You may be familiar with Billy Corben. The prolific Cocaine Cowboys director premiered his marijuana doc Square Grouper: The Godfathers of Ganja at SXSW and has Dawg Fight coming later in the year, but in between he premiered Limelight at the fitting Tribeca Film Festival. His latest documentary follows Peter Gatien, better known as the “King of New York Clubs.”
In our Tribeca review I praised the film for its “exhilarating Goodfellas-esque approach on the fame, money, and lifestyle that came with opening the four biggest clubs in NYC.” Our director introduces a set of “real-life eclectic characters that could easily be found in Scorsese’s masterpiece. With a focus on the 80s and 90s club scene, specifically Limelight, we learn how Gatien climbed the ladder and was then hit with legal trouble due to the drug-fueled frenzy in the clubs.” We can now get a glimpse at the madness in the trailer below via Apple.
Synopsis:
As the owner of legendary hotspots like Limelight, Tunnel, Palladium, and Club USA, Peter Gatien was the undisputed king of the 1980s New York City club scene. The eye-patch-sporting Ontario native built and oversaw a Manhattan empire that counted tens of thousands of patrons per night in its peak years, acting as a conduit for a culture that, for many, defined the image of an era in New York. Then years of legal battles and police pressure spearheaded by Mayor Giuliani’s determined crackdown on nightlife in the mid-’90s led to Gatien’s eventual deportation to Canada, and the shuttering of his glitzy kingdom. Featuring insider interviews with famous players in the club scene as well as key informants in Gatien’s high-profile trial, Billy Corben’s (Cocaine Cowboys) exuberant documentary aims to set the record straight about Gatien’s life as it charts his rise and fall against the transformation of New York, offering a wild ride through a now-closed chapter in the history of the city’s nightlife.
Limelight hits theaters on September 23rd, 2011.