Shooting some of the scenes in FOR IZZY throughout San Francisco was for me not only a revisiting of my past, but also a rediscovery of a city that I was previously unfamiliar with.
When I lived in San Francisco in the early 2000’s, I’m embarrassed to admit that I hadn’t heard of Harvey Milk. The photo above is the very building on Castro Street where Harvey Milk once lived that I passed by every single day on the way to and from work.
Fast forward a few years later in Vancouver, and my acting coach emails me the script to MILK (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1013753), mentioning there was a part for me that I should submit for if my agents hadn’t already done so (I eventually did submit a self-tape for the role that eventually went to Kelvin Yu (http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0950515)).
The script floored me (in fact, as strong as the film was, the script was even better). From reading it, I could sense that this story wasn’t just a biopic about Harvey Milk, but a story about the screenwriter himself, Dustin Lance Black. You didn’t have to know Black’s own personal journey to know that Harvey Milk’s story had profound personal meaning to him because of how the script was written, as if the ghost of Harvey Milk himself had lived with Black as he wrote it. This wasn’t just inspired writing; it was transcendent.
After reading that script, I did a deep dive into Harvey Milk’s own story, reading as much as I could, watching the documentary THE TIMES OF HARVEY MILK (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088275), and educating myself as much as I could on the history of the fight for LGBTQ rights.
Harvey Milk didn’t become the first openly gay elected official in the US (or perhaps the first ever, anywhere) because he was superhuman. At the time, he was a middle aged man, a refugee from the corporate world who moved from New York to San Francisco to start over. So he opened a camera store on Castro Street and lived upstairs.
As an elected official, he didn’t win over his constituents with lofty grandiose promises, but got into the weeds with the “dog poop” ordinances (enacting laws that made sure owners picked up after their dogs).
However he could sense the bigger picture, and stepped into those bigger shoes that he knew he had to fill. His “you gotta give ’em hope” speech was especially remarkable and prescient because of the time period – 1978. The post-Watergate, post-Vietnam late 1970s was a period of deep cynicism, economic gloom, and a crisis of faith about the American Dream. Not a lot to be hopeful about at that time.
And yet, that’s what made that speech so relevant in that moment. To me, that speech wasn’t about giving its audience a momentary burst of inspiration, boundless optimism or rah-rah positivity, but something more profound.
Hope is a choice.
You can choose to have hope, especially when you are not feeling hopeful.
You can choose to have hope, especially when you are feeling the most helpless.
Because hope isn’t ephemeral like an emotion. Hope is a resource that can fuel the resolve you need to get you beyond whatever despair you’re currently feeling.
And most importantly, when you choose to have hope in those moments of despair, you have the capacity to give that very hope to others – even beyond one’s own lifetime, as Harvey Milk had done.