter dare emiko amore and francis reed and artie bresson and i gave them each of you know positions and assignments and artie's assignment was i said just get a pie just you know just try and get high angles get high and he came back with these incredible shots the one you referenced from you know looking down at city hall he got on top of the fox plaza building and the incredible shot the pan up market street where it's you know you start you start at the bottom of this of the hill and then the camera just pans up and reveals the the length of the march that was already already shot and artie was just you know he was just a really a beautiful soul really i again i was you know i was just nobody a neophyte and and he i was just you know what can i do it was just a big teddy bear what can i do how can i help what can i do what's his famous feature um k usa okay usa yeah yeah but buddies buddies ladies that was it was the early aids age kind of the first feature fictional feature that was dealing with aids among queer people uh hi um where i have question were you there um the night of the dan white um verdict where everybody was breaking windows and burning police cars yeah i i was there the night of the damn white verdict and i was not there as a filmmaker i was there i was a very pissed off citizen oh that was my question the second part is um it sound it looked like you um there is film from that night at city hall and also on the castro and i think part of it uh from what i remember um the police came in after and went into the bars and yeah and started beating all the all the gay people that were in the bars that had were not even involved in the in the riots so yeah there and we did have a shot of that there was a uh an attack outside the elephant walk bar somebody was dragged out of the bar and clubbed and we we had a sequence of about that event about the police brutality um [Music] but we decided to take it out you know at a certain point you're making as john well knows you're making filmmaking decisions that end up having to do with pacing and duration and and you just have to make some hard choices that um you kind of have made your point and you need to and that was one where we just it felt like it was we were spending a little too much time within the sequence but yes the cops did come to the castro afterwards and intentionally went after attack people some of that deleted stuff in the we able to save it for the criteria there's someone that's had their hand up way back there yeah because that was a very chilling way to start the film and also what equipment did you use to do the editing so the the will tape as it's referred to uh was in the possession of harvey's lawyer walter kaplan and i knew it existed and walter was holding on to it till he felt confident enough about the project to share it with us and at a certain point he did that's how we got it and we edited on moviolas and thank you steambacks for being here um and i know someone was was asking about using film as a teaching tool or as an opportunity to sort of you know um expand minds and maybe the minds of young people and i know that another film you worked on um greetings from washington dc um is maybe going to have that opportunity soon um so i just wanted to ask you to speak about greetings a little bit if you wouldn't mind which is a film that you made with francis reed lucy weiner and that we are that the archive is restoring and we'll be showing in this theater in just two months great and maybe brandon can talk about the outreach uh but yeah i can i can mention the film uh in 1979 there was a the first uh i think was called the national march on washington for gay and lesbian rights and uh five of us made a short film called greetings from washington dc which lucy weiner directed and francis reed terry lawler greta schiller and myself produced and that is now ucla and outfest have taken on it as a restoration project so coming soon to this theater near you may 22nd yeah and it's actually and um outfest has a whole distribution plan for the film which is great um and it will also be on the dvd extras with my film paragraph 175 that's getting re-released by milestone ryder uh i was just gonna ask a question about um but um just thinking about like making films um and how long it takes to make a film like that how long how much footage you have to amass and like the process of writing narrative and the narration specifically like what how much of the story would you say and like the story arc did you have in mind uh since the beginning and then how much did it adapt and change based on the interviews and just like what was what's the finished product yeah a good question about um how the the story development the good the good thing about having that much time from when the events happened to when we actually had the funding to get into real production and editing i had a lot of time to live with the story and to work it out and those pre-interviews helped to clarify how i wanted to to shape it um so by the time i got into editing there was a pretty clear three-act structure so debbie hoffman and i the debbie was the editor we both edited uh we were we would each work on specific acts so the structure you know was pr pretty much stayed stayed what it was from start to finish of course you know within that lots of changes and development and um and discoveries made along the way um but the editing process itself it was 10 months from start to finish once we were funded it was we filmed the interviews and did the edit in 10 months but i had a couple years before that to work on it so last question over here hi um i was wondering where are you up here okay there we are i was wondering uh if you were involved at all in the feature film milk and if and what you thought of it and um also [Music] uh in terms of florida which you mentioned before uh which is a state that i'm from miami-dade county um i put a post up about that and my feelings about it and it got a lot of support and then a well-meaning friend said uh it's really nothing you know you've probably not even read the bill but you should look at it and i did and i don't even have the words i don't know how to start to explain this movement this context and what it's like to grow up queer and i just wondered if you have words that can help serve as a bridge for someone who doesn't think things like that matter do you have words john i mean i don't even think desantis those people half of them really mean it you know that's what makes you even more reprehensible more repulsive because they're just trying to pander to some psychos not psychos but people who are really crushed under other people's opinions and have no way to empathize anymore we're all in our little digital silos now which i think is why there's some reactionism happening now kovit didn't help you know there was a kind of when people are behind whatever their points of view behind you know squares of glass that you you know the temptation is to read the news you want to hear and starts to reify things and if there's missing components of your life you're looking for blame for that and republicans uh not all of them you know weirdly people like goldwater were sort of pro-gay because it was part of his general freedom idea but he was also racist but that was a different issue um there is a sense of americans specifically people on the rights love escape gov and people on the left are starting to learn that and use the same tactics which i abhor but there is a sense of my life isn't turned out the way i want to it's got to be a reason for this and it's not the god they worship how could they blame the god working in mysterious ways it must be the immigrant it must be the foreigner it must be the queer the trans person now who's getting it most of all it must be the black folks down the street who are taking my recent government resources there's got to be someone to blame other than myself and the way i grew up and that seems to have come back comes back over and over periodically it can't happen here you know sinclair lewis wrote about fascism in the 20s um 30s and it was of course it can happen here you know and after queer gay marriage happened it was a certain kind of uh you know we were also coming out of aids and it was a strange capstone of a idea of rights of queer rights that certainly weren't all of them there's no housing or employment federal rights way of gay marriage it was like okay let's just rest for a minute uh but no we've you know queer people have always been a boogeyman a bowie woman someone to parade in front of frightened people looking for some trouble and what's also repulsive is these people have probably have gay fin friends and relatives even you know so they're cynically not even believing it like maybe anita bryant did but actually you know with no empathy but actually not believing it's true and just using that hatred and fear and i the these are the kind of films that remind us what can be done what needs to be done and the and the the example of a san francisco that's fade you know decaying right now but is the best of america coalition justice i don't even know what i'm saying um and milk yes so um objectively uh i thought the film did a really fine job telling the story and certainly um getting the story to a gazillion people in a way that a documentary can never penetrate subjectively i have i do have a subjective perspective on it too which is i think the documentary wasn't um uh as adequately acknowledged for what it contributed to to the project in the telling of the story but that's that's my subjective view [Music] it's a beautiful film and we're so happy and and also i'm sorry i just want to make one point so beyond the self-serving in that i think that because i think there's a point to be made around that in that i think that documentaries are often not thought of as authored works and why you're seeing more and more documentary filmmakers taking a writing credit which which i would certainly consider now with this film i don't think all documentaries earn i think you have to earn that under specific circumstances but i think that that is um that's something that needs to be examined is that documentaries are are authored pieces of work and should be um viewed that way so that's all i'm honored to have be here with rob one of our greatest documentarians ever and narrative filmmakers thank you john thank you thank you for doing this of course thank you ucla film tv archive hammer outfest support your your cinemas