Billy Corben’s documentary Limelight, about the rise and fall of Peter Gatien's empire, also illuminates the shopping mall-ification of NYC over the last decade.



The best documentaries work in roundabout fashion; they seem to be about subject A, and very directly so – but in their depiction of subject A, what you really learn about is subject B, of which subject A is one small piece. We saw it earlier this year with Cindy Meehl’s Buck, a documentary about psychologically damaged horses and the horse whisperer who heals them; in actuality, the film is about how to deal with psychologically damaged people. Limelight (which premiered at the 2011 Tribeca Film Festival) is another such film.

Directed by Billy Corben, who documented Colombian cocaine dealers in Cocaine Cowboys, Limelight is ostensibly about the rise and fall of New York nightlife king Peter Gatien. Gatien, who at one point ran a $30 million-a-year empire comprised of nightclubs Limelight, Palladium, The Tunnel and Club USA, ended up going bankrupt and being deported back to Canada in 2003, after a string of federal and state-level cases were brought against him. Those charges, mainly stemming from the claim that Gatien was using his nightclubs as a front for drug racketeering, were found in court to be meritless; the minor tax evasion of which he was eventually is portrayed in the film as a petty offense the government vigilantly pursued because it wanted to get even.

While Gatien and the colorful cast of characters that orbited in his circle certainly make for an engrossing lot – Michael Alig, the convicted murderer who was portrayed by Macaulay Culkin in Party Monster, is a major presence – the glamour and insanity that was the Manhattan club world in the 90s is ultimately not the most interesting focus of the documentary. What is ultimately quite compelling about Limelight is how Gatien’s fall mirrors the fall of the edgier, more dangerous New York recreational scene that thrived in the late 80s and early 90s.

Before the Giuliani administration began its draconian measures to prosecute every open container, every drug sold at every club citywide, New York is presented as being a lively center for nightlife, a kind of nightlife where bizarre and eccentric characters could congregate en masse, at massive venues like Limelight. Nightlife today in New York, of course, is a pale shadow of what it once was 20 years ago; the Limelight space, fittingly, has been turned into a shopping mall.

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. Some of the most telling images in Limelight come toward the end, where we are presented with New York’s contemporary version of nightlife – not bizarrely dressed, self-proclaimed “freaks” in platform shoes and blue lipstick, but fratty i-bankers in Armani suits. A rise and a fall, indeed.