Stu­dio 54

Tak­ing debauch­ery to insane new heights, leg­endary 1970s New York night­club Stu­dio 54 attract­ed reg­u­lars from Andy Warhol to Liza Min­nel­li and Michael Jack­son (who pops up in old VHS footage to pro­claim the venue a ​“safe haven”). For­tu­nate­ly, direc­tor Matt Tyrnauer’s excel­lent doc­u­men­tary dares to go beyond the hedo­nis­tic $50,000-a-night par­ties, by por­tray­ing a venue that rep­re­sent­ed both the very best and worst aspects of Amer­i­can society.

Found­ed by Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager in 1977, Stu­dio 54 was the ​“Mount Olym­pus of dis­co”, with the club’s opu­lent high ceil­ings and dra­mat­ic enter­tain­ment (it had stage props and light­ing designed by Tony award-win­ning cre­atives) turn­ing it into a fun­fair for adults. Clos­est homo­sex­u­al Rubell, who died from AIDS in 1989, was the ring­mas­ter of the oper­a­tion, hug­ging celebri­ties and walk­ing around with a coat stuffed full of cocaine and Quaaludes. Mean­while, Schrager, who talks open­ly on cam­era through­out, was the son of a gang­ster and a famous intro­vert, who pre­ferred to take a back seat to Rubell’s gid­dy antics.

Tyr­nauer lov­ing­ly por­trays the pair’s unlike­ly friend­ship and how they cre­at­ed a club where the LGBT com­mu­ni­ty had a safe haven dur­ing the tox­ic 1970s. As inter­vie­wee (and reg­u­lar Stu­dio 54 attendee) Nile Rogers puts it: ​“Once you walked through those doors, you were free.” But behind the glitz and glam­our, Tyr­nauer makes it abun­dant­ly clear it was also a very ugly place, with Rubell only allow­ing peo­ple – who des­per­ate­ly queued in the cold – inside based on their attrac­tive­ness or social stand­ing. Pass­ing anec­dotes reveal some patrons were even forced to exchange sex­u­al favours for entry, with the venue strik­ing a fine bal­ance between being class­less and classist.

When things inevitably fall apart, Rubell and Schrager (who, nowa­days, runs a bou­tique hotel busi­ness empire) call on Don­ald Trump’s infa­mous lawyer Roy Cohn, and the pair start to feel less like bea­cons of diver­si­ty and more like the poster boys for cap­i­tal­ist excess. Did Rubell real­ly care about the LGBT com­mu­ni­ty? Or were they, as he puts it (via archive footage), just ​“mice” who fell into his ​“mouse trap?” Unfor­tu­nate­ly, the film seems to say that Stu­dio 54’s own­ers were not dri­ven by encour­ag­ing inclu­siv­i­ty, but more in attain­ing sta­tus and adding to the stacks of cash they hid away from the IRS in their nightclub’s ceiling.

Under less skilled direc­tion, Stu­dio 54 could have just been 90 min­utes of sto­ries about orgies, dis­co grooves and Tru­man Capote get­ting tanked up. How­ev­er, Tyr­nauer ensures that it is a bal­anced sto­ry, which he tells with all the verve of a cocaine-fuelled, rags-to-rich­es-to-rags Scors­ese epic.