STUDIO 54: A Fun Watch, But Boy Does It Have Its Problems

Studio 54 is blessed to be a documentary about something unendingly interesting. The film follows the rise and fall of Studio 54, telling a story many already know while finding some new information that should still intrigue those already familiar with the story. Watching the film, I realized that there are dozens of things mentioned in the film with which I would happily spend hours. Unfortunately, by taking on a big topic and failing to ever get specific, Studio 54 fails to live up to its great potential.

If we’re going to bring up a sex pit, then I think our chance to be prudish has passed and we should get down to business

There is a lot of good and bad about this documentary, but I want to address this film’s biggest problem first. A film about a three year f*ckfest should not be this coy. Studio 54 does not hide the sex and drug use present in Studio 54, but does shrink from it. The film doles out little mentions of quaaludes or public sex, believing that will in itself be tantalizing. If the makers of Studio 54 were nervous about getting too deep into frank discussions about sexuality and drug use, they might have picked a bad topic for the film.

The issue is somewhat summed up by a moment during an interview with one of the workers who helped with constructing a moving walkway for Studio 54. He is asked if he knew that he was inevitably helping to construct a “sex pit.” His response is a blush, a comment about technically, they were using rubber because it was easier to wash, and a sly yes. And then the movie moves on.

This interviewee was not just someone who worked somewhere that had a sex pit, not just someone who went somewhere that had a sex pit, he knowingly helped build a sex pit. Why are we being modest about it now? I fail to believe that this person did not have anything interesting to say about the sex pit. And even if he has grown modest in the intervening years, I’m sure there are hundreds of people who have not grown more modest with time that could talk about it. The bigger point is that you can’t just bring up something like a sex pit and then move on as if nothing had happened.

Studio 54 leaves some of its most interesting ideas untouched in what at times feels like a mission to stay PG-13. It’ll mention that there were mattresses in the basement, but it won’t talk about the politics of public sex in such a status driven environment or give any personal details about what this meant for the sex lives of the club’s attendees. I’d even like to know what the cleaning scheduling for a sex basement is. Where there sheets?

At times, this shrinking for the taboo (though I don’t know who would go and see a documentary about Studio 54 and then get scandalized by sex and drugs) feels almost agist. There is a feeling that because these people are now forty years older than they were when the club was open, they are no longer freaky. I doubt this very much. I’m sure some of the film’s talking heads would still get down to business in a sex pit.

Adding to this issue, the filmmaking tends to dampen the sexy subject matter. There are multiple montages of sexy photos from Studio 54 that are compiled in such a wrote and mechanical fashion, simply showing one after another with no real context or feelings – the photos drained of their steamy appeal. Instead, they just become another bloodless piece of repetitive evidence like the film’s unending quest to still another picture of the long line out in front of the club.

I’ll leave the sex pit alone for now

This film’s greatest attribute is it’s subject. Studio 54 was able to touch so much of American culture that a film about it is able to find something that’ll stick with everyone. The film has a young Michael Jackson, Elton John grabbing Divine’s breasts, and a mob lawyer that is so fully a mob lawyer he will leave you ensorcelled. In its ubiquity, Studio 54 was also an incredibly documented phenomenon. Some of the best moments in the film are culled from news reports and professional photographers.

In a film that often fails to ask it’s subjects interesting questions, it’s a godsend and a mercy to have 1970’s journalists to do it for them. There is an interview with one of the owners where he talks about how his ideas about what people should wear to Studio 54 have changed over the years and it is a joy. The film is at times able to give you information you wouldn’t have even thought to ask about, but can only do so secondhand.

The story of Studio 54 has all the parts of a great drama and so the film does not have to stretch to make the story compelling. The club was a soaring success, was taken down by an IRS investigation, and then the two owners fought to establish themselves again. The story is fascinating and has enough facets that no film could exhaust them. It is not infrequent to see a documentary that could find an interesting person or setting, but can’t find a story. Studio 54 does not have that problem.

Someone to watch over Matt Tyrnauer

I hope Matt Tyrnauer doesn’t think he is friends with his editors, because my current theory is that they have yet to forgive him for a slight. Surely no one who cares about him would let him waste such a large amount of screen time banally scrolling through newspaper headlines. Clipping newspapers is not storytelling and someone who gives two hoots about Matt needs to let him know before it’s too late.

The same thing could be said of his amplification of the lo-fi elements of dated mediums. The crackles and flares on the film footage and the static and tracking lines in old television clips are so severe I would be shocked to find out that they were not an intentional choice. They might belong in a college power point presentation about the development of screens, but they certainly don’t belong in a movie that is about anything other than the development of screens. It’s the same failed, desperate attempt at nostalgia of a VHS Snapchat filter. And if those clips really did look like that originally, smooth it out. It didn’t look fun or cool. Just ghastly. I still like Matt Tyrnauer and I am still excited for whatever his next film will be, but in that project I hope he can find an ally to watch over him that has an eye for film and a sympathetic heart.

Nothing specific

At a certain point in this film, I realized that most of the film’s talking heads, who serve to narrate and direct the film, do not give any examples. Someone might say that the music was exciting, but they will not mention bands they liked, songs they liked, or a time they danced with someone. They just say that the music was exciting and then the film will show a separate person who also said that the music was very exciting, and dancing was fun, but would be just as incapable of saying more.

So much of why Studio 54 is fascinating is because it drew in interesting people and came at an interesting time in history and culture. As for the interesting people, this film had them, but never while they were being interesting. I failed to come up with any good reason why a film that is able to interview people who worked at the club, attended the club, and ran the club is without a single interesting story about something that happened one night at Studio 54.

Even some of the characters that made Studio 54 great at the time have faded through the years. There was a period when people were describing the charm and determination of the co-owner Ian Schrager after being charged with tax fraud, and I realized that the man they are describing is not the man I have been seeing somewhat frequently for the past hour. While his life does seem better now, I am confident that the old Ian would have given a more interesting interview.

In regards to Studio 54’s place in history and culture, the film rests upon some shaky ground. The film does not do a very good job of laying what came before or after the club. There is not enough in the film about disco (pretty essential to Studio 54) to fill a dictionary definition. The film briefly mentions that this was the period after the invention of the pill and before AIDS as an explanation for all of the sex happening at Studio 54, but then moves on before saying anything interesting.

What history makes its way into the film is sometimes questionable. At one point, an interviewee claims that the seventies was the invention of celebrity. That claim is dubious at best. Maybe the interviewee has some distinction in how Bette Davis and Cary Grant differed from Liza Minnelli and Elton John, but if so they came to the wrong film to try and get such nuances across.

A silent queer pain

If you did not know, this film will tell you that Studio 54 was important to queer people in New York City. It will tell you that again and again. And it will tell you that for queer people in New York City, Studio 54 was freedom. It will use the word freedom again and again. Studio 54 is clearly interested in showing that its titular club was important for queer people in the 1970’s, but does not want to address the pain connected to that.

There are times when Studio 54 makes it sound like queer people never met in public before disco clubs, but that’s not true. They’d meet in bars that got ransacked by the police and in piers and Times Square movie theaters that were rife with violence. When the queer people in Studio 54 say that the club was a newfound “freedom,” that does not mean that they were sitting at home waiting for a place to hang out. It either means that it was the first time they could be out in public and feel safe, or that they had never been openly out in public before because the places where that could happen were prohibitively dangerous.

The unfortunate truth is that the ecstatic experience of many queer regulars of Studio 54 is inherently tied to the overt violence and oppression they faced in other parts of their lives. Like much of the film, there are no specifics about this pain, and instead, only vague references to a generalized homophobia. This creates a narrative of passive oppression as if no one was really at fault and people just needed a few well timed sitcoms to show them how fun gay people can be. The same is true of the descriptions of the AIDS-related deaths of the club’s workers and patrons as disappearing or going away instead of dying slowly and painfully as a direct result of decisions made by politicians and health insurance companies.

I still believe that the focus should have stayed on the ecstasy and freedom, but never truly addressing this pain is an issue.

Studio 54: Conclusion

While this review comes across as pretty negative, my experience with Studio 54 was mildly positive and I am confident that you can have a decent time watching this film. The reason the review is more negative than the experience of seeing the film is that the good things about this movie are very broad and the problems are many and specific. It is a fun story that is not told that well. It is still a fun story, though.

Do you agree that this film lacked specifics? Would you rather watch a film that covers a larger story or focuses on smaller details? Tell us your thoughts in the comments below.

Studio 54 opened in the US on October 5, 2018. For all international release dates, see here.