1/6/2024 0 Comments The minutes studio 54He’d managed to hang on to high-quality videotape copies of the dailies, stashing boxes of Digibetas and D2s under a friend’s house.īut there was no EDL (or “edit decision list”) to go by. The earlier version that had tested was still in relatively loose form, and yet, Christopher became obsessed with trying to recreate “54” as originally intended. ![]() ![]() Though he had directed everything, the film became something else entirely, and because it was his first feature and the final say wasn’t his, Christopher went along with the process. And they expanded a subplot featuring Neve Campbell’s character, Jersey gal turned soap star Julie Black, into a full-blown love interest for Shane, eliminating any of the character’s same-sex trysts along the way.Īfter the test screenings went down, Christopher was given pages that he and the cast were contractually obliged to shoot - all at a cost of an additional $4 million, raising the total budget to $13 million. They shot new scenes of federal agents building evidence to bust Rubell, even going so far as to change which character ratted him out, and then they tacked on a happy ending - a cheesy one-night-only reunion party back at the club after Rubell gets out of prison. I mean, you’d have to be some kind of genius to take a dirty, wet basement and turn it into a VIP room celebrities would kill to get into”). They wrote an upbeat narration that amplified the awe factor and explained things for those incapable of figuring it out for themselves (e.g. Originally, Shane’s fuddy-duddy dad disapprovingly remarks several times about his son hanging out among “negroes” at the club. That subplot was rewritten so that Meyer’s character (the purest soul in the film) was responsible. In Christopher’s cut, Shane steals money from the club. Owned by Disney and overseen by Harvey and Bob Weinstein at the time, the distributor had released its share of edgy pics, including those that pushed the sexual envelope (“Chasing Amy,” “The House of Yes,” “Muriel’s Wedding”), but the test screenings resulted in “some heartbreaking cards,” and Harvey Weinstein took them to heart, ordering changes. Of course, this was a different time - and a different Miramax. “We had a dark movie, so I didn’t expect a high score.” But Miramax was spooked. “Our movie scored higher than ‘Boogie Nights,’” he explained. “But they didn’t test it in the cities (where the audience for a dark, edgy indie movie would be) they tested it out in malls in Long Island and places like that, and that audience was split between the cool people who loved it and the homophobes in the audience.”Īt this point, Christopher turned to the Miramax rep silently eavesdropping on our interview to make sure he was allowed to say “homophobes.” He’s been burned by this process before and had to put on a good face back when the film - the compromised version his producer called “55” - originally came out. Once Christopher had submitted his cut, they held test screenings to gauge how it would play. Now, their popularity became the film’s greatest liability, giving Miramax hope that their specialty film might have mainstream appeal. “For a year, I fought for that cast,” he said. The film had been budgeted at $8 million, but according to the director, Miramax had been loving the dailies and happily gave him another $1 million to work with. “We made a specialty film geared toward the metropolitan market, the cosmopolitan market, right? And then my cast blew up and got enormous,” Christopher recalled. Instead, the movie played like a watered-down “Wizard of Oz” - or perhaps more to the point, a cross between “Cabaret” and “Saturday Night Fever,” with afterschool-special-caliber morality grafted on. ![]() Plucked from the behind the velvet ropes outside Studio 54 by the club’s lecherous gay owner, Steve Rubell (Mike Myers in his first and best dramatic role), he leverages his sex appeal by flirting with any and everyone - and sleeping with most - to land a job at the club, work his way up to bartender and leverage that for a short-lived place among Gotham’s upper-class elite.Įxcept that by the time Miramax released the film, the menage-a-trois plot between Phillippe, Meyer and Hayek had been snipped, along with nearly all traces of Shane’s bisexuality. That’s how Christopher conceived “54”: It’s the story of Shane, a gorgeous New Jersey mouth-breather played by Phillippe, who discovers almost by accident that his body is his entry ticket to New York’s decadent and highly exclusive disco party scene.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |