Canadian actress Alison Pill didn’t know much about Harvey Milk when she auditioned to play his lesbian campaign manager in Gus Van Sant’s biopic Milk. Twenty-two years old, she considered herself fairly informed about the history of the gay rights movement, and yet all she knew about Harvey was something vague about the “Twinkie defense.”
Today, Pill is one of Harvey’s biggest fans. And she belongs to another fan club, too, one a lot of queer women are going to be joining when they get to know Anne Kronenberg, the curly-haired dyke-on-a-bike who ran Harvey’s first successful campaign, played by Pill in the film.
At first glance, it’s hard to see much similarity between the two women, although Kronenberg was also 22 years old when tapped by Milk to run his third supervisorial campaign.
Strong, confrontational, and passionate, Anne rode a motorcycle and wore leather jackets. She took on the cautious gay male establishment of the times and helped Harvey kick down some of the social and political walls between lesbians and gay men.
Anne Kronenberg on
Castro St.
in 1978, from the documentaryThe Times of Harvey Milk
Unlike Anne, Alison Pill is small and slight, with huge eyes and long, straight hair. But any impression of fragility is a false one; she comes out swinging both on screen and in person, and more than does justice to the character she portrays.Pill hadn’t met Anne Kronenberg when she auditioned for the role, and didn’t meet her until several months after she was cast, although they’d spoken on the phone. It wasn’t until the two women got together in person that she got a feeling for who Anne is, and threw earlier ideas of how to play her out the window.
“I met her my first day in San Francisco,” Pill said in an exclusive interview with AfterEllen.com. “It was so amazing, and completely changed my view of what I had been planning to do with this character.”
Kronenberg is featured in the documentary The Times of Harvey Milk, but watching it hadn’t prepared Pill for the real thing. “In the documentary, you don’t really get a sense of her, but more of Harvey,” she said. “Anne can control an entire room very calmly. She’s a pretty incredible woman. You just want to listen to her, do whatever she says, and you’re not sure how that happened…. She’s one of the strongest women I’ve ever met, but in a really subtle, womanly way. And it was an important energy to try to capture.”
Pill completely immersed herself in both the story and the character. “I just started soaking up stories of the Castro, and stories about Dick (Pavich), and Jim (Rivaldo), and meeting with Harvey in the morning before everybody else got there during the campaign. I knew so much of the interpersonal relationships of the campaign office by the end of it, and all the funny stories. I soaked it up to the point of where I knew how to be in the room as Anne, even when she had nothing to do.” The real Anne Kronenberg has nothing but praise for the justice done to her story, and for director Gus Van Sant.
“He wanted to get it right and I believe he did,” Kronenberg said.
“Gus welcomed us on the set, and when we were there was always asking, ‘Is this the way it happened? ‘ And he would change things when we said something wasn’t right. For instance, when I said, ‘Wait, women were marching behind him in the Gay Freedom Day Parade,’ Gus put out a call, ‘All of Anne’s posse, come on down,’ so that there’d be women there. It was amazing, and I was consulted a lot.”
Anne in Harvey’s campaign headquarters (his camera store) in 1978
Van Sant chatted with AfterEllen.com for a few minutes the day after Milk premiered in San Francisco.He said that in the middle of shooting, activist and former Milk political protégé Cleve Jones (played in the film by Emile Hirsch) told him about one incident involving Anne and her “posse” that he thought should be in the film.
Alison Pill as Anne Kronenberg; Emile Hirsch as Cleve Jones
There were three gay men running for the seat Milk ended up winning, and one of them, Rick Stokes, was known as being pretty uptight, Jones told Van Sant. Right after being hired as Milk’s campaign manager, Anne brought her dyke posse to a Stokes campaign event, where she and the other women started handing out “Milk” signs to the women filing into the room.In the Milk shooting script, Stokes responds to Anne’s presence with outrage. “Young lady,” he fusses at her, “You must be confused. This is my night, not Mr. Milk’s.”
Anne introduces herself as Harvey’s campaign manager, and Stokes replies, “Then you should know this race is for District 5, the Castro, not for all of your lesbian… compadres.”
A tough-looking woman grabs Anne and kisses her, and Anne tells him, “I’m sorry. Are we distracting you, Mr. Stokes? I’d hate to screw you up on your big night.”
Stokes orders the women to leave, saying they’re not from the district, and another Milk supporter corrects him. “Not true. Guess where we found them all, Rick? A slew of them, way up on Valencia St. Living right there in our district. And you see, as it turns out, Annie here is very, very popular with the ladies.”
Pill said she loved the scene, saying that Stokes was always trying to “keep it comfortable with straight folks. Like you can be gay, but not too gay. And Harvey would always preach the exact opposite.”
She also praised Cleve Jones for always being the one ready to say, “We need more ladies.”
“He always did,” Van Sant agreed. “I just wish in this case he’d have said it a little sooner. I’d have liked to make that scene work in the film, but it was already…” He paused as if searching for a word.
“Epic?” I offered.
He just smiled. “There’s a lot of story.”
Still, it’s clear he regrets not finding a way to use the scene. “It’s part of the story that his alliance with the lesbian community gained him votes,” he said. “It was partly through Anne and partly through other advances into the community and connections…. There are a lot of things in the film that are absent, and that story is one of them.”
He added that even though the scene isn’t in the final cut of the film, he expected it to be included as an extra on the DVD when it’s released.
Pill was disappointed the scene didn’t make it into the final cut, and about something else, too. “I thought there was going to be a full on make out scene,” she told me. “There was just a little kiss.”
Even without that bit of guerilla campaigning, however, Pill makes an impact in a film loaded with powerful performances. Because it’s in the trailer and is bright, funny, and important, the scene where Harvey introduces her to his friends and supporters is probably the one that most people will be talking about.
But it’s another scene where Pill has her star turn.
The night after Milk and Mayor George Moscone were shot and killed by Dan White, she and Harvey’s lover Scott Smith (James Franco) go down to City Hall, where there is supposed to be some kind of memorial service for the two men. It’s poorly attended, and they head back towards the Castro, despondent.
And flowing down Market Street, headed by Cleve Jones, is a river of mourners, stretching for miles, candles flickering in their hands. Anne says very little, but her face is a testament to the power of that moment, both for those who were there at the time, and those who came together to re-enact it for the cameras thirty years later.
“That whole night — I will never forget shooting it,” Pill said, her voice shaking a little. “I will never forget the number of volunteers who came out, and in everybody’s faces, like the older couples who had obviously been there, and younger couples who knew who Harvey was, and gay or straight, old or young, whatever; everybody was there to celebrate his life. And it was incredible that people were willing to do that for no other reason than we asked them if they would be willing to come out to Market Street in the middle of the night and walk for hours.”
Scene recreating the memorial march in San Francisco the night of Harvey Milk’s assassination
“I will never forget just walking out into Market St. and seeing literally thousands of people there for that reason. It was an amazing thing to be a part of, and it was so representative of what Harvey was about.”Although Pill said she was a strong supporter of LGBT rights before signing onto Milk, the battle for marriage equality and against Prop 8 has made a powerful impression on her after having played the role of Anne.
“I’m just so utterly furious about Prop 8,” she said. “I thought it could have gone 52-48 the other way this time. I wish that Prop 8 didn’t happen. I wish that (the ban on adoption by unmarried people in) Arkansas had never happened. I wish what happened in Florida didn’t happen. I hope we never see anything like that again.”
One of Pill’s hopes for the film is that it will further the cause for which Milk gave his life, and thinks it has a powerful lesson for communities struggling with divisiveness. “What Anne and Harvey did was bridge a gap that is too often there between people with similar views, but who are still sort of disconnected, which is how it was in the gay and lesbian communities at the time,” she said. “And I hope that sort of offers some sort of lesson for the next time, and the fight against Prop 8, that we have to get people together who are close but not quite there, to try and close that final gap.”
It’s a sign of how connected Pill is with the woman behind her character that Kronenberg said almost the exact same thing, adding that much of Milk’s effectiveness was in his skill as a coalition builder.
“Harvey was all about reaching out to disenfranchised people,” Kronenberg said. “Not just lesbians and gay men, but African Americans and women. He really, really got the connection with feminism, with human rights. Long before I came on the campaign, Harvey was a crusader for women’s rights. I didn’t change him in any way.”
Said Pill, “I think what Harvey did was absolutely incredible, forming a coalition of people who had never worked together before…. the lesbian community was so separate from the gay community. And to put these two really powerful activist cultures together did an amazing thing, and Anne was so much a part of that, and gaining access to a whole other political machine through that. I think it’s incredible that he was able to do it.”
It wasn’t always easy doing it Harvey’s way.
“There was a lot of suspicion when I came in,” Kronenberg said. “Those walls were up, but we learned to play together well and we had lots and lots of fun. And by my being involved in the campaign, that naturally brought more women into the campaign. So I think the whole dynamic changed. And what would have happened if Harvey had still lived? I think that this would have continued.”
Although Kronenberg gave Milk’s campaign a legitimacy and energy it had previously lacked — along with his first win — she says she got more from him than he did from her. “I learned to be a stronger woman than I was,” she said. “We all were really young when we met Harvey. And I learned that I could do anything I set my mind to because Harvey gave us the framework, and then he let us just go and excel.”
That may be why everyone involved with the film expressed at some point the fear that Harvey’s legacy might be lost. I asked Pill about something screenwriter Dustin Lance Black said, that one of the reasons he wrote the story was that he was worried that Milk was slipping out of history.
“Yes, I think there was a real danger of that,” Pill said. “When we were shooting in San Francisco, people in the Bay Area – people my age, gay, lesbian – they had no idea, didn’t even know the name. And, in terms of the city’s history, and human rights and civil rights history, it’s absurd that none of us really know about it. I’m so grateful that I got to do this research on a chapter of history that I really didn’t know anything about.”
Learning that history gave Pill a new perspective on playing a lesbian.
“I grew up in an era, a time and place, where (being gay) just doesn’t seem like that big a deal,” she said. “And I forget how big a deal it is, and how much things have changed, and then again, how little they’ve changed…. Thankfully, there are more gay characters being written that are fuller, and not stereotypical, and I can only hope to see more of that. I’d be honored to play somebody else like Anne again.”
Alison has big expectations for Milk, and they go far beyond her own career. “I just hope that when everybody sees this movie it will offer, first of all, some hope that things have improved,” she said. “And things will improve more, but only with a great deal of activism and forethought, and coming out, and making people deal with it.”
Allison Pill has one more hope for the film, and her role in it: “That Anne Kronenberg won’t be forgotten. That she becomes an inspiration.”
