Harvey Milk Francisco had no idea. It was just a really brief, provincial, localized current events story that the mayor and a city council member in San Francisco were killed. It didn't have much reverberation." Milk's life has been the subject of a musical theater production; an eponymous opera; a cantata; a children's picture book; a French-language historical novel for young-adult readers; and the biopic "Milk", released in 2008 after 15 years in the making. The film was directed by Gus Van Sant and starred Sean Penn as Milk and Josh Brolin as Dan White, and won two Academy Awards for Best
Harvey Milk as a case where a murderer escapes justice because he binged on junk food, simplifying White's lack of political savvy, his relationships with George Moscone and Harvey Milk, and what "San Francisco Chronicle" columnist Herb Caen described as pandemic police "dislike of homosexuals". Dan White served a little more than five years for the double homicide of Moscone and Milk. On October 21, 1985 (a year and a half after his release from prison), White was found dead by carbon monoxide poisoning in a running car in his ex-wife's garage. He was 39 years old. His defense attorney told reporters