The '54 film: the real story

[Nano]

I found this racconto of the events that sent the 1998 movie 54 in Peter Biskind's 2004 book DOWN AND DIRTY PICTURES. It's a journalistic chronicle of the 90's golden days of U.S. "indie films" and a big chunk of it focus on Miramax, the company that produced and distributed 54. Given that this film has been discussed at length here in the past, I'm posting bits from three different chapters of the book that tell revelatory details on its making. It's long, but believe me it's worth it, either if you're interested in the movie itself or in the way films are produced -and history whitewashed- in the so-called Indiewood.

Here's the first part:

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54 (...) was regarded by Miramax as Boogie Nights Lite. Written by Mark Christopher, just out of Columbia film school, it was a script about the glory days of Studio 54 in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when it was the epicenter of the gay cultural explosion in NYC. The script was full of raunchy sex and not-so-nice characters. It is the tale of Shane, a kid from New Jersey who sleeps his way to the top of the 54 pecking order, which means that he becomes one of the shirtless bartenders for which the club was notorious, golden boys who flexed and preened for the clientele of both sexes, occassionally deigning to grant sexual favors in return for money or drugs.
54 was just the script to bring out the worst in Miramax. It contained all the elements Harvey (Weinstein, Miramax's co-chairman) used to like -it was sexy, transgressive, and hip- but now these virtues had become vices -they scared him- creating a fatal ambivalence. Miramax had released a considerable number of gay-themed movies (Paris Is Burning, The Crying Game, Priest, etc). Still, in the gay community, Harvey was regarded with some suspicion, despite his very visible support of organizations like GLAAD and amfAR. (...) But in the grip of a dream come true, the filmmakers put their fears aside. After all, everyone knew Christopher was gay, the script was filled with gay material. Miramax was the fearless company that released Paris Is Burning, Priest, this, that. What could go wrong?
Trouble came quickly, disguised as good fortune. The filmmakers knew it was a tough, uncompromising script that was not for everybody and not particularly commercial. It was aimed at a young, sophisticated urban audience. For that reason, they wanted to keep the budget down, $ 4 million. But Miramax wanted a bigger movie at double the budget, $ 8 million. (According to Miramax, the budget was close to $ 5 million.) The filmmakers feared that a bigger budget would necessitate a bigger marketing push to attract a bigger audience to pay back Miramax for the bigger budget and bigger marketing push. A bigger audience would necessitate script changes to broaden the film's appeal, as well as "casting up" the picture. But more money is more money, and this was Christopher's first feature. (...) He found hard to say no. (...) Indeed, at the beginning, everything went smoothly. Christopher had the benefit of good producers -Dolly Hall, who had just finished Lisa Cholodenko's extraordinary High Art, and Ira Deutchman, who had exited Fine Line and was trying his hand at producing. (....) Christopher also had the benefit of the Weinstein's development and production teams. But what was Miramax's golden talent bank one minute became Miramax's revolving door the next. First Jonathan King left, who had brought in 54 in the first place. (...) Then (Miramax's head of production Paul) Webster left, in 1997, to head Film Four in England. (King's brief replacement, Alan) Sabinson was replaced by (Meryl) Poster, who was quickly moving up through the ranks. Deutchman was fired, and 54 fell into (Miramax's executive VP of production and development Jack) Lechner's lap. Miramax battled Christopher over the casting. The most important role was Shane, the kid from NJ. The filmmakers wanted to use an unknown, but Poster objected, shrieking into the phone, "We need to cast someone we can book on Leno, on Letterman!" Finally, they settled on Ryan Phillippe, a relative newcomer. Salma Hayek was cast as the female leg of the triangle. Continues the source, "Then we got Neve Campbell shoved down our throats. She is one of the nicest gals you would ever want to know, but she can't act her way out of a paper bag with a flashlight. She makes Salma Hayek look like Meryl Streep". Campbell had appeared in Scream (produced by Miramax's twin exploitation label, Dimension). Harvey used to say to actors like Campbell, "Work for Dimension and you'll make your payday, then work for me on a labor of love". Her presence virtually guaranteed a big TV sale, so that even if the movie tanked theatrically, they wouldn't lose money. "It was more of a studio mentality -familiar faces", says Lechner. But Campbell's part was small, and the filmmakers figured they could live with her. And, in a stroke of good luck, Mike Myers, fresh from Austin Powers, agreed to play Steve Rubell. It was a great part, gave him a shot at a serious role, allowed him to stretch. When Myers signed up, Harvey green-lit the movie.

(to be continued)

[DiscoMan]

Generally I like "54" (own the DVD), however about 2/3 of the way through it loses track of itself and goes off into the weeds with the scenes between "Shane" and "Julie Black". And the moralizing - here we go again with the pleasure police...

[Nano]

The second and final chapter:

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Weinstein looked at a two-hour rough cut of 54 in February 1998. The film, shot in Toronto, had wrapped in the fall of the previous year. During the shoot, Mark Christopher and company were more or less on their own. As Paul Webster puts it, at Miramax, "when you're in production, you're left entirely alone to make the movie. The company influence is felt most keenly during the casting, and post-production". Harvey flew up occasionally to kiss the stars. While he was there, he complained about the Studio 54 bartenders, asked, "Can't there be some girls behind the bar? Why can't these guys keep their shirts on?" Conversely, he reportedly wanted Hayek to remove her shirt in a scene where she and Shane make love in the bathroom. She refused.
When the lights came up, the Miramax co-chairman congratulated the filmmakers on the quality of their work, and painted a rosy picture of future success, especially since Ryan Phillippe was no longer an unknown. While 54 was in the editing room, his teenage slasher movie I Know What You Did Last Summer, written by (Scream screenwriter) Kevin Williamson, had grossed a cool $ 72 million, domestic, for Columbia. Suddenly, Phillippe, along with Mike Myers and Neve Campbell, made for a hot cast.
Harvey smelled money. Instead of an edgy film by a first-time queer director, 54 was going to be Miramax's summer blockbuster. Says Ira Deutchman, "In Harvey's mind, 54 was going to be a teen movie that could cross over to a wide yhouth audience for which the film was never intended". Weinstein test-screened 54 in a mall on Long Island early in 1998. Because the film had never been intended for mallrats from the 'burbs, the filmmakers were upset, and indeed the preview cards were terrible, with particularly poor ratings for Shane, who seemed unsympathetic. Says a source, "When a movie tests badly in the malls, nobody thinks, Okay, we tested it in front of the wrong people. They think, We've made the wrong movie".
The 54 gang was desvastated. Harvey told Christopher to get rid of any suggestion of bisexuality in his lead character. Webster recalls, "Everybody miraculously became straight". It seemed clear that Weinstein was retrofitting the film for an audience of heterosexual suburban teenagers. To Miramax development head Jack Lechner, homosexuality was not the issue. "The fight was about how do you get anyone to give a shit about these characters", he recalls. "It was particularly unfortunate that the most explicitly gay scene in the film where Shane kisses his roommate and his roommate freaks out was badly acted, badly directed, just not believable. The audience burst out laughing. The problem was, you couldn't say that without someone coming back and saying, 'You're being homophobic'".
In fact, this is exacly what the filmmakers suspected. Weinstein insisted that he wasn't homophobic and tried to get the filmmakers into a screening room to watch another Miramax film, Velvet Goldmine, produced by Christine Vachon and directed by Todd Haynes, that had just been completed. He explained that he had kept his hands off it, in his mind proving he wasn't reworking 54 because he was uncomfortable with the material. The very same day that Weinstein met with the filmmakers to purge the picture of the bisexual ambience that surrounded Shane, he accepted an award from GLAAD.
In any event, instead of trying to realize the director's vision and reshoot the kiss, Miramax took the film in the opposite direction. Continues Lechner, "The decision was made to make Shane nicer, but there was no point making a nice version of that story, because who wants to see a story about nice people at Studio 54, and that's not what was shot. If it had been my responsabilty, I would have tried to do it better, instead of changing it".
But Lechner doesn't have much sympathy for filmmakers who go through the Miramax blender. "People moan and complain about Miramax's ruthlessness in recutting films, but for the most part, these are people who didn't make the film well enought in the first place. They blame Harvey because they don't want to blame themselves. When he's working with something that actually is good to begin with, his amazing attention and passion can help it to be great, but his weakness is that if it's lousy to begin with, he'll work as hard or harder, and it just never will be any good, because you can't turn a turd into gold. You only get a really polished turd. If you've made a lousy movie, you're better off at a studio, where they're not going to take the time and trouble to make your life hell".
At the studios, development is the Bermuda Triangle into which scripts can disappear forever, the no-man's land known as Development Hell. A studio, continues Lechner, "would have ground the life out of it before it ever got shot. At Miramax, they let the filmmakers make their films" and then they grind the life out of it. It was Post-Production Hell. Films would languish in post for months, sometimes years. Harvey would pour so much money into post-production that by the time he was finished, the films were too expensive to make their money back, and rather than throw good P&A money after bad (post-) production money, he would either give them a token release or put them on the shelf before casting them into the netherworld of ancillaries like video and cable.
(...) Then the filmmakers discovered that Harvey had given the film to his post-production department to recut without informing them. Christopher's crack editor, Lee Percy, who had cut Kiss of the Spider Woman and would go on to do Boys Don't Cry, resigned. Also, unbeknownst to the 54 folks, Harvey hired a second writing team, and even Dispatches author Michael Herr, who wrote the narration that rescued Apocalypse Now from incoherence, to fashion a voiceover. Christopher was locked out of the editing room. The new writing team produced twenty-five additional pages -nearly a quarter of the film- fleshing out the romance between Shane and Neve Campbell's previously minor -but straight- character, for whom Shane develops a sudden crush.
How could a script that gestated in the womb of the studio's development division for a year or more have needed such radical surgery in post? "The root of everything was that Mark's vision of the movie and Harvey's vision of the movie were two different things", Lechner explains. "Harvey thought he was going to get Saturday Night Fever. He was reading that script and imagining it the way John Badham would have directed it, with John Travolta. When he reads the script, Harvey's looking at it as a potential acquisition, thinking, How am I gonna sell it? He's not concerned with detail until he actually sees the movie".
(...) The filmmakers desperately wanted to believe that Harvey knew what he was doing, convinced themselves, "Okay, Harvey is very successful, he's made some really good movies, he must know what he's talking about". But eventually, Christopher refused to shoot the additional scenes. He threatened to take his name off the movie. Miramax came right back, counterthreatened to fire him. By this time he was on the edge of a nervous breakdown. (...) Eventually Christopher reluctantly agreed to oversee the shooting of the new scenes. When Christopher showed up at the sound studio to oversee the mix, he had not even seen the final cut.
Lechner was out the door before 54 was released.

* * *

54 opened (...) on the weekend before Labor Day 1998. It opened to mixed, but generally scornful reviews. Whether Christopher's cut would have worked better than the film Miramax released is besides the point. Miramax, wrapped in the indie mantle, behaved like the studios at their worst. 54 did indifferent business, and as a result, Christopher's promising career went into turnaround. The Mayor of Castro Street, which he was supposed to direct for HBO, was canceled. Says one person connected to the film, "This whole thing was so painful, it sucked so badly, it almost made me leave the film business. I'm embarrassed to be associated with it". Editor Lee Percy concurred. He says, "After 54, I was ready to leave the business". The only thing Christopher will say is, "No comment".
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As a P.S., Christopher had to wait till 2005 to direct a movie again... and the movie was a "straight" comedy, Pizza. He made it at IFC Films.

[paul]

Originally Posted by DiscoMan

Generally I like "54" (own the DVD), however about 2/3 of the way through it loses track of itself and goes off into the weeds with the scenes between "Shane" and "Julie Black". And the moralizing - here we go again with the pleasure police...

I totally agree!

[DiscoMan]

After reading the article posted by Nano I now realize why "54" goes off into the weeds. That's the real shame of "54" - it could have been so g*****n good if it portrayed Studio 54/70's club life as it really was. I'm convinced that Disco will never have an honest portrayal in modern cinema because the suits in charge just have no f*****g clue what being a baby boomer and Disco were all about...

Studio 54 was the last act in a period of such unique and incredible personnal freedom, the likes of which America will never see again, and it's that freedom that should have been portrayed in "54".

[paul]

DM, I frequently recommend people watch "Summer Lovers" in combo with "54". Though it's not a disco movie per se, "Summer Lovers" captures the sort of free spirited personal freedoms we associate with disco.
"Summer Lovers" is at the tail end of the disco period around 1982, set in Greece.

[DiscoMan]

I own "Summer Lovers" on DVD as well and watch it often...

[SandraDee]

I was really disappointed with '54'. I much prefer watching the documentaries made about Studio 54. '54' the movie is like watching a bad soap opera. That Spike Lee film about Summer Of Sam is 100 times more enjoyable IMO.

[Mixmachine]

Originally Posted by DiscoMan

I own "Summer Lovers" on DVD as well and watch it often...

Man you just reminded me , I need to get this dvd before it disappears, I loved this movie when it first came out and I'm itching to see it again, I always remember the club scene when they played "Your Love" by Lime..

Here someone on IMDB posted pics of this club today, although I can't say for sure until I see the movie again.
Koo club

as for '54' I never liked it much and actually have never seen it in one seating, catching bits and pieces on Cable, maybe I should check it out properly and see

I enjoyed reading the accounts of the 'making of 54 ' above, most movies are a struggle to make, and many times the 'behind the scenes' stories are more entertaining than the flick itself .

[paul]

I own both 54 and Summer Lovers. Mix, you should definitely buy it. Both make for great xmas viewing

[Videoskooter]

Originally Posted by SandraDee

That Spike Lee film about Summer Of Sam is 100 times more enjoyable IMO.

That's one of the best DISCO-movies ever IMO! The atmosphere, the music, the cars! Love it!

And Jennifer Esposito ranks higher than Hayek!!! (Sorry Paulie )







And it has Plato's Retreat: that would have been my club!!!!

[paul]

Johan, are you talkin' bout my woman
Anyway, yeah umm Jennifer looks hot too
I have never seen Summer Of Sam due to my reluctance to watch slasher or horror flcks esp. when it's associated with the music I love. Perhaps when I've had too much tequila I'll run down to Blockbuster and rent it.