The Beginning of “Disco”
THE LAST DAYS OF DISCO came about as the merging of two story ideas -- one about young people just out of college and graduate school coming to Manhattan for their first jobs and bad apartments; the other concerning a popular dance club in the last days of the Disco Era. The day and night stories would intertwine through the characters of ALICE and CHARLOTTE.

The project's first stirrings were at the darkened Barcelona disco Up&Down during BARCELONA's shoot in 1993. "For a costume party disco scene with Mira Sorvino and Chris Eigeman, we picked through the first volumes of the Rhino disco anthology and found one terrific song after another," Stillman remembers. “With cast and crew moving to the rhythms of Boogie Oogie Oogie all day, it reminded us of how great and how much fun disco music was. The beauty part of discos, for the filming of stories, set largely at night, is the welcome absence of any connection with the natural world, such as windows. Night shoots can start at a decent hour like 8 a.m.”

"After BARCELONA, I had been aspiring to make a different kind of historical adventure film -- something that would be dramatically challenging but 'cinematic,' full of horses, great uniforms and important conflicts. Real moviemaking - dialogue films no more! Maybe still some talking, but on horseback.”

"Then editing another dancing scene of an especially radiant Tushka Bergen in a Barcelona disco, it struck us: Young women in discos! That could be 'cinematic,' too. Recent college graduates. Railroad apartments. Manhattan in the early fall and late spring. A publishing house in modern offices over Park Avenue near Grand Central, like Doubleday when I was there. Music and lots of it."

Bernie: "I care about ideas, Des. I care about ideas a lot."

The Eighteenth Century would have to wait. This would be the third -- but final -- film in the Doomed-Bourgeois-In Love series; the middle panel in a sort of triptych. "We'd promise there would be no more.”

About the Club
The name of the club is never stated in the movie --it's always just "the club," which is not Studio 54, Xenon, Nell's, or the revived El Morocco of that period. It's just the place which, at that moment, everyone who cares about that kind of nightlife wants to get into. It resembles the others in the excitement of those who manage to get in and the disappointment or feigned indifference of those who don't -- and as a crucible of relationships.

“There was a lot of exaggeration about what the clubs were like at the time, and even more in retrospect,” Whit says. “I first went to Studio in the spring of 1978, dragged by a girlfriend, fairly terrified of both not getting in or what we might find if we did. There was no crowd or problem at the door, and inside the cavernous space was entirely empty - it must have been early - except for one couple we had known for years.”

“We should remember they had to let in a lot of people to fill up those spaces, and the 'boring - preppie' element was heavily represented.” Cocktails were the drug of choice.

While the focus inside the club is on the post-college sub-set, the story principally concerns the background on most nights in a sort of multi-ethnic United Nations of Cool that includes many actual Manhattan club types and the sorts of exotics who allegedly filled the discos of the period.

Some extras became Nubian guards or silver or gold people - - often to get them out of nonperiod clothes or hairstyles. “Many of the actual drag queens were so good at what they do, they're hard to make out in the final film," Co-producer Roch says. One background actor who showed up with too short hair and lots of tattoos became a flamboyant 'Marie Antoinette' whose dexterous footwork and large costume helped cover the track in dolly shots.

Hat designer Ivy Supersonic appears with her troop of naked hat models, 'the Groovy Girls.' As Chloë and Robert Sean Leonard leave the dance floor talking about the Tiger Lady (Jaid Barrymore), they pass George Plimpton enthusiastically recommending a James Salter novel to an interested model wearing only a striking hat.

Perhaps the crew's favorite dancer was resident British journalist and New York nightlife historian, Anthony Haden-Guest. When a choreographer questioned whether Haden-Guest's dance was too contemporary and post-disco, he insisted he'd been doing the same step, a crab-like herky jerky, since his Whiskey-a-go-go days in London in the 1960s.

“Haden-Guest’s book, THE LAST PARTY, was very entertaining and got a deservedly positive [VOGUE] review from me,” Stillman says, “but by definition such racy accounts are collections of the most interesting, colorful, outré stories possible. To some stories there were about three witnesses; the other five thousand people there the same night saw nothing. Similarly, the published photos tend to show gold and silver people, Nubian guards and exotics as in the background in the movie, but most of the photographic coverage shows a lot of quite normal types dancing in a club. Overall our club was, if anything, a little heightened from what I remember, as well as, having aspects of different nightspots. Seeing café society types dancing to ‘Disco Duck’ at the late 70’s El Morocco is not the kind of thing you easily forget.”

For Michael Weatherly, who plays the ad client “Hap” in the film, “It’s the hair. The hair is very important ‘cause it’s not the 70’s hair. It’s not that Andy Gibb, down to the shoulders, feathered out sort. It’s this weird 1980 hair. When I first signed on, I was thinking wide ties, and wide lapels, but it’s not. If you look at a tape of 1980, 1981, it’s skinny lapels, skinny ties, and Rick Springfield and what’s going on? Weird time. And it’s just like Whit to pick a wacky time.”

About the Production
THE LAST DAYS OF DISCO is the third production of Westerly Films, the second after BARCELONA to be financed as an independent production by Castle Rock Entertainment. In post-production Polygram Filmed Entertainment joined Time Warner in an agreement to co-finance and co-distribute the Castle Rock production slate, of which this is the first film.

THE LAST DAYS OF DISCO was shot entirely in and around Manhattan on a budget of approximately eight million dollars, almost all "below-the-line" -- hard production costs. Unit production manager/Co-producer Cecilia Roque worked with the support of the New York production unions to keep the production in town.

"We met Cecilia in the fall of 1988 when she turned down the chance to production manage METROPOLITAN but recommended her location manager, the late Brian Greenbaum, who did a brilliant job," Stillman says. Four years later Cecilia ran the U.S. side of BARCELONA's production as its Associate Producer.

Co-producer Edmon Roch came to Westerly Films' attention when, as a 22-year-old film journalist, he gave METROPOLITAN its best Barcelona review. Edmon started work on BARCELONA's production as a literary jack-of-all-trades and ended as its key man and Associate Producer (he also has a cameo at the end of that film as the bride's motorbike-riding brother).

Westerly Disco Inc. was created to make the film, its first hire location manager Daniel Strol, a Romanian emigre long resident in the city who found the film's authentic Manhattan locations -- most of the characters (Tom excepted) inhabit the truly constricted apartments many New Yorkers put up with, but film companies normally avoid.

"The wardrobe department saved on footwear -- in some locations there was too little space to get the camera far enough back to shoot anyone's feet," Stillman says. "Having Josh sit down while ironing his shirts might seem like attempted comedy but it was also the only way we could get both actors in the same shot."

Those responsible dreaded shooting the girls' Yorkville railroad apartment in an actual Yorkville railroad apartment, but others feel the film came together there. “That tiny location was like a pressure-cooker for performances -- it was so small and so real -- maybe we had just reached the point in a production when it was time to happen but the cast seemed to become one with their characters there.”

The girls' apartment kitchen was actually two kitchens. "A third floor apartment on East 91st Street had been offered to us, but the apartment below it had a bathroom/kitchen arrangement exactly as in the script and final film," Stillman says. "When Dan, back to the rest of the apartment, complains about 'yuppie roommate combos' he's on the third floor -- when Charlotte, back to the bathroom, replies 'well, that’s just tough,' she's on the second. Initially there was some, uh, skepticism, but the kitchen scenes ended up cutting together well and the apartment geography had its significance in the story."

To find the disco exterior location the production team and some friends wandered on summer nights from Chelsea to Tribeca checking out club ambiances and looking for quiet streets, alleys and courts. Coming from Jet Lounge and "289" on Spring Street, they found the tunnel leading to Van Dam Street which in the film became Van's posting.

During the shoot, "whenever we had questions about crowd dynamics or how many extras it would take to make our club look busy we could just look down the street at some of the clubs in the neighborhood, then try to make it look bigger," comments Roque.

Production designer Ginger Tougas' art department built a faux wall and front and back doors to match the club interior, which was constructed within the opulent Loew's Jersey Theatre in Journal Square, across the Hudson from Manhattan. A baroque structure completed in 1929 and now being restored, the space resembles the theatres remodeled as discos in the late 70s and early 80s -- Xenon, Palladium, Studio 54.

"We were offered the actual Studio 54 location and between scouts and other occasions I ended up visiting it a lot, bringing back memories of its heyday in 1978-79," Stillman says. "However, since we always wanted our club to be 'real' as a fictional place it seemed counterproductive to shoot at the actual 'Studio' and then say 'well, it's not that.' Also: it was expensive, 54th Street doesn't look like much, and as a whole structure the Loew's Daniel Strol found had it all over the actual clubs we visited."

A good omen for Alice’s and Josh’s on-screen romance were the magical shooting days of the scenes involving Chloë Sevigny as Alice’s dates with Matt Keeslar as JOSH. Their lunch date was shot at the Brassiere Restaurant, a favorite publishing haunt of the period which closed three years ago after a fire but whose management Strol persuaded to re-open it for the production.

The clean-up and restoration of the Maine Monument at the corner of Central Park adjacent Columbus Circle was completed just in time for Alice and Josh's walk there, with the required wet-down provided by a natural downpour.

But, appropriately for THE LAST DAYS OF DISCO, the most exhilarating were the many disco dance scenes, for some of which crew members and anyone who happened to be visiting on or near the set were dragged onto the floor to provide "deep background." They tried to hide the Executive Producer, independent film lawyer John Sloss, in the back but strobe lights and the "B" camera raises him to visibility in the brief "He's the Greatest Dancer" strobe montage.

THE LAST DAYS OF DISCO was principally filmed in 50 first unit and 3 reduced unit days between August 12 and October 27, 1997. Other shots and inserts were picked up during post-production -- the last an insert of the Maine Monument in March, 1998.