"STUDIO 54" // TRIBECA 2018 REVIEW
STUDIO 54 is as much a part of New York’s legacy as The Empire State Building is. It just is. The magic behind the stories, the almost legendary tales of debauchery and excess are stuff that makes you want to cancel all plans and hear tale after tale. If you’re old enough to have lived through it, maybe you were even there on a night or two, you might have partied along the likes of David Bowie, Diana Ross, Michael Jackson, and Steve Rubell himself. Maybe you saw Ian Schrager shuffling off in the corner somewhere. Maybe you know you were there but don’t remember any of it. It was an age of decadence, New York in the 1970’s, and Studio 54 captured it like lighting in a bottle. It was the right time, the right place.
Matt Tyrnauer tackles the story as if you’ve never heard of it, sprinkling in footage from the studio, archive photos, and new interviews with all the usual suspects, several who haven’t talked about the club before. At least, not in this manner. It’s an enthralling documentary, one that really brings you into co-owners Rubell and Schrager’s story. It helps by telling their background, showing who they were, how they met, what Studio 54 became, and what happened after. The party seemed like it was never going to end, but end it did, and when it ended, everyone fled, like rats on a sinking ship. As you watch it, you find yourself (at least in the beginning) wanting to be there, to have experienced it first hand, wishing you were there right now. And when the second half comes barreling through, you remember why it shut down and why the party had to stop.
It almost seems like a fictional story, something that’s too strange to be true, too bizarre to have happened. But it did, and all in only 33 months. How they struck such a cord in just 33 months that we’re still talking about it now is truly incredible. And Tynauer gets all of the beats right, taking us through the story just at the right speed. The party can’t last forever, but if it can last just one more moment, maybe everything will be okay. Here’s to Steve and Ian, and everyone else who made this castle in a cloud a party of New York legend.
VERDICT: SEE IT