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Interview: Mark Christopher on the Director’s Cut of 54

Christopher was eager to talk about how he was able to restore his 1998 film 54 to its original glory.

Interview: Mark Christopher on the Director’s Cut of 54
Photo: Miramax

Fresh out of graduate school in 1995, Mark Christopher had a young filmmaker’s dream come true: the opportunity to make his first feature film with studio backing. Miramax, a rising studio at the time, had purchased Christopher’s screenplay about the fabled New York City nightclub Studio 54 and hired him to direct the movie as well. When 54 was released three years later, it was panned for its unfocussed plot and what seemed to be a bland take on the sex and drug culture of the late 1970s. But that was not the movie Christopher had planned to make. Under pressure from the studio, which suddenly got cold feet about the gay-inflected subject matter, he had to reshoot portions of the movie and alter the plotline to serve a wider and less adventurous audience.

Seventeen years later, Christopher has been fortunate to realize another dream: a chance to let the world see the version of the movie that should have played in 1998. After successful screenings at various festivals around the world, 54: The Director’s Cut is now available on Digital HD from Miramax and Lionsgate Home Entertainment. When we spoke recently, the writer-director was pragmatic about the past, but eager to talk about how he was able to restore 54 to its original story, about three young people caught up in a dark but heady moment in American cultural history.

How did the movie come about?

I started writing it when I was in graduate school at Columbia University. My first-year short film, The Dead Boys’ Club, had disco in it. That was when disco was just emerging from the “disco sucks” feeling. And then I made another short called Alkali, Iowa, which Mary Beth Hurt was in. She’s married to Paul Schrader, who was my mentor at Columbia. So when I wanted to make my disco American Graffiti, he was the one who suggested that I set it at Studio 54, because he had gone there a lot. And that was the start of it all.

You were probably too young to have gone to Studio 54 yourself in its heyday. What did the nightclub mean for you?

Here’s the thing, it meant to me what it probably meant to everyone. I just happened to be in the cornfields of Iowa, but you could have been in Queens, Saudi Arabia, or in Paris and it was this beautiful, glamorous, decadent world that we saw in the magazines. I came to New York in 1984, which was a very low point in the city I think. It wasn’t fun, and unexciting. So that might have been a bit of the seed for the film as well—that yearning for a time before, in the late 1970s, when there was this incredible escape into disco. And the emblem of all that was Studio 54. When I went there it was in a different iteration, it was kind of more “bridge and tunnel” and it would open for like a weekend or something. It definitely was not the glamorous thing that it was in the era that I am depicting in the movie.

Did Schrader influence the work in any way?

He started introducing me to people, including producers. That also led to meeting people who worked there, because, obviously, I wanted it to be about the worker bees. So I met a lot of bartenders, coat-check girls and bus boys. He was very helpful with all that. Also, you know, both he and I grew up in the Midwest with all this religion. He was in [what I believe] was a [Calvinist] sect, and I grew up Lutheran, and we wanted to bust out and live the wild life of the city. And then, over the years, every time there was a new draft he would read it. Finally, one day he said, “I think you’re done, I think it’s ready,” which is a great compliment coming from one of our best movie writers of all time.

What prompted the changes that the studio imposed on the movie before the original release in 1998?

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My cast was sort of growing up and getting more famous as we were shooting and the studio made a business decision to make it much more mainstream and so it changed quite a bit. This new movie is literally a different movie because we’ve removed about 33 minutes of re-shoots and put back 44 minutes of the original material. It has different character development and character relationships, and different themes.

How does this current version compare to your original script?

It’s very close. The changes from the script were really scenes that didn’t work or which we couldn’t get. For instance, Mark Ruffalo. I found him in a small theater in New York and cast him as Shane’s best friend in Jersey. He had a wonderful scene in the script near the end, but due to budget we didn’t actually get that scene, so that’s missing. And then there were certain things, you know, you shoot an entire scene, but then you realize that a look from one character to another can replace that scene, the usual stuff that you find in the editing room.

And where exactly in the movie did you replace the original 44 minutes of material?

It’s threaded all the way through the entire movie. The opening, as you notice, is completely different and the story is reconstructed. It’s about the love triangle between Shane [Ryan Philippe], Greg [Breckin Meyer] and Anita [Salma Hayek]. And then also it’s very much with Ryan’s performance. We had to find the very short pieces of film and trim them back together to give him the full moments that he needed as the lead character, to give him a richer performance.

You mentioned the love triangle. Is it true that Cabaret was your major influence here?

Cabaret is really one of my favorite films and Bob Fosse is one of favorite filmmakers. I guess I’ve always been interested in worlds that are on the edge of collapse, because the stakes are so heightened for everybody. That was the view with the Weimar Republic in Cabaret: Let’s go to the cabaret and forget your troubles. And at the heart of that film is a love triangle between two men and a woman. With my film this was the end of the 1970s and everything was about to collapse—sex, drugs, etcetera—and there’s this glamorous shining moment right before it does. We shot at Studio 54, the exterior and the lobby, because the space was in trouble and they needed money, and the Roundabout Theatre Company moved in and put up their production of Cabaret. I just love that.

Was it difficult to restore the cut footage?

We didn’t have an EDL, which is an edit decision list. If you have an EDL, you feed it into the editor and it basically spits out your movie. [After the original release], because I wanted something for me and the actors, I cobbled together a bootleg VHS director’s cut using different video sources so there was no time code, etcetera. So we needed the VHS dailies in order to match them to the bootleg cut. The thing is, most people wouldn’t keep VHS dailies for 17 years, but thank goodness Miramax did. My wonderful post-production supervisor, Nancy Valle, found most of the material—a shrink-wrapped palette with signs saying “marked to be destroyed” in a 90-degree warehouse. She found it just in the nick of time, otherwise there would have been no movie. Then my editor, David Kittredge, matched each shot from these 44 minutes from the VHS dailies. But we didn’t find it all, which is why you see some of those underground-looking shots. Those truly came from underneath my friend’s house in the Hollywood Hills on videotape. I feel like it gives a little taste of the 1970s and I hope that people like that.

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How were you able to get the studio interested in releasing the director’s cut?

Somehow the bootleg tape got out there in the world. Also, people had seen earlier cuts [before the original release] and that had a good buzz as well. Then, in 2008, it played at Outfest and it got a really great response. And it played in Italy, in Turin. They oversold the venue and the wonderful Italians, being Italian, had a riot and the police came and locked the doors. So then they put the film on a loop and played it all night so everyone got to see it. These are the sort of stories that helped Miramax see that there was an audience for this movie.

What was it like going back to your earlier work?

It was fascinating because I’ve grown as a filmmaker, so I now know shorthand. I know what can be trimmed and cut more to get my story across. I think when you’re younger you’re more in love with your dailies and it’s harder to cut them. I wouldn’t really say I would want to change anything. You know, maybe I would have had Salma speak more Spanish when she’s freaking out, but in those days we probably weren’t allowed to do that. There’s an old adage: You don’t ever really finish a film, you just abandon it. So I got pretty close to what I wanted before I abandoned it.

As a young filmmaker, were you soured by your first studio experience?

I was offered other movies, but I wanted to go back in to my independent roots. That was a decision that I made at that time. But I’m not really the type to look backward. It was probably the right decision for them, but now, you know, I’d like to do studio films. This experience has been fantastic and I have much thicker skin, shall we say?

What are you most proud of, now that you’ve made the movie you originally intended?

I feel like the film works on a bunch of levels. I think the filmmaker’s responsibility is to draw the audience into a unique universe, and that’s done in many ways—through the writing, the characterization, the casting, through the framing and the movement of the camera, etcetera. And, in particular, in this film, it’s the lighting. Because we’re in a nightclub in the 1970s, it was really important to me that it was really dark, in the way that we all probably experience nightclubs; you see things in flashes of light, or reflected in bubbles or glitter. And so to restore it back to its original dark richness was really important to me and I’ve really done that.

Gerard Raymond

Gerard Raymond is a travel and arts writer based in New York City. His writing has appeared in Broadway Direct, TDF Stages, The New York Times, The Village Voice, and other publications.

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