They came to the set to visit, it was amazing." “The studio went bananas,” says Christopher. “When you walk on the set," says Christopher, "and you have a pregnant woman in a bikini, a goat, a woman with a snake around her neck, a woman with a painted-on dress, and two naked gold guys - how can you not love that?”Įarly on during filming, Christopher’s editor Lee Percy cut together a scene of Shane entering the club for the first time and sent it to Miramax. And as filming commenced in Toronto all those years ago, the studio had reason to be optimistic. The plot is a classic rise and fall, but set among the glamorous, debauched fantasy world of Studio 54. "We thought we were making something along the lines of Boogie Nights, you know? Something that was wild and represented the time period.” He becomes 54’s “It” boy, and betrays his friends in the process, before a brush with death snaps his life back into focus. Shane, however, seduces or sleeps with anyone who can move him ahead, male or female, including a fling with Julie Black (Neve Campbell), a soap-opera star. Greg wants to be promoted to bartender, but refuses to drop trou for his boss, the lascivious Rubell (Mike Myers). He becomes embroiled in a love triangle with two married co-workers: Anita (Salma Hayek), a coat-check girl with dreams of disco diva-dom, and her husband, busboy Greg (Breckin Meyer). In its most recent incarnation, 54 follows Shane as he trades grim Jersey City for the bacchanal of Studio 54, getting a job at Ian Schrager and Steve Rubell’s famed pleasure dome as a bartender. What was hard for us was that initially we thought we were making something along the lines of Boogie Nights, you know? Something that was wild and represented the time period.” “This kind of resurrection does not happen,” says Phillippe, “especially for a film that didn’t perform particularly well and was picked apart by the critics. A digital release is planned for later in the year as well. In the years since the film came out, bootleg versions of Christopher’s original cut have circulated widely, earning 54 a kind of cult status as a lost classic of gay cinema - a status affirmed with the Berlin screening.
See how David and Margaret reviewed 54 back in 1998: "The characters were fundamentally changed in a way that wasn’t true to the original script. “I’ve never seen this kind of editing and reshooting on another film I’ve done,” says Phillippe, who played Shane, a Jersey boy seduced by the club's sex-drugs-disco allure. The two cuts are so drastically different that one of 54’s producers, Dolly Hall, nicknamed the studio cut “55.” Christopher’s film had been sanitised nearly beyond recognition. However, the studio that released the film, Miramax, then run by Bob and Harvey Weinstein and owned by Disney, ordered 40 minutes removed from the 106-minute film as well as 30 minutes of new scenes. The film Christopher originally wrote and shot was a gritty, queer exploration of pre-AIDS hedonism. When it was released 17 years ago, 54 died quickly, but not exactly of natural causes. Find out what's screening where and when. When it comes to movies, there's something for everybody on SBS, SBS VICELAND, NITV and SBS On Demand.