‘Studio 54’
by Peter Belsito
A feature documentary of a strange gay New York club scene in the late 1970s.
Studio 54 was the epicenter of 70s hedonism — a place that not only redefined the nightclub, but also came to symbolize an entire era, basically the wildest aspects of the pre AIDs gay New York
.
Its co-owners, Ian Schrager and Steve Rubell, two friends from Brooklyn, seemed to come out of nowhere to suddenly conceive and preside over a new kind of New York society.
Now, 39 years after the velvet rope was first slung across the club’s hallowed threshold in a former Broadway theater, this feature documentary tells the real story behind the most audacious club of all time.
This is a first hand look into the inside of the amazing Studio 54 told here by co-founder Ian Schrager as he looks back and gives an intimate run-down of the disco’s creation and rise to complete wonderland, and then it’s ultimate demise after just a few years as it came crashing down quicker than a snort of blow.
Co founder Rubell, who was gay, died of AIDS a few years after the club’s demise.
This documentary explores the experiences, first hand accounts, from many of the employees caught up in the whirlwind of this Xanadu on New York’s 54th Street. The photo’s and videos from inside the club are as much eye-opening as they are fascinating.
Studio 54 the club was a place to feel safe and feel free, a place to live life to it’s fullest every night and escape the prejudices, injustices, and cruel world of reality outside its doors.
It drew the likes of Liza Minelli, Michael Jackson, Liz Taylor, Truman Capote, Andy Warhol ….and so many more from the global A-List of Celebrity in the late ‘70’s.
It was a time and experience like no other in recent history, and the place to be (if you could only get in the door). Almost as famous as the wild scene that happened inside the impossibility of gaining entrance to the club by hundreds on the streets outside was equally well known.
