Rob Epstein has a few words for Sam Smith.
“Facts and history matter,” says two-time Oscar-winning filmmaker Epstein who, in 1985, was the first openly gay person to accept the award. Epstein along with his filmmaking partner Richard Schmiechen took home the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature for their revolutionary film “The Life and Times of Harvey Milk.”
The filmmaker wrote about his historic win and the need for the younger generation of openly gay Oscar winners like Smith and writer Dustin Lance Black to understand the history of the awards and the LGBTQ community in a guest column for The Hollywood Reporter.
Smith, 23, was awarded the Oscar for Best Original Song for “Writing’s on the Wall”, the theme song from “SPECTRE”, the most recent James Bond film. During his acceptance speech, the singer announced that “no openly gay man had ever won an Oscar.”
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Critics and the Twittersphere were quick to point out that Smith needed to do some fact checking, citing Stephen Sondheim, Dustin Lance Black and Elton John as his openly gay Oscar-winning predecessors. With numerous thinkpieces and backlash against Smith appearing in the press this week, the public had yet to hear directly from the first openly gay winner or address Smith’s speech claims.
Prior to 1985, “no other gay-themed film, made by openly gay filmmakers, had ever received this acknowledgement,” Epstein writes of his historic win, recounting the difficulties he had in getting the film and his follow-up film on the AIDS crisis, “Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt,” made. That film would also go on to win an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature four years after his first win, making him the first openly gay filmmaker to win two Oscars.
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Epstein tries to put a positive spin on Smith’s snafu, using this time to call attention to the amnesia he perceives the younger generation has when it comes to LGBTQ history: “I congratulate Sam Smith and Dustin Lance Black for taking their moments in the 45 second spotlight to acknowledge a community that has fought long and hard to have our very existence recognized. But, please, do your homework.”
