Sean Penn Got Milk

Gus Van Sant's Harvey Milk biopic just got the edge on Bryan Singer's adaptation of Randy Shilts' The Mayor of Castro Street by casting two A-listers to play Milk and his assasin, Dan White. Academy Award-winners Sean Penn and Matt Damon (who won the screenplay Oscar for Van Sant's Good Will Hunting) will reportedly star in the as-yet untitled project, set to start shooting as early as this December.

Penn would play Milk, the late San Francisco city supervisor who was the first prominent US politician to be openly gay, and Damon would play White, who murdered both Milk and SF Mayor George Moscone in 1978.

White's trial, where he used the infamous "Twinkie defense" to claim his innocence, was a scandalous miscarriage of justice, resulting in a sentence of only seven years. As depicted in Rob Epstein's 1984 Oscar-winning documentary, The Times of Harvey Milk, the resulting uproar over the final verdict (dubbed the "White Night Riots") was as important to the still-growing gay rights movement as Stonewall was almost a decade earlier.

In addition to the documentary, Milk's story has been told on television and the stage (including the 1999 TV movie Execution of Justice, based on the play by Emily Mann), but a narrative feature has been in development for years, with such stars as Robin Williams (himself a long-time SF resident) and Hugh Jackman rumored to play Milk at various times.

Click here to purchase The Times of Harvey Milkon DVD from Amazon.com.
Links via Reuters.com, Wikipedia.org and Imbd.com.