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 first night that club in Queens opened, Steve went to hang out with the kids at the bar and I went up to the DJ booth and played with the lights. “For Ian, it was a flameout — the thing that made him famous also landed him in prison.”. When you dance here, you’re just free.”. 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. Schrager and Rubell are Brooklyn boys of a type, the hustling children of a hustling generation. A film by Matt Tyrnauer. 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. 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. I was in a meeting when I heard she died. Yes, father of: … People like Donna Summer are bigger than life and we feel we’ve lost something when those people pass. 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 like throwing cold water on your face. Through the years, I had received some calls from her. 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. Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager opened Studio 54 on West 54 th Street in New York in April 1977. “Studio 54 is one of those stories everyone thinks they know, but they don’t,” Mr. Tyrnauer said in a telephone interview. She became a born-again Christian at some point. “Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood,”, “The Last Party: Studio 54, Disco, and the Culture of the Night,”. 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. The two Brooklynites revolutionized the nightclub scene, transforming what was … “Being raised in Brooklyn and having that hunger.” Born on 19th July, 1946 in New York, New York, USA, he is famous for Co-owned Studio 54 with Steve Rubell. 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 … She was the soundtrack for a part of my life. Still don’t. She had her apartment in New York, off of Fifth Avenue in the 60s, and she also had a home in Hancock Park in L.A. She was fun-loving and very observant and smart. Steve Rubell, left, and Ian Schrager at the club in 1978. Relationships. I felt much the same way when Andy Warhol died. My friend Norma Kamali helped her style and her wardrobe and helped with the design of her album covers. STUDIO 54. When you consider the nightspot’s legacy, it’s a wonder it lasted just 30 months. Ian said: ”In 1977, we opened Studio 54 in Manhattan. They didn’t have a building permit when they started construction, which was completed in six weeks. And the friendship just got closer and closer and closer. “When I went into the hotel world, I knew that you have to create a visceral experience, and I learned that” from the club, Mr. Schrager said. 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. “After a while, everybody had it in for them,” Mr. Rodgers said, “simply because they wouldn’t let everybody in.”. Schrager’s friend, Donna Summer, was the queen of that era. She was working with good friends of mine, Neil Bogart, at Casablanca Records, and Peter Guber. When I think about that era I think about Donna Summer. I first heard her music probably in 1975, when she came out with the long-play version of “Love to Love You Baby.” It kind of ushered in discotheque music. Ian Schrager, recognized today as a successful hotelier and real estate developer, first came into the spotlight in the late 1970s with the glamorous New York club Studio 54. Ian Schrager: Coronavirus pandemic will not be a “paradigm shift” in hospitality By Jill Menze | September 24, 2020 Although the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic brought travel and hospitality to a near standstill, hospitality and nightclub legend Ian Schrager believes it’s only a matter of time before things return to normal. “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.”. “I knew Matt a long time, and I trusted him,” he said. (Mr. Schrager was granted a pardon last year from President Barack Obama.) It would close after just 33 months in existence. She was really the star that helped kick it off. “There was a real backlash against Studio, a groundswell of resentment,” Mr. Schrager said. “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. In December 1975, Ian partnered again with Rubell to open Enchanted Garden, a disco in Douglaston, Queens. “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. The masterminds behind Studio 54 were Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager, college roommates at Syracuse University who got into the nightclub business after their first venture, a chain of steak restaurants, failed to flourish. Ian Schrager (r) and Steve Rubell outside Studio 54. “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. And she was a sophisticated person. We always benefited from that fun era, and it kind of dies a quiet death. Relationship status Married (Since 2008) Sexuality Straight: Current Wife of Ian Schrager: Tania Wahlstedt: Ex-girlfriends or ex-wives Rita Noroña: Has any kids? 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. “I’m lucky, I’m lucky,” Schrager says. My office called, saying my phone was ringing off the hook. “It’s where you come when you want to escape. While at Syracuse, he was a member and eventual president of the Sigma Alpha Mu fraternity. It’s indicative of a culture of secrets that Mr. Tyrnauer said characterized the time. She would come to Studio 54 when she was in New York. Performers at Studio 54. Boutique hotelier Ian Schrager, along with his partner, the late Steve Rubell, opened Studio 54 in 1977; it was hot stuff for four years, long enough to help define the disco era. “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. Being a born-again Christian doesn’t mean you have to say and think silly things. The iconic Ian Schrager joined editor in chief Stacy Shoemaker Rauen for a fireside chat during HD ‘s second annual Elevate conference held in October in New York. I don’t believe she really said that because that’s not the Donna Summer I know and the person she was and the kind of life she lived. But it came from the gay clubs. Schrager grew up in a Jewish family in Brooklyn. Along with his Steve Rubell, Ian Schrager was the mastermind behind Studio 54. Photo Credit: Photofest. That 1980 date was also the beginning of the H.I.V./AIDS era, with the first cases surfacing about that time.”. His father worked as a postal worker and later became a tennis pro. “For me, this is really an operatic, tragic story of the years ending the sexual revolution. First of all, her music emerged first in the gay clubs. It was through this fraternity that he met fellow brother Steve Rubell, wit… “The phenomenon is very different from perception — which is sex, drugs, disco, mountains of cocaine, Liza Minnelli, period. A … But it’s like being shaken into reality when someone like that passes. That’s where it came out of, and then it worked its way into the straight clubs as a mainstay. While Mr. Schrager was working on a photo book chronicling the Studio 54 years, he approached Mr. Tyrnauer with the idea of a documentary. According to our records, Ian Schrager is possibly single. 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