Tyrnauer grabs you with all the glamour and frisson he recreates through the pumping classic dance music, myriad star-packed archival photos and, best of all, actual, never-seen 16mm footage taken in the club itself, that proves once and for all it truly was everything it was rumored to be, and more. The momentum only continued to build as the place became a semi-private playground for every star from every field in the world, and the very name “54” became emblematic of both the ultimate in disco chic and decadence. ![]() Schrager does indeed finally open his mouth and, in a raspy Brooklyn accent, recounts how the pair took over a former Broadway theatre and in a whirlwind six weeks had the club opening of openings, with hordes outside dying to get in, with even Sinatra and Beatty rumored to have been unsuccessful in gaining entry. I should know, for-full confession-I worked at 54 on opening night as a busboy and once attended a Parliament Funkadelic concert at Madison Square Garden in the company of the late journalist Bob Weiner, Annie Leibovitz and Schrager, who did not utter a word all evening. The director’s major coup here was getting the full cooperation of Schrager, now a super-successful hotel magnate who, from the very beginning, has maintained a near-legendary stoic silence about everything. Although it lasted a mere 33 months, 33 years later people still talk about the club, the varied, often drug-fueled celebrities and common party-goers who let their hair down there, and the way it seemed to forever epitomize a certain post-Pill, pre-AIDS zeitgeist of frenzied hedonism in the wake of Watergate.Īlthough various factual and fictional (Mark Christopher’s 1998 54, butchered by Harvey Weinstein and only now reappearing in a director’s cut Whit Stillman’s The Last Days of Disco) films have attempted to capture this disco of discos, Matt Tyrnauer’s documentary Studio 54 finally tells its full story, and an enthralling, sometimes absurd, sometimes very sad and at times almost unbelievable story it is. Their names, respectively, were Ian Schrager and Steve Rubell, and what they created was a nightclub called Studio 54. ![]() Once upon a time, two Brooklyn boys, one introverted, serious and straight, and the other gay, gregarious and sometimes flamboyantly out of control, met at Syracuse University, bonded and together crafted a true magical kingdom.
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