Two college pals from Brooklyn Steve Rubell and Ira Schager not only took The Big Apple but the world by storm when they opened Studio 54 in 1977. Overnight these brash entrepreneurs took the club scene to another level with it's opera house bones that provided a balcony to watch the beautiful people in full hedonistic tilt as well as special sections for A listers to snort coke and perform other illicit activities as the boys pulled all the stops to make the club a success which they did from the opening night, maintaining a dizzying pace until the Feds cracked down three years later when silent partner Jack Dushey sang like a canary to the Feds. Then suddenly as it had begun it ended for this brazen duo and they were off to prison on tax evasion convictions.
Documentary filmmaker Mark Tyrnauer's (Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood) fascination with celebrity nostalgie de las boue is once again in full evidence as he takes us back to the epicenter of the 70s Disco era and its meretricious glamor and sybaritic lifestyles of the beautiful people making the scene at the time; the plague of AIDS, that would decimate so many attached to the club still at bay. They were dancing on a volcano almost as volatile as the bathhouses in NY and Frisco. It remains a weak telling however as it depends more on still photographs, gossip and the guarded testimony of surviving former co-owner Ira Shaeger trying to paper over Rubell, Dushey and their all consuming greed (skimming up to 80% a night) as an insatiable desire to "succeed." Given the voluminous amount of celebrities who were part of the scene Tyrnauer offers little in terms of interviews then and now, outside of a precious snippet with a young Michael Jackson pre- superstar period. Instead he relies on former club flunkies playing coy, protecting themselves, acting like it was all fun and games as they clipped the cash strap city of NY for millions.
Rubell the extrovert of the duo's high energy enthusiasm had a certain likability in the early days that was soon corrupted by sex, drugs and rubbing elbows with the in crowd. He soon became dictatorial out front insulting customers and turning them away while remaining obsequious to the celebs. He would die of AIDS in 1989 like their famed lawyer Roy Cohn had in 1986; both in deep denial about their disease. Some things were just impossible to lie your way out of.
Shaeger, a man who clearly understood the price of everything and value of nothing was destined to land on his feet as he bought protection in prison and ratted out others to cut his sentence in half as he sits today in a multi-million dollar Southhampton mansion along with having a newly minted pardon from President Obama. With this insulated, unctuous character as the main source of Studio 54 the doc is a shallow as the crowd it catered to in its hay day, offering the viewer nothing that we did not already know last century.
Documentary filmmaker Mark Tyrnauer's (Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood) fascination with celebrity nostalgie de las boue is once again in full evidence as he takes us back to the epicenter of the 70s Disco era and its meretricious glamor and sybaritic lifestyles of the beautiful people making the scene at the time; the plague of AIDS, that would decimate so many attached to the club still at bay. They were dancing on a volcano almost as volatile as the bathhouses in NY and Frisco. It remains a weak telling however as it depends more on still photographs, gossip and the guarded testimony of surviving former co-owner Ira Shaeger trying to paper over Rubell, Dushey and their all consuming greed (skimming up to 80% a night) as an insatiable desire to "succeed." Given the voluminous amount of celebrities who were part of the scene Tyrnauer offers little in terms of interviews then and now, outside of a precious snippet with a young Michael Jackson pre- superstar period. Instead he relies on former club flunkies playing coy, protecting themselves, acting like it was all fun and games as they clipped the cash strap city of NY for millions.
Rubell the extrovert of the duo's high energy enthusiasm had a certain likability in the early days that was soon corrupted by sex, drugs and rubbing elbows with the in crowd. He soon became dictatorial out front insulting customers and turning them away while remaining obsequious to the celebs. He would die of AIDS in 1989 like their famed lawyer Roy Cohn had in 1986; both in deep denial about their disease. Some things were just impossible to lie your way out of.
Shaeger, a man who clearly understood the price of everything and value of nothing was destined to land on his feet as he bought protection in prison and ratted out others to cut his sentence in half as he sits today in a multi-million dollar Southhampton mansion along with having a newly minted pardon from President Obama. With this insulated, unctuous character as the main source of Studio 54 the doc is a shallow as the crowd it catered to in its hay day, offering the viewer nothing that we did not already know last century.