The Times of Harvey Milk’s Rob Epstein on Docs, Reality TV, and Keeping Harvey Alive on Film

You’ve seen Gus Van Sant’s Milk, but for the real story of slain San Francisco city supervisor (and gay rights pioneer/martyr) Harvey Milk, you absolutely must watch Rob Epstein’s Oscar-winning 1984 documentary The Times of Harvey Milk. The Criterion Collection releases a gorgeous Blu-ray this week, which features the thoroughness for which the company is famous — a new digital transfer, terrific essays, an informative commentary, and featurettes on everything from the making of the film to the investigation of the assassination of Milk and mayor George Moscone.


For Epstein, the success of The Times of Harvey Milk would launch one of the great documentary careers in American cinema; his works (most of them co-directed with Jeffrey Friedman) also include the gays-on-film doc The Celluloid Closet, the moving AIDS piece Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt, and the documentary Paragraph 175, about gay men who survived Nazi concentration camps. In 2010, Epstein and Friedman made their narrative debut with Howl, a fascinating exploration of the landmark poem by Allen Ginsberg, portrayed indelibly in the film by James Franco.

Click HERE for Full Interview on Movieline.