Selected for preservation by the National Film Registry in 2012.
The film opens with acting mayor Dianne Feinstein breaking the news to the assembled press outside City Hall that mayor George Moscone and Harvey Milk had both been shot and killed by city supervisor Dan White. Gus Van Sant opens his biopic Milk (2008) with the exact same footage.
This film is part of the Criterion Collection, spine #557.
The end of the film claims that one reason for Dan White's comparatively light sentence was that his lawyers argued that his consumption of junk food had caused his depression and mental illness, and contributed to his compulsion to commit murder. This is a widely disseminated misrepresentation of White's defense strategy that has become popularly known as the "Twinkie defense." In reality, White's lawyers claimed that his massive consumption of junk food was a symptom, not a cause, of his depression. Psychologists employed by White's defense argued that he was clinically depressed, and pointed to several changes in behavior, among them the consumption of mass quantities of junk food, as evidence of that depression. A November 2003 article by Carol Pogash in the SF Gate, "Myth of the 'Twinkie Defense: The Verdict in the Dan White Case Wasn't Based on His Ingestion of Junk Food,'" systematically debunks this narrative.
Bill Kraus, an activist who is one of the interviewees in this documentary, was also a central figure in the 1987 nonfiction book And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic by San Francisco Chronicle journalist Randy Shilts. When that book was adapted into a 1993 telefilm, Kraus was played by Ian McKellen. Kraus died in 1986 of AIDS-related causes.