Rodriguez argues that she worked to avoid doing a mere interpretation, choosing instead to focus on Minnelli’s tenacity as a performer. “I got to entertain my new friends, which was great.” SEE Kennedy Center Honors: 50 entertainers who deserve to be selected “It really was a great ‘how do you do’ the group and hope that they enjoyed it,” she recalls. The first scene she filmed was also the audience’s introduction to Minnelli in her element– performing the famous title number from Minnelli’s Emmy winning television special “Liza with a Z.” It was also the first time that most of the cast and crew saw Rodriguez perform. “It’s like 24 hours of joy, and then a year and a half of abject terror.” Rodriguez was forced to face that terror head on. In Halston, the legend of Studio 54-the celebrity, the glamour, and the tragedy-lives on.A veteran of Broadway herself, Rodriguez admits to feeling a range of emotions after she learned that she was cast as Minnelli. It also came to signify the tragic end of that era, as the AIDS crisis struck in 1980 just as the nightclub was sold. Alongside the excess and unruliness, the club represented freedom, self-expression, and the sexual revolution of the ‘70s. Liza Minelli sang at the final party, the night before the co-owners went to prison.Įxclusive as it might have been, Studio 54 was a place where all were welcome and celebrated-no matter gender, sexuality, or race. Rubell and Schrager’s mystical Studio 54 shut down in January of 1980, less than three years after it had opened. Rubell and Schrager pleaded guilty to tax evasion in 1979 and served 20 months in jail. In 1978, Steve Rubell boasted to New York magazine that in terms of finances, “only the mafia does better than us,” and not long after the IRS came knocking. ATSUSHI NISHIJIMA/NETFLIXīut the party couldn’t last forever.
He really took care of me," Minnelli told Harper’s Bazaar in 2011 of Halston.Įwan McGregor as Halston entering Studio 54. The living legend, portrayed remarkably by Krysta Rodriguez in Halston, speaks only kindly of her late fashion mentor to this day. While there’s no record of an overdose inside Studio 54 like the series shows, Minnelli did check into the Betty Ford Clinic in California for the first time in 1984 for treatment. Halston shows Minnelli partying consistently, indulging in drugs, and even overdosing inside Studio 54 one night before deciding to go to rehab. Celebrities such as Diana Ross, Bianca Jagger, Grace Jones, Michael Jackson, Brooke Shields, Liz Taylor, and many, many more were regulars at the fashionable club.įashion royalty Halston was a regular, of course, along with his best friend and muse Liza Minnelli. Club regular Andy Warhol once said that Studio 54 “was a dictatorship on the door but a democracy on the dance floor.” Halston's depiction of Studio 54 co-founder Steve Rubell swiftly denying patrons at the door on the basis of their shirt or their hat not being to his liking is, according to footage from the documentary, accurate.
The Rolling Stones, for example, were split into two of the categories-Mick Jagger and Keith Richards got in for free, but the other band members had to pay to enter. The doc explains that the guest list was split into four categories: “No Goods” were people who should never be let in, then those who had to pay to get in, followed by those who got in for free, and finally “No Fuck Ups,” who were VIPs who were let in swiftly and easily. According to Schrager, this level of desperation was commonplace the club frequently had people climbing over fences and allegedly even pulling guns on doormen. In Studio 54, a 2018 documentary that featured the club’s surviving co-founder Ian Schrager, he revealed that someone really was found dead after getting stuck in an air vent and suffocating after trying to enter the club illegally-but unlike in the show, it was a man dressed in black-tie attire. A crowd outside the iconic, star-studded nightclub in 1978.
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