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Studio 54 is a place spoken of in mythic tones — a den of sin and extravagance that surely couldn’t ever live up to its legends. It’s a place you’ve definitely heard the name of, even if you know nothing else about it; the ur-nightclub, glitter and disco and beautiful people.  Finding out the story behind such a place is like seeing a theatre set when the lights come up: seeing how the magic happens can be fascinating, but it also casts a pall.

The short version is this: Ian Schrager and Steve Rubell (pictured above) opened a nightclub in what was once a TV studio (hence the name). They pulled off the opening in a crazy-short period of time by hiring a crew of theatre guys who were used to building sets on a shoestring budget and in a hot hurry. Thousands of invitations were sent out in anticipation of the opening, creating a massive buzz around the new place that was opening. This was the Seventies, in that brief sliver of time between the Pill becoming widely available and before the HIV/AIDS crisis, and people were exhausted from feeling serious over Watergate and Nixon and Vietnam. The moment was perfect for a new sort of Eden, one with quaaludes and dancing, celebrities and basement orgies.

To say that Studio 54 was a massive success was an understatement: they were the first club to institute a velvet rope barrier where not everyone could get in — which of course only increased demand. Promoters were paid by the cover story, and as the documentary suggests, this may have been the real beginning of the obsession with celebrity. I want to see that documentary: this one flows like a Wikipedia entry made up of random stories. But they’re seriously interesting stories. You want to talk (disco) baller moves? How about running the number one nightclub in New York for months at a time with a series of one-day-only catering liquor permits?

But as the byline points out, ‘nothing this fabulous could last forever,’ and Schrager, the documentary’s main source and the surviving partner behind Studio 54, admits that much of the downfall of Studio 54 was due to sheer arrogance. The club was making money hand over fist, the managers were taking a massive skim from the takes, profits were being used to provide drugs to famous patrons, and everyone still wanted to get in every night. It was the place to be seen. “If you didn’t see someone at Studio 54, it meant they couldn’t get in,” one of the interviewees commented. The doormen were being offered sex for entry and taking it, and Steve Rubell — ever the braggart and ringmaster — made the mistake of crowing to New York Magazine that “only the Mafia” made more money than Studio 54. Needless to say, there was a massive IRS raid very shortly thereafter.

When you create exclusivity, it’s marketable, but all those who can’t get a piece of the pie have a great deal of schadenfreude when it all comes crashing down. And yet, this is a film about disco, but there’s something totally metal about throwing a massive rager the night before you go to prison for tax evasion and obstruction of justice, so of course that’s what Rubell and Schrager did.

When they got out of prison, the backlash against disco and excess was in full swing, along with a recession, the Reagan era and the AIDS crisis.  The last act of the documentary, covering the period from Rubell and Schrager’s prison time through the coda detailing Rubell’s death from AIDS and Schrager’s rise in the hotel industry, drags like a poorly edited student essay, uncertain when it’s okay to stop.

Overall, the documentary is enjoyable and makes excellent use of archival footage, insights from Schrager and a throbbing disco score. On the downside, the narrative structure is weak and ideas for potentially more explosive documentaries are dangled as frustrating afterthoughts. Missing entirely are contemporary interviews with the surviving glitterati of Studio 54 regulars and that weakens the film’s conceit that the legacy of Studio 54 lives on.

 

Studio 54 opened in select cinemas across Ireland on June 15.