Studio 54

He's wearing bell-bottoms.

Hold it right there.

And he's chewing gum.

I'm not gonna be fake. I come from Venezuela.

-More coming up over there. -Okay.

-Let the black guy in. -I think they should let all of us in.

Exit over there to your right, please.

Yeah, let them in.

I will get inside.

What do you think makes a place hot?

Like 54... What was the phenomenon that it became international?

People flew in from over the world just to go there.

What made it such a...

I don't know. I, uh... You know,

in a club it's all about capturing a moment.

When you walked through those blacked-out doors,

you were in another world.

Anyone that was allowed in,

uh, was totally free inside.

Steve and I had no idea what it would really mean,

or that it would last only 33 months.

Just captured everybody's imagination.

You could be next to Elizabeth Taylor

or, uh, just about anybody,

uh, and feel wonderful and good about yourself.

I love the nightlife,

and I love seeing people have fun nights.

There's nothing that makes me happier

than to see the people having a good time.

Everybody that was there was a star.

Thanks. That makes me feel great.

It does, because so much bad

came out of it, you know, for Ian and I

that it's good to think

some people think of it like that.

The owners of Studio 54, Ian Schrager and Steven Rubell...

Two dozen agents raided the chic disco this morning.

It's up to ten years in prison.

What was your reaction when you learned

that your partner had been arrested?

-I just go? - Uh, yeah, try that.

Well, um,

you know, I was wondering to myself why,

after almost 40 years, you know,

I would finally feel okay to talk about Studio,

'cause I hadn't talked about it, you know, at all.

Now I'm at a point in my life

that it doesn't sting as much

after all this time the way it used to sting.

There's only two people

that could've told this story...

Steve and I.

That's why I'm happy

to finally tell the story as it really happened.

All right.

You haven't seen the book in a few weeks,

so we should look at everything,

and I have to ask you a couple questions.

I never been in a room

with so many celebrities.

It was like numb.

So we need a picture here.

This one.

My friendship with Steve was always very close,

almost from the moment we met.

We met in college.

We both came from Brooklyn,

middle class,

lower middle-class working families.

Everybody upwardly mobile and ambitious,

and everybody wanted their kids

to do better than they did.

Brooklyn made me hungry.

My father was a tennis pro, and I played tennis,

and I'd visit these estates, and I saw how people live.

And you just see this whole other life.

You were very well aware of the difference

between what they had and what you had.

Somehow tennis expanded the universe,

and you saw that there were other possibilities.

We chose, as much as possible,

to try and pursue those avenues of success.

In college, Ian was very studious.

He wanted to become an attorney.

And Stevie was the social butterfly.

If you wanted to meet a certain girl, you saw Steve Rubell.

If you needed to know what courses to take,

you saw Steve Rubell.

He knew everybody at Syracuse University.

Steve was the most public of people,

but he, in fact, was very private.

He was never open about his sexuality

and the fact that he was gay.

It wasn't something we talked about.

You know, it didn't matter.

Steve was an extrovert, and, yeah, I am an introvert,

but inside, value-wise, essence-wise,

you know, we were the same.

After we graduated, I got a job as a lawyer,

and then Steve was working on the steak restaurants.

Steve was very interested in doing steak restaurants

in as many places as fast as he could possibly do it.

He had expanded too quickly, and they weren't doing well.

So I acted as his lawyer

and kept the creditors at bay.

That's when Steve and I became partners.

I was the one that wanted to go into the nightclub business

because I smelled that there was a real, you know, opportunity with it.

That ambition, that drive

really forged a real bond between us.

Steve always felt he had something to prove,

as I did.

From the beginning,

they had this intuitive understanding

that they were getting out

and they were gonna do something big together.

The Vietnam War ended,

and Watergate ended,

and everybody, all of a sudden,

was tired of being concerned about outside forces,

and they said, "I want to have some fun."

They were tired of being serious.

So everybody went out and went wild.

We were going out to clubs in Manhattan all the time,

and trying to figure out

what kind of club we wanted to create.

Gay clubs were some of the first clubs

that had disco music.

But disco was black music,

and it came out of black clubs.

The beautiful models, the girls would go to the gay clubs

with the gay designers and hairdressers and makeup men,

and then the straight guys would want to meet the models,

so they would go to these clubs,

and it all started blending.

For me, as a New Yorker,

I'm telling you, this was revolutionary.

And it was the first time

that it felt like people were nonjudgmental.

Everybody was fine with everybody else's culture.

At that time, gay clubs were behind closed doors, hidden.

It was a little bit like going to a speakeasy in the '20s, I suppose.

It was subversive,

and there was an incredible energy.

We wanted to tap through the loose,

intense, sweaty, dancing fun that was happening there

and take it up a notch...

to create the ultimate nightclub.

Blow everybody away with it.

Dent the universe. Change the world.

Ian and I walked into this old opera house and theater,

and Ian and I both saw it,

and we both went upstairs and signed the lease.

And some people said we were crazy

'cause we were on 8th Avenue

and 5th and 4th when the West Side was nothing.

In those days, it was not.

And Mayor Beame said he's gonna clean up the streets.

We're still waiting. It's very dirty.

I'm living here many years, when I remember

when it was beautiful, and now it stinks.

54th and 8th wasn't Disneyfied yet.

It was really a very sleazy neighborhood.

Perhaps the sleaziest neighborhood in the city...

the West Side and the Theatre District.

If you wanted to get mugged,

that was really a good place to go.

It was amazing that anyone would think of opening up

a discotheque on West 54th Street.

In the '20s, it was built as an opera house.

And then it used to be a CBS television studio.

And there were some really big-time shows that were there.

Time now for everybody's favorite guessing game...

Uh, What's My Line?, Captain Kangaroo,

The $64,000 Question.

I mean, these are big-time television programs.

They had all moved to L.A.,

and it sat empty for a long time.

This is around the 40th anniversary of Studio.

It seems like yesterday to me.

Now there's a sloped floor here for the theater,

like there was when we were here 40 years ago.

But, you know, you can't have a sloped floor and have dancing.

So we had to level it off.

And we didn't have enough time

to get a building permit to do it.

We had to just start working on it immediately.

So we said, "Just go ahead and do it."

We had a guy

on a tall ladder with a paintbrush...

Yeah. ...that was maybe 30 feet long...

Right. Right. ...and he was painting the ceiling.

And someone kept moving the ladder.

Yeah, I worked 30 hours straight right up to the opening.

Yeah. And it was that kind of unbridled energy,

you know, that got this whole place built in six weeks.

We were competing against

what probably is the best nightclub people in the world,

and wanted to have the best of those clubs.

First, we went to the usual suspects.