Limelight
Review By: Joel Collier
Documentary: Limelight
Presented by: Tribeca Film Festival
Director: Billy Corben (Cocaine Cowboys)
After watching this documentary, at the Tribeca Film Festival, on the life and death of the Limelight and Rudy Giuliani’s crusade against the club’s owner, Peter Gatien, I was left questioning the current status of New York City nightlife.
We all know that there was a time in NYC when the rich and the poor partied together freely, where artists, philosophers, entrepreneurs, and the nightlife cult joined to create something progressive, almost magical. The result was a breeding ground for new ideas, an opportunity to embody fantasies, and a nightly chance to actually have fun. Most nightlife enthusiasts have come to terms with the fact that what was once, will never be again. Those who’s birth dates are post-Studio 54 and the Gatien/Club Kid era seem doomed to only ever experience the ghost of these decades.
Long time NYC Mayor, Rudy Giuliani, is hailed for having brought the city out of an age saturated with crime and sexual deviance. Giuliani was a bastion for the “Disneyfication” of Manhattan. He brought in companies such as Disney to the sex-haven that was Times Square, promising them saintly surroundings. Fast-forward to 2011, and we have the corporate hell now known as Times Square.
Nowadays, most people wait in line to pay a cover to buy overpriced drinks to be surrounded by shit heads while uninspiring, soulless music blasts overhead. The fact that the party days of yore seem impossible to re-stage is a result of current constructs in the spectrum of society. The bleached white state of nightlife leaves no room for the glory that once was. The ‘en masse’ party scene served a vital purpose, one of hosting a fertile ground for creative thought and one of catharsis. At it’s core it was a product of positive undertakings. Limelight was a sign of positive growth in New York City. Without this arena for the creative stratus, an integral part of cosmopolitan society remains extinct.
One can see it in the sour-puss faces of the youths clinging to their PBR’s and precious dollar shots. Every New Yorker who experienced the nightlife mecca that once was can still feel the hollow in the air of 20th/ 6th Ave where a Mall now resides within the same walls. That inescapable feeling is a silence that has fallen over all of clubland. There is hope among small groups of youths who demand a piece of what nightlife used to be. A new underground of sorts is breathing life into a wonderful Frankenstein of their own creation. Together with key figures of nightlife past, they are carving a new NYC nightlife landscape. The freedom to use the night as a canvas for ones’ dreams, to discover creatures that inspire and music that comforts and strengthens- this is the impetus for defining a new nightlife.