LIMELIGHT (Documentary)

I was really drawn to this movie cos I wanted to see what I had missed out on way back then when I should have been one of the Party People.  In the early ‘80’s as a Brit living in London when I did visit  NY I did get to enter a very scary meatpacking district to go to AREA,  a rather fabulous club that was completely redecorated to a new theme every 6 weeks.  But I never made it to Limelight the iconic nightclub/discotheque of the era, and I never got offered any drugs.  Oh my wasted youth.

This entertaining documentary is the latest movie from Billy Corbin who gave us ‘Cocaine Cowboys’ and ‘Square Grouper’ … so he’s got a wee drug theme going on here.  The title is slightly misleading as the focus is not so much on this club itself but on the rise and fall of its very sinister looking owner Peter Gatien.  Corbin tracks Gatien’s whole career starting off in his native Canada to his first Limelight club in Hollywood Florida and his gradual ascent to be being dubbed ‘King of NY Clubs’ when he also owns The Palladium, The Tunnel and Club USA.

There can be no doubt of his enormous contribution to pop culture at the time, and the fact that these gigantic dance caverns were giving so much fun to thousands of party givers every night.  Too much fun in the eyes of the authorities, especially once puritanical Rudolph Giuliani took over as Mayor and committed himself to a wholesale cleanup that resulted in the ‘disney-fying’ of all the really interesting and edgy parts of the city.

Gatien was the central target for all the law enforcement agencies that one by one try to take him down and close his operations.  Firstly on the drugs issue where they set an extraordinary precedent of indicting him personally for all the drugs that were sold and consumed in his clubs,  even though they admitted he never ever made a cent out of it.  An unsustainable case that he won after all the prosecution’s dubious witnesses were exposed.  Then there were fights to keep his liquor licenses, charges of tax evasion etc. etc. all that involved great financial cost for Gatien just to defend himself.

One of the movie’s producers was Gatien’s daughter Jennifer which may account for the very sympathetic portrait it painted of the man. He did after all come over as a man with no faults at all (bar a little tax-evasion). and I guess his demise was inevitable with every single Federal & State Agency after him. Still it was sad to contemplate anyway, cos I for one couldn’t help admiring the man and what he achieved …. and what I missed out on.