Dustin Lance Black can’t imagine anyone but Sean Penn in “Milk” but had wanted out gay actor for role

Inside a packed conference room at the headquarters of the Writers Guild of America in Los Angeles, Oscar-winner Dustin Lance Black was among those speaking on a panel Thursday evening about the status of “Gay Today In Hollywood.”

The crowd of more than 250 people was filled with writers who would dearly love to have the kind of success Black has had with Milk and he shared with them his journey in getting the film made.

“I wasn’t interested in letting go of it until I knew it was in the hands that would take it to a wider audience,” he said. “That meant writing it as a spec. You just knock on a lot of doors and you hear a lot of nos. There are a lot of gay and lesbian producers out there and a lot of them are very big. Even if they’ve never done gay stuff before, they’re looking for it. Dan Jinks and Bruce Cohen said, ‘We don’t want to be gay producers, we don’t want to do gay content necessarily.’ That had always been there kind of mantra and they always said no – until they said yes to this one.”

Black had met the late Harvey Milk’s friend, Cleve Jones, while doing his exhaustive research and that led to finding the perfect director: “The first person I attached was Gus Van Sant. That took awhile and some of it is luck. Eventually it was Cleve Jones, who Emile Hirsch plays in the movie, that had the relationship with Gus because Gus used to live with him when he was editing Even Cowgirls Get the Blues. Cleve and I were like, ‘Let’s just go surprise Gus with the script’ and we did. Then there were a lot of meetings after that and there was a lot of discussion there. There’s all this stuff to get past. There’s all the nos. Eventually (Gus) was attached then there were nos from other producers. Trust me, I had a lot of producers who I met with before Bruce and Dan who said, ‘This might be a TV movie., we might be able to get this on some cable channel.’ So, it’s attaching it to people who have the vision that you have. Once Bruce and Dan were on it and Gus, then we started to get some steam.”

Sean Penn went on to win the Academy Award for best actor for his portrayal of Harvey Milk. But Black admitted he wasn’t his first choice for the role – because he is straight.

“I love Sean and I think he’s amazing and I can’t imagine it with anyone else,” he  said. “But I wish we had an out gay actor who was of the caliber that could finance a film that cost what this cost. We don’t have that yet but that was something we tried to do for awhile. Eventually, we needed to go to that A-list, green-lightable actor.”

But even with Penn attached, “we did not have a distributor. It was just the faith of Bruce and Dan, of Gus and I and the passion we had behind it. And it looked like it was going to fold – a lot. Many, many times I thought that it was not going to happen.”

Others on the panel seemed to caution against dreaming too big citing the limited market for gay-themed films. But Black encouraged the crowd of scribes to “write them and then push the living hell out of them until someone gets them made whether that’s (a) $800,000 or $20 million (budget).”

“We’re in a unique position as writers because it doesn’t cost us any money to go out there and tell these really personal, beautiful stories that I think are going to reach beyond the gay community and what an important time to be telling those stories. I think it’s our stories that are going to bring us our civil rights.”

Coming up later today and over the weekend:  More stories from the WGA Panel: “Gay Today in Hollywood: A Status Report.”