Bianca Jagger on a white horse. Andy Warhol yucking it up with Jerry Hall. Diana Ross doing a number with Liza Minnelli. You don’t have to have been to Studio 54, or even have been alive when it was open, to have an image of Studio 54. Between 1977 and 1979 the nightclub to end all nightclubs was the centre of the celebrity universe, where the famous and the beautiful (or the ugly and very powerful) could shut themselves away from the disgusting riffraff and party until dawn.
It’s both addictively gossipy and a journalistically solid tell-all.
The story of the rise and fall of the club’s owners, Ian Schrager and Steve Rubell, is told by the relatively few who live to tell the tale (Rubell died from an AIDS-related illness in 1989). Matt Tyrnauer’s documentary is rigorous in its examination of the story. In the first half it’s all disco and people having a lovely time in tiny scraps of gold lamé. We see how a club, thrown together in just a few weeks, created the idea of ‘the place to be seen’. If you weren’t there, as one contributor puts it, it meant you couldn’t get in. Desperate crowds roil outside, begging to be picked for entry, so they might disco dance next to the Rolling Stones (only Mick and Keith got in free) or Divine or Truman Capote in his dressing gown. It’s a look at a pre-Instagram age, when celebrity was polished and exciting and never wore tracksuit bottoms to Starbucks.
In its second half, the film takes a bleaker turn, getting into the tax-avoidance and drug scandal that ended Schrager and Rubell’s tenure (it’s rather quaint that ’70s society was shocked at celebrities taking coke). Tyrnauer doesn’t let Schrager gloss over aspects he doesn’t want to cover, like informing on other nightclub owners in order to reduce his prison sentence. It’s both addictively gossipy and a journalistically solid tell-all, a look at an alien world that’s equally enticing and repellent.