A History of Studio 54, This Time Told by the Quiet Partner

At one point in the new documentary “Studio 54,” Michael Jackson wanders into a television interview that the club’s co-owner Steve Rubell is doing. Asked what it is that he likes about Studio 54, a shockingly relaxed and smiling Jackson says, “I like the atmosphere — the feeling, the excitement.

“It’s where you come when you want to escape. When you dance here, you’re just free.”

As the film shows, though, that sense of freedom came with a cost. Rather than using Studio 54 to tell a more expansive story about the disco movement, the director Matt Tyrnauer looks closely at the nuts and bolts of what it took to create the most famous nightclub in the world and what brought it crashing down.

“Studio 54 is one of those stories everyone thinks they know, but they don’t,” Mr. Tyrnauer said in a telephone interview. “The phenomenon is very different from perception — which is sex, drugs, disco, mountains of cocaine, Liza Minnelli, period.

“For me, this is really an operatic, tragic story of the years ending the sexual revolution. The timing is haunting — Studio was open for 33 months, from April 1977 to January 1980. That 1980 date was also the beginning of the H.I.V./AIDS era, with the first cases surfacing about that time.”

At the heart of “Studio 54” is the partnership of the founders Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager, two strivers from Brooklyn who met at Syracuse University and rode the rocket of success before pleading guilty to tax evasion in 1979 and serving 20 months in jail. The film is able to explore the inner workings of the club, and this friendship, because, for the first time, Mr. Schrager speaks at length about his Studio 54 experiences.

“Forty years later, it’s a wound that healed, though I still have the scar,” Mr. Schrager (whose eponymous company now runs dozens of boutique hotels around the world) said in a phone conversation. “I wanted to do something for my family that would really give them an idea what it was like.”

Mr. Tyrnauer, a longtime contributor to Vanity Fair magazine whose documentaries include “Valentino: The Last Emperor” (2009) and this year’s “Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood,” met Mr. Schrager in the 1990s; they bonded over a mutual interest in design and architecture. While Mr. Schrager was working on a photo book chronicling the Studio 54 years, he approached Mr. Tyrnauer with the idea of a documentary. “I knew Matt a long time, and I trusted him,” he said. “He’s an honest guy, didn’t have an agenda.”

Mr. Tyrnauer knew that Mr. Schrager had very conflicted feelings about that phase of his life. “This was kind of a reckoning for him with something very important in his life and career, but too hot to touch as a traumatic memory,” he said. “For Ian, it was a flameout — the thing that made him famous also landed him in prison.”

“Studio 54” documents the frantic efforts required for Mr. Rubell and Mr. Schrager to create the glamorous, liberating club of their dreams in an abandoned former opera house turned television studio on crime-ridden West 54th Street. They didn’t have a building permit when they started construction, which was completed in six weeks. Studio 54 had no liquor license when it opened — every day, they would get a temporary catering permit, a stopgap that continued for more than a year, and ultimately set their downfall in motion.

Opening night was a mob scene (“We were actually scared,” Mr. Schrager said, “we had to bring all the security inside out onto the street”), and then it was a matter of constantly scrambling to feed the beast of success. But between the extroverted Mr. Rubell’s cultivation of celebrities and the studious Mr. Schrager’s sense of style and theatricality, they set out to create the perfect party every night.

“It was the most magical club that ever existed,” Nile Rodgers of Chic, disco’s greatest band, said in a telephone interview. “Lots of clubs evoke a certain era — the Cotton Club, the Moulin Rouge, the Copacabana — but none of those did what Studio 54 did, where if you got in, you were a star, not just a person.”

First, of course, you had to get in, and the crowd that showed up nightly led to Studio 54’s infamous velvet rope and a highly selective door policy. Mr. Tyrnauer quoted Andy Warhol, a regular at the club, who once said that “Studio 54 is a dictatorship at the door and a democracy on the dance floor.” In the film, the journalist Anthony Haden-Guest, author of “The Last Party: Studio 54, Disco, and the Culture of the Night,” describes the expectant, desperate faces of the hordes gathered outside the front door as resembling “the damned looking into paradise.”

That kind of power gave the Studio 54 team a sense of invincibility, an arrogance that antagonized those who didn’t make the inner circle. “After a while, everybody had it in for them,” Mr. Rodgers said, “simply because they wouldn’t let everybody in.”

When Mr. Rubell boasted to New York magazine that “only the mafia does better” than Studio 54, the Internal Revenue Service took the bait, raiding the club in December 1978 and alleging that the owners had skimmed more than $2 million from the profits.

“There was a real backlash against Studio, a groundswell of resentment,” Mr. Schrager said. “We were the poster boy for all that was wrong in the economy, in city life — we got so many people aggravated at us, there was a need to bring it down, a lot of bad karma at the end.”

Mr. Rubell and Mr. Schrager were sentenced to three and a half years, but their time was cut in half after they gave information about the finances of other discos. (Mr. Schrager was granted a pardon last year from President Barack Obama.) In the movie, Mr. Schrager seems more ashamed of this action than of his own crimes, indicating how much it would have disappointed his father — who, we find out, was “Max the Jew,” an associate of the crime kingpin Meyer Lansky.

Mr. Schrager had never spoken about his father before (“That was the biggest shock,” Mr. Rodgers said, “my face dropped when I saw that”), and he is visibly uncomfortable on film discussing this part of his history. It’s indicative of a culture of secrets that Mr. Tyrnauer said characterized the time. He added that Mr. Schrager didn’t even know that Mr. Rubell — with whom he opened the Palladium nightclub and created the boutique hotel category after they got out of jail — was gay until very near his death from complications of AIDS in 1989.

“By today’s standards, you would consider that to be a shocking omission in a close personal relationship,” Mr. Tyrnauer said. “It reminded me that this time is so near and yet so far away.”

Mr. Schrager believes there were two defining events for his generation — Woodstock and Studio 54 — and he invokes Walt Disney and Steve Jobs as kindred creative spirits. “When I went into the hotel world, I knew that you have to create a visceral experience, and I learned that from Studio,” he says. “What distinguishes the product is the magic, the alchemy that happens when you put it together.”

He said, though, that if he were creating Studio 54 again, he would take a different approach to the door policy. “Instead of letting all the celebrities in, I would let the bankers in.”