More a ‘social experiment’ than a nightclub

Studio 54 wasn’t built in a day; it took almost six weeks. And the downfall of the famed Manhattan nightclub didn’t happen right away, either. That was almost three years later, when co-founders Ian Schrager and Steve Rubell were sentenced to prison for tax evasion. They served 13 months.

Filmmaker Matt Tyrnauer (Citizen Jane, Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood) spends most of his documentary’s 98 minutes on the heady times in between the nightclub’s April 1977 opening and the founders’ 1980 sentencing. Schrager then sold the club from prison, and it staggered on for another decade, but it was never the same.

But what a heyday. The owners incorporated Studio 54 as Broadway Catering, and bought daily liquor licences to get around the fact that for months they didn’t have a permanent one. Everyone who was anyone would go — Liza, Andy, Freddie, Jackie, and Elton. An assistant from the time reveals that Keith and Mick would get comped but the rest of the Stones had to pay at the door; that’s how exclusive it was.

And then Rubell bragged: “Only the mafia does any better, but don’t tell anybody.” Unfortunately, he was talking to a reporter. The IRS read the story. And the raid turned up drugs, a ledger with a column marked “skim,” and evidence that the White House chief of staff had used cocaine there.

Tyrnauer walks a fine line, managing to at first glamorize the glory days of the club and then deliver a suitably sombre tone in the documentary’s final third, which covers the Aids-related death of Rubell in 1989.

Extensive candid interviews with Rubell back in the day and with Schrager, now a hearty 72-year-old, help on that front. “Studio 54 wasn’t a nightclub,” he says today. “It was like a kind of social experiment. That’s why it’s never been able to be recreated.” He concludes simply: “It was fun.”•••½

Studio 54 opens Oct. 12 in Toronto, Montreal, Saskatoon and Calgary; Oct. 13 in Winnipeg; Oct. 19 in Victoria and Waterloo; and Nov. 21 in Ottawa.