Limelight out on DVD today

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"Billy Corben’s 2011 documentary Limelight has just arrived on DVD and it proves to be as gripping as any fictional film. Limelight isn’t just Gatien’s story. The movie is about the changing pop culture scene of the last 30 years — particularly, the shift in club music from disco to electronica to hip hop — and the drug culture that went along with the transitions." --Joe Meyers, Connecticut News-Times

The New York Post ran an oral history of the Limelight:

[Today], the documentary “Limelight” arrives on DVD, offering an insider’s look into the heyday of New York’s most notorious ’90s nightclub, run by impresario Peter Gatien. Here, key players look back at the club’s glittering rise and shocking fall, before its glorious Gothicchurch home turned into a mall:

JEN Gatien: “I remember when I was 20, Bruce Springsteen walked up and said, ‘I’ve always wanted to come in here. Do you think I could get a tour?’ So I gave him a tour of the club, and it had this inflatable [Moon Bounce] — you know, one of those things that kids jump inside of. So we both took off our boots and jumped around. I’d regularly see celebrities like Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Wahlberg, Juliette Lewis, Adrien Brody, Vin Diesel, Chloé Sevigny.”

Frank Owen, former Village Voice night-life reporter, author of “Clubland”: “Limelight had some of the best music I’d ever heard. I saw practically every major techno act at Lord Michael’s Future Shock night — Ultramarine to Prodigy to the Orb. Also, Funkmaster Flex’s hip-hop events were amazing. I first met Michael Alig in the late ’80s. He seemed as harmless as a powder puff.”

Michael Alig, “King of the Club Kids” and Limelight party promoter: “My favorite memory of Limelight was this magical time between 4 and 6 a.m. All the “normals” had gone home, and all that was left was a really fabulous group of club kids, drag queens and transsexuals, and everyone was really drunk and high on the dance floor, and you could see sunlight coming in through the stained glass windows.”

Steve Lewis, director of Limelight: One night in March 2006, “Michael asked to borrow my car, and I asked why. He said, ‘Well, I killed Angel [Melendez, his drug dealer], and I’m going to chop up the body, put it in a box, put it in your trunk and dump it.’ I said, ‘Michael, get the f -  - k away from me.’ I knew he had gone down a very bad road with drugs, but this was the most absurd thing I’d heard.”

Owen: “Never in a million years could a scene like Limelight’s happen again. These days, club owners [say], You want to make money in the club business? It’s simple: Just throw in a few banquettes, pay a designer, buy a bunch of vodka, and you’ll make money hand over fist selling bottles for $400.’ Think of the culture that came out of nightclubs in the ’80s and ’90s: hip-hop, house music, garage music. But nightclubs today are no longer cultural institutions.”

Update on Wednesday, January 25, 2012 at 7:36PM by rakontur

Limelight is also available for streaming on-demand via Amazon

Limelight opens in New York today

Playing exclusively at the Landmark Sunshine on Houston St between 1st and 2nd Ave. Get your tickets.

New York Times:  “Limelight” delivers the messed-up goods.

New York Daily News: <3 stars> Director Billy Corben employs a lot of flash to recall the wild nights, and interviews with a jailed Michael Alig, NYC officials and others flesh out the flashbacks. Transporting as it is, this doc leaves a bad taste in your mouth, if just for the ill will it drudges up.

New York Magazine: <Critic's Pick> This documentary about the rise and fall of New York club entrepreneur Peter Gatien, from the drug-fueled heyday of the city’s nightlife boom to the hypervigilance of the Giuliani years and beyond, is full of enough double-crosses and shady dealings to fuel several crime epics—even as it attempts to partly salvage Gatien’s reputation.

Film Journal: Darkly fascinating documentary. It’s a sad, messy, fascinating tale, populated by an unusually motley cast of characters, many of whom could have stepped right out of Martin Scorsese’s GoodFellas.

Time Out: A fascinating history, especially when Limelight touches on the club scene’s dark side

Tribeca Film: If the story of New York City in the modern era is a story of formerly edgy, artistic neighborhoods building up an eccentric culture and pedigree, only to have that culture and pedigree used as a selling point for the commodification of those neighborhoods, then Limelight is a very sharp portrait of how New York became the town that it is today. 

FilmCritic: What begins as an expose on Caligula's den turns into a true-life Roman tragedy. Whether Gatien is wholly innocent is besides the point. Limelight lifts the entertaining veil of smoke and mirrors only to uncover an oligarchy turning the screws on an unknowing body politic. Apparently, we're all suckers.

Screen Comment: <4 stars> With his MTV-style, neon-light editing tricks, and a spate of long-forgotten news clips and little-seen club footage at his disposal, Corben plunges with electrifying zeal into the depravity, the chaos and, simultaneously, the loving open-mindedness of the Limelight crowd.

The Advocate: Get a wicked contact high from Billy Corben’s fascinating documentary, which opens September 23 in limited release, about the rise and fall of nightlife king Peter Gatien, owner of legendary gay-inclusive Manhattan hot spots like Limelight, Tunnel, and Palladium — until Mayor Giuliani's mid-'90s drug crackdowns led to Gatien's deportation. The film includes interviews with famous club scene denizens and key informants in Gatien's trial.

The Onion AV Club: As usual, Corben’s style is caffeinated and a little rough around the edges, but he’s a tenacious journalist, and his yen for sensationalism gives Limelight an irresistible tabloid pop. He supports his case well, drawing on interviews with informants and law-and-order types, and he makes a convincing argument for the vitality of a nightclub scene that was scrubbed out of existence. It’s like the end of Casino: Sin City converted into Disney World.

Toronto.com: The sense of strapping in for a wild ride amid exciting music and the non-stop party makes Limelight an entertaining spin around Manhattan by night.

Modern Tonic: Limelight, peppered with commentary from the likes of Moby, club promoters, DEA agents and the man himself, paints a vivid portrait of Gatien and his empire, celebrating the evolution of popular music, style, and nightlife culture in the Big Apple while exposing an underbelly of sex, drugs, murder and government corruption.

the trailer for our new documentary: Limelight

In theaters September 23, 2011

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Limelight featured in Details

The first day of school

As a kid, there's nothing worse. The sense of impending doom as the sun starts to set. The ticking clock on 60 Minutes was the signal on that Sunday night that the final minutes of freedom were winding down. Somehow it doesn't seem right to start school before Labor Day, the traditional benchmark that the fun n games are over, summer is past and fall is setting in. We haven't even been menaced by a real hurricane yet, although it looks like that may change soon.

We worked the The U DVD release really hard last week. Billy did about two dozen radio and TV appearances and a few hundred fans turned out for the AllCanes release party. As of last night, The U was the bestselling sports DVD on Amazon, even surpassing the new Karate Kid.

The U Facebook fan page, which will hit 88,000 fans this week, has become the go-to source for Canes news. Evans will continue to update it daily throughout the season

We're in the stretch run on Limelight, our upcoming documentary chronicling the spectacular rise and fall of New York nightclub impresario Peter Gatien, set against Rudy Giuliani's transformation of New York City in the 1990s. Last Thursday we interviewed infamous club kid Michael Alig at Coxsackie Correctional Facility in upstate New York. Doing prison interviews is always dicey -- you never know until you arrive how strict the guards will be and what you'll be allowed to do. In this case, prison officials treated us well, the interview went smoothly and Sam Rega spent the weekend logging and cutting the interview into the documentary.

We're about ready to deliver Square Grouper. The sound mix will be finished in the next week or so and I'm starting to tackle deliverables. News is forthcoming about release date, but it's looking like November.

Oh, one more thing. We've been talking to ESPN for the past few months about doing a new feature documentary with them (no, not The U 2). It's looking like it will happen, we'll begin work just after Labor Day and it will premiere in late 2011. I can't say anything else about it, yet.