YOU MAY not know Rob Epstein by name but you certainly know his films. A pioneer in the world of GLBT filmmaking, Epstein has been acknowledging and addressing the lives of gay people in his films for the past three decades. In the late 1970’s Epstein’s work burst onto the scene with his groundbreaking documentary, Word is Out: Stories of Some of Our Lives, which delved into the lives of ordinary gay and lesbian Americans. Six years later, he conceived and directed the Peabody-Award-winning documentary, The Times of Harvey Milk (1984).
After co-directing The AIDS Show (1986) with Peter Adair, Epstein teamed up with Jeffrey Friedman in San Francisco to form Telling Pictures. Their first film was Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt (1987). Inspired by the Names Project, Common Threads chronicled the spread of AIDS in America during the epidemic’s first decade. The documentary garnered Epstein his second Peabody Award and his second Oscar for Best Documentary Feature.
After jointly producing and directing Where Are We? Our Trip Through America (1989), Epstein and Friedman adapted Vito Russo’s The Celluloid Closet to the screen. Essential for any film historian, The Celluloid Closet uncovered and examined images of same-sex behavior and innuendo over nearly a century of filmmaking. Six years after The Celluloid Closet, Epstein and Friedman made a very somber movie, Paragraph 175, which examined homosexual life in Germany before and during the Nazi era. Since then, Epstein has directed television programs, both dramas and documentaries, but is now poised (with Friedman) to release a film about Allen Ginsberg in the 1950’s called Howl.
A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Board Director on the Documentary Branch of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, a teacher and currently Chair of the Media Arts at California College of the Arts in San Francisco, Epstein continues to contribute to the world of cinema with his careful examination of GLBT culture. Gay & Lesbian Review: Word is Out caused quite a stir when it came out. How do you think it has stood up over the years? G&LR: Your work seems to have a recurring theme suggesting that outing oneself is the best political tool for the GLBT movement. G&LR: You don’t think you have political intentions when approach your work? G&LR: The Celluloid Closet is certainly a film that has held up over the years. It’s a pleasure to watch it with young audiences who get this primer on cinematic images, from homophobic to homoerotic ones, of the past. G&LR: Milk uses footage from The Times of Harvey Milk. How much input did you have on making the later film? G&LR: How do you feel about Sean Penn’s performance and his Oscar win for Best Actor? G&LR: What are your personal memories of Harvey Milk? G&LR: As a brilliant strategist and someone who could mobilize a community, we could have used him in the run-up to Prop. 8, where we were clearly out-organized by the opposition. G&LR: What role can the visual media have on altering peoples’ perspectives on same-sex marriage—can a film or documentary change someone’s mind? G&LR: What can you tell us about your upcoming film, Howl? I know it’s about Allen Ginsberg; can you give us a hint on what kind of angle you are taking on the author and his famous poem? G&LR: You’ve had a long career. What advice would you give to filmmakers out there who want to incorporate GLBT images into their films but may be afraid of the corporate, commercial, or cultural backlash?
Rob Epstein: I recently saw it at the Outfest Film Festival screening last year as part of their Restoration Project, and I thought it held up pretty well. There are a few sequences I feel are kind of time period artifacts—mostly the music sequences. In terms of the stories and what they have to say, they’re essential and classical.
RE: When I hear it stated to me that way, it sounds formulaic. It’s not how my process works, but I’m not discounting that analysis. I don’t approach the material with any political agenda, but that’s not to say I walk away from somebody else pointing that out.
RE: It would sound disingenuous of me to say I don’t, but it’s not my starting point. It starts with dealing with the subject, the humanity of the subject, and trusting the rest of it. I don’t think you can make a film and say you’re making the film because you expect an end result from it. I don’t think that’s how good filmmaking happens.
RE: The whole premise of The Celluloid Closet was to get people to see what they had seen before and may not have completely understood. That film was telling a hundred-year history of how queer characters have been portrayed in mainstream movies. The cycles were changing yet referring back at the same time. We wanted to take Russo’s thesis and translate that into a movie experience.
RE: The Times of Harvey Milk was a good reference point for the filmmakers. What I had was very informal.
RE: I thought he did a good job representing his take on Harvey. As far as his win, that barrier had already been broken with Tom Hanks winning for Philadelphia (1993). It didn’t feel like a milestone, but obviously there was a lot of good will and support for the movie.
RE: I lived in the neighborhood, so my memories were interactive of him as a storekeeper, then a supervisor. Then it became about constructing his story and presenting it so that the world outside of provincial San Francisco would understand and appreciate his significance. That was a many-year mission.
RE: The lesson learned from the Proposition 6 campaign in the 1970’s—where Harvey was instrumental in setting up the mechanisms of grassroots work and media saturation—was coming out, letting people know they were voting against you, if that was how they were going to vote.
RE: I believe it can. I know it has. I don’t know how to quantify that, but if a film is well made… That’s always my goal: to make a film that anybody who sits in front of it can understand and be affected by whatever truth it’s trying to convey.
RE: It follows what was going on in Ginsberg’s life from 1950 to 1957, when he created the poem, and how the world responded to the poem, culminating in the trial in 1957.
RE: That’s a decision everybody has to make for themselves. What kind of creative life do they want to have and how they want to go about it. There are different paths. If you believe in what you have to say, stick to your beliefs and find a way to do it.
