STUDIO ONE FOREVER (Marc Sartarelli 2023)

[Chris Knipp]

A HANDBILL ADVERTISING THE CLUB IN THE 70'S

MARC SALTARELLI: STUDIO ONE FOREVER (2023)

TRAILER

Hedonism with a tragic dimension and a message for LGBTQ+ people today

Studio 54, located in Manhattan, was the most famous disco. But it was short-lived and on the East Coast and lasted from 1977 to 1980. A new documentary, Studio One Forever, celebrates and mourns for what may have been the biggest and longest lived gay disco, located in a huge warehouse space on La Peer Drive in West Hollywood, and continuously in existence from 1974 to 1993. Nothing could more epitomize an era in gay American life - period when you could still say "gay American life." Now the politically correct words are "queer" and "LGBTQ+." For the sake of the moment, however, let's say gay. This film celebrates and mourns a time when being LGBTQ+ (or gay) was less acceptable than it is now (that's an understatement!) and when thousands of gay men found community and refuge in discos and disco music. Discos were their/your/our special place, to be themselves/yourselves/ourselves and be safe.

The location was associated with the gay rights movement, and boldness, celebration, and pride. It attracted celebrities, even icons of the old Hollywood like Cary Grant, Bette Davis, Rock Hudson or James Stewart who were seen there. People make fun of disco music now, but discos were fun, and dancing there was the best. Nothing can replace them. Film Threat's Austin festival reviewer Michael Talbot-Haynes comments that this doc should be "required viewing for the newer generations of queer culture," and he's right. This was a loud, boisterous, exciting, collective environment whose warm, surging music and moving bodies have no easy present-day equivalent. Not all of this may seem such a loss to contemporary queer men (see further details below), but it nonetheless can't help being a vivid guilty pleasure to fantasize about it. And there is more.

As a film, at first anyway, Studio One Forever nonetheless comes on strong as nothing special. It's simply a group of talking heads, aging gay men reminiscing about their salad days - the years when they looked good shirtless. We see a lot of clips of young buff gay men with their shirts off jammed together. They are sometimes intimate, sometimes showing off, sometimes oggling each other. But this film's impact grows as you stay with it, becoming the story of a whole American generation of same-sex-loving men, a story touched by tragedy. Not all gay discos were like this. Of course they were others not so big, not in West Hollywood, not so intensely popular. They did not all, as Studio One did, filter out anyone who was not buff and good looking, or, shockingly not white.

This is one of the stunners of the film: Studio one's starkly exclusivist nature. It largely kept out patrons of color and there was reportedly discrimination also by social class, and requirement of three IDs, and never enough, for those who didn't conform. These were the policy choices of owner Scott Forbes, who had publicly declared the club to be an environment "planned, designed and conceived for gay people, gay male people.” A narrower profile comes out in the film clips: the preferred young man was blond. Today's America is more multicultural, less blithely racist - though one African American former patron says he never felt discriminated against. (And despite Scott Forbes' exclusivity, the club was notably open to drag queens sometimes, like the flamboyant disco icon Sylvester.)

Exclusivity somehow seems to be part of the hedonism in this instance. And hedonism it was, with promiscuous sex, drink, and drugs so open, as former Studio One bartender Michael Koth, tells, men put their stash of cocaine right on the bar to share lines with others. Koth is one of many before-and-after guys: he looks pretty good now, but back then, his blond doe-in-the-headlights look was devastating.

Though we have talking heads here, this is at least in one way like Sugarcane than you might think because these talking heads, like Sugarcane's, are talking to each other and discovering things by doing so, and having emotional revelations. This is a group of men living the gay life in the 70s and 80's and deeply embedded in Studio One who are now discovering their shared memories and seeing where they are now.

Usually history isn't as simplistic as the story that emerges here, but here, it makes sense: the 70's were heaven, the 80's were hell. This is because in the 80's AIDS came, and no community was more decimated by AIDS than this one. It is tragic to see the images of crowds of promising young men as the participants on screen count off one after another cut off in his prime in the early days of AIDS when there was no treatment. While personally the 80's were good for some of us, the realization of dreams; on the outside world, for us nothing was good. In politics we got Reagan and Thatcher; in society we got Yuppies. The end of the 70's and beginning of the 80's was a rude change, the denizens of Studio One lived through it with particular intensity, witnessing death all around them. Itw as if the frivolity and hedonism of the 70's were punished by the tragedy of gay life in the following decades. When these man begin to remember those who are gone, and even look at photographs full of crowds of young men who were lost to AIDS and victims of a conservative administration that tacitly scorned the victims of what they thought a "gay disease," one after another they weep, and we weep also.

Glenn Gaylord, senior film critic for The Queer Review writing from Outfest L.A. last year, describes somewhat my present experience. "I thought going in I’d experience a cute memory piece," he writes, "about a long forgotten nightspot. Who knew that I’d emerge a hot mess soaked in tears and newly energized to fight for our right to exist and thrive."

Those who like Michael Koth lived their golden youth here, then suffered devastating losses from AIDS, have not had an easy time of it. This is why the years after the "paradise" of the 70's - the last blissful, unfettered time to be gay - feel to them like "hell."

Studio One also had another side, a section called the Backlot, where there was cabaret entertainment in which a galaxy of glittering stars appeared who included Eartha Kitt, Liza Minnelli, Chita Rivera, Joan Rivers, Ike and Tina Turner, Roseanne Barr, Rosie O'Donnell, Wayland Flowers, Bernadette Peters, and many others, many of them getting their start here. The Wikipedia entry reports the club had Sammy Davis Jr., Peter Lawford and Paul Newman on its "board of directors." Elite Hollywood was gay-friendly.

Though much of this will be eye-opening if you weren't around or part of the gay world back then, at times Studio One Forever risks seeming just a slick reunion video unaware of its own limitations. But all the awards it has received at "Out Fest" type film festivals show that for its target audience these limitations don't exist. And there's also something more - a larger plotline about these men's campaign to save a Los Angeles landmark, which this ugly warehouse winds up being. The main talking heads, Lloyd Coleman, Gary Mortimer, Gary Steinberg, Ron Hamill, and John Duran, all of them involved with the great days of the disco, want to save the building. Stay tuned for how this campaign turns out.

And while even this community landmark issue may not concern you so much, this film winds up being deeply evocative - not only with its clips of blond beefcake, but through the film’s nostalgic soundtrack of surging cuts from Donna Summer, Sylvester, Thelma Houston, Village People, Bronski Beat, and more.

Studio One Forever, 93 mins., debuted Jul. 18, 2023 at Outfest and Dances with Films in LA, shown also at BFI Flare London LGBTQIA+ festival and Kadish Pride in Mumbai. US theatrical release Sept. 13, 2024, internet Oct. 8.