[LINK] "54 Bombed in 1998. Now It's Been Resurrected as a Cult Gay Classic."

[rfmcdonald]

Louis Jordan's Vulture article about how the 1998 movie 54 was gutted by edits and retakes ordered by the studio, and how a restoration of the film has restored its original critically-acclaimed story, is a frustrating tale. Why did Miramax go out of its way to undermine a film that worked well originally? I take from Jordan's account the lesson that homophobia, of one kind or another, was just that strong.

In the summer of 1998, writer-director Mark Christopher’s 54, a clumsy cinematic paean to New York's legendary disco club Studio 54, was released to dismal reviews, a lukewarm box office, and then promptly forgotten — at least by most of us. But just last week a director's cut of the film, which starred Ryan Phillippe, Mike Myers, Salma Hayek, Breckin Meyer, and Neve Campbell, was shown at the prestigious Berlin Film Festival. That's the sort of honor usually afforded classics like Apocalypse Now or Once Upon a Time in America, not a film with a 13 percent score on Rotten Tomatoes. So how did this movie wind up getting that honor?

When it was released 17 years ago, 54 died quickly, but not exactly of natural causes. The film Christopher originally wrote and shot was a gritty, queer exploration of pre-AIDS hedonism. 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 two cuts are so drastically different that one of 54’s producers, Dolly Hall, nicknamed the studio cut “55.” Christopher’s film had been sanitized nearly beyond recognition.

“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 characters were fundamentally changed in a way that wasn’t true to the original script. Not even close.”

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. A digital release is planned for later in the year as well.

“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. 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.”