Milk Premiere Brings Back Memories

Phil Bronstein, editor of the SF Chronicle (and Sharon Stone’s ex) writes up the premiere of Milk. He writes of Josh Brolin:

I’d walked the District 8 neighborhood with Dan White, doing a few stories about this seemingly earnest guy a bit in over his head. Josh Brolin’s hair-perfect presentation of the White character in the film was as eerily pitch-on as his George W. Bush. I sat across the aisle from Brolin at the premier and occasionally had to look over to gut check that it wasn’t Dan in the chair, as much as he was on the screen.

And of Penn:

Sean is pretty remarkable in the movie. I don’t know how you go from the scorching, tormented Irish thug in “Mystic River” to such a convincing Jewish/gay icon and diva in the same lifetime without some genius in there. I told him something like that, though scaled down, at the City Hall party afterwards. We’d hardly spoken since the fugue-like struggles he and I had over editing his Iran and Iraq pieces for the paper, nose-to-nose in the back of Tosca, manhoods challenged, accusations of traitorous conduct, duels with pistols suggested.

Isn’t it interesting that these Oscar movies are taking us back through history? Nixon, Harvey Milk among them?