I graduated from the Grad Film Program at NYU in 1995, but I knew pretty much as soon as I started cutting my thesis film at the end of 1993 that 1) it probably wasn’t going to get me signed by, well, anyone; 2) I needed to pay off the thousands of dollars I’d put on my credit cards making the film, and there was no way I was going to do that at my part-time, $8/hr filing job at a financial management firm; and 3) if I was ever going to be a director, I wanted the experience of working on a real film set. Luckily, having gotten a reputation for doing sound at film school, I started getting calls to do it elsewhere — first from other film schools, then on independent features. Unluckily, the pay started at “deferment,” aka zero unless the film made money, and went, in my first couple of years on the job, all the way up to $400/week flat rate with no overtime.
It felt worth it, though, because independent film production was a fun and exciting new world to me. One of the first films I crewed on was Greg Mottola’s Daytrippers — which I think literally every non-union crew person in New York at the time worked on for at least a few days. I was shocked to find myself hanging out with a cast of really good actors either on their way to stardom or already there, that included Liev Shreiber, Anne Meara, Parker Posey, Hope Davis, Marcia Gay Harden, and Stanley Tucci. I remember clearly how exciting it was the day I was watching blocking rehearsal thinking, “That cute guy with the grey hair and thick glasses who’s rehearsing this scene looks kind of like Campbell Scott,” and then he went to hair and make-up and came back an hour later looking exactly like Campbell Scott, because it was Campbell Scott. Most of those films never saw the light of day, though, often for good reason. The majority were cases of white male producers supporting white male directors’ “edgy” fantasies, either violent (Paper Blood) or sexual (Casanova Falling), and sometimes literal, when the director got to play the lead and actually act them out (Fall)*. But if you worked on one of those films for any length of time, doing the 6-day weeks and 14-hour days that basically made them your entire world, you started to feel like part of a family. It was a pretty dysfunctional family, where everybody was breaking their backs and flirting their asses off every day (the era was extremely pre-pre-pre-Me Too), getting drunk at the end of every week if not more often at Blue & Gold, or Lucy’s, or whatever East Village bar was the one that non-union crew made their headquarters that year, and indiscriminately hooking up with each other, but a family nonetheless. The non-union crew world was full of creative, interesting and hot 20-somethings (because weren’t we all hot in our 20s?) who loved independent film, and who also knew that, in a few weeks, they’d be on a new job with new interesting and hot people. So basically, every production was a three-to-six-week-long party.
Given the debaucherous nature of all of the films I worked on in those days, it’s hard to believe one stands out — but it does. Shampoo Horns was a film directed in 1996 by a recent NYU film school grad from Spain named Manuel Toledano. Like so many NYU undergraduates of the era, he’d spent way more of his four years at the Limelight than in the library, but Manuel then put that experience to use by writing a movie about it. Specifically, he'd written a feature about one wacky night in the lives of a pack of club scene denizens, including two college students on Ecstasy, an older artist with AIDS, and the self-made celebrities responsible for the famous party Disco 2000, among them club promoters Michael Alig, James St. James, Freeze, and Richie Rich, and club owner Peter Gatien. The really wacky part? Those five were playing themselves in the film. Gatien was even letting us shoot in his clubs, with part of the deal being that his daughter, Jen, could both act in the film and help with continuity (Seth, the script supervisor, was happy to have her, not so much because she was likely to catch critical continuity errors by saying, say, "Didn't he snort the heroine with his left nostril instead or his right?" but because she was cute and blonde). Writer-director Manuel also had other connections. He had somehow persuaded some producers to finance his film as a French-Spanish co-production, and to hire Pedro Almodovar's then-DP, Alfredo Moya — a man impressively able to maintain his dignity and well-developed sense of humor even while watching people vomit for the camera at 3 am — to shoot it. A third of the crew came over from Europe with Alfredo and the French producer. Another third was made up of club kid-friends of Manuel's, like his personal assistant, Claude, whose main job seemed to be voguing, and he also put friends in the cast, like his heroin junkie friend Jonathan, for whom he'd written a character named "Junkie Jonathan” who ODs on heroin at the end of the film and gets his body disposed of in a cardboard box (so maybe they weren't such good friends?). And then there were the scruffy, desperate, non-union NYC crew scraped together to work for a key rate of $500/five-day week by Andrew, the line producer, a guy who was most notable for two facts: that he could somehow convince a group of fairly intelligent people into working themselves to death for very little, and that a large chunk of his right ear was missing. We never got the full story about how that had happened except that it had something to do with an unfriendly dog incident in the not-so-distant past, and I think, after working with Andrew, most of us would have sided with the dog.
The days were a minimum of 14 hours but often 18. We were spending an inordinate amount of that time at two nightclubs, the Limelight and the Tunnel, and I would say that basically living in a place where they show porno tapes beside coke tables in the bathroom stalls and every cushion has a stain that tells a story does something to you. On top of that, most of the the time we weren’t shooting in the clubs we were working nights, which anyone can tell you is a ticket for the express bus to delirium. The quiet, sparsely-inhabited world of New York in the wee-est hours feels completely removed from normal daily reality. It's a bizarre (and dangerous, in the 90s) thing to find yourself alone on the street in a city that supposedly never sleeps. It also feels upside-down to be going to bed when everyone else is getting up. I would look at people on the subway platform as I headed home to Brooklyn at 5, 6, 7 or 8 in the morning (it got progressively later as the shoot went on), and think how little they really knew about their city — although mostly I really just hated them for having been so recently where I had so desperately wanted to be for hours: in bed. And then the question of whether or not I’d get more than a couple of hours of sleep, due to daylight and noise and biorhythms, were anyone’s guess. Followed by trying to get back to daylight with those normal bastards on weekends, which only screws up your body clock more, heightening the surreal disassociation between you and the world that already feels drug-induced, which then increases your ill-advised, already-too-powerful dependence on stimulants and depressants of all sorts.
The cast only fed into the crazy. Because many of the folks who were acting in the film were dependent on drugs to get through a day, so, by extension, were we. If Michael Alig’s dealer, Angel, needed cab fare to come to set, it would come out of petty cash. If James St James showed up for his scene and immediately snorted his way into a K-hole, we were the ones who had to wait for him to come out of it — which meant that production had to try and get him to do it on our schedule. Plus, as time went on, the surreality of what our daily lives had become began to feel like an extended hallucination. There were scenes in the script, such as the one in which Michael peed in a cup and somebody drank it, or an "outlaw party" of trans club kids getting drunk and high in the back of a tractor trailer, that would then be followed by a confusingly-similar real-life scene, such as Michael pissing on the wall of set in front of the crew or, well, trans club kids getting drunk and high in the back of a tractor-trailer (actually, in that case the fake scene and the real scene took place simultaneously). One day we filmed Peter Gatien playing himself in a scene where he appears on a talk show and is questioned about drug use in his clubs, and a few days later, the cops came and shut us down so they could search the Limelight for heroin and ecstasy. It was also hard not to be even more preoccupied with sex than usual, and not just because of the porn stalls. For many of the players in the film, the club scene was about escaping from the repressive homes and towns they'd grown up in, which very much included expressing their sexuality. If thinking about fucking our co-workers wasn’t already the most convenient distraction available during those long days and nights, the well-toned bodies being shown off all around us, as well as the fantastic fake breasts, made it pretty hard to avoid.
Then there was the Spanish crew. There were five of them: Alfredo, the DP; Santamaria, the key grip; Santiago, the first AC (leading to some confusion, in the beginning, because one was nicknamed "Santa" and the other "Santi"); Mark, the young second AC; and Carlos, the gaffer. Alfredo and Mark spoke perfect English, but the others did not. The language of lights, flags and lenses helped us each pick up a lot — I learned my lens sizes in Spanish, Carlos learned to say "Watch your backs!” when coming through with a piece of heavy equipment, even if with his accent it sounded more like “Wash your backs!” — and then the rest of the cross-cultural communication happened in the universal language in which they were most interested: partying. I hate to generalize, but I will because it’s so obvious to anyone who’s spent any time with Europeans that they have way more interest in quality of life than we do. Americans have internalized our Puritan work ethic from years of cultural brainwashing, but the Spanish know better. Carlos explained it best by telling a story about how one day, when he working with his father who was also a gaffer, Carlos told him he didn't feel like taking the crew's morning sandwich break. His father ordered him to take it anyway because, he said, "If you don’t, one day, they will take away your sandwich." Which is making a much bigger point about unions, employees and employers, but also, they have morning sandwich breaks in Spain. And tea breaks in England, and a glass of wine or beer during lunch throughout Europe. And what do we have? Name-brand Oreos at craft service, if we’re lucky. And especially since the Spanish crew guys were away from their wives and families in New York City, earning barely more than drinking money anyway, they certainly were not about to sink to our level and work too hard. Santi, for one, was often plastered by noon (which somehow never affected his work because the dailies were always sharp), and they all went out somewhere trendy pretty much every night to drink and chain smoke, which you could do in this town back then. One evening, at the end of a relatively short day of work, they and the French producer invited me and the sound mixer to head down to Bowery Bar with them, in the limousine that we’d been filming in that day. Even though we looked like shit, it was pretty fun to be seen stepping out of a limo in front of one of the see-and-be-seen venues of 1996. Probably because it was a unique opportunity to get home a decent hour, the sound mixer and I went home after one drink. The Spanish crew did not.
Maybe you're starting to see how, under such conditions, it becomes hard to maintain one's professionalism. As time went on, we’d want, more and more, to go out at the end of the day to wind down — even if that day ended at 3 am. And when the bars in the East Village closed at 5, someone always had an apartment nearby to continue the party. One night in week four, I remember the sound mixer and I showed up for work at 5 pm — having worked until 7 am the previous morning — and, finding we didn't really have any sound to record until around midnight, promptly sat down at a cafe nearby to have a bottle of wine. We knew we'd probably sober up in time, but since the producer and line producer were the ones buying us the wine, we didn’t really care all that much either. And with the exhausted and often-hungover crew not performing at the highest level, and the main cast getting more and more difficult to get any work out of when they showed up at all, the producers kept having to add more endless days on the schedule, making us all even more sleep-deprived and judgment-impaired. Plus, the production had come to fully embody Claude’s nickname for it, “Shampoo Horny.” By the end of the job, I had been propositioned by four different people, two French, two Spanish, three of them married and one with a pregnant wife who was actually in the movie. I hadn’t hooked up with any of them because I was infatuated with the first AD, someone I’d worked on a few projects with at that point and with whom I was convinced I had a real connection. He had a live-in girlfriend, though, and I considered myself too honorable to go after somebody who was in a co-habitational, four-year relationship. He was also, however, under full frontal assault from Key Make-Up, which often found her position her on set to be in his lap. As his rebuffs of her grew more feeble, I wondered if I should lower this one set of standards I had left.
And then, suddenly, either we ran out of money or somebody in Europe put their foot down — Did we get everything we needed? Did anyone even know or care any more? — because we found ourselves at the wrap party. A private room at the Tunnel quickly filled with our unique little pressure cooker of insanity, already in the process of exploding. I watched the coked up First AD go home with Key Make-Up, then got plastered and kissed Propositioners 2 and 3 and gave my number to 4 — a French PA, who I, worked up from my daily eye-fucking with First AD, slept with a week later. This naturally made it inevitable that the two of them would then become roommates, since First AD finally broke up with his girlfriend and moved out of their apartment, and the fact that everyone knew who’d slept with who at that point nixed any chance he and I had of dating. Not that I or French PA would have cared — he was, after all, French — but, even when they’re behaving in exactly the same way, American men have trouble letting American women live down their one night stands. Still, maybe it was better that way. Now, it was really over.
At least for the crew. A few months later, I picked up The Village Voice and saw Angel the drug dealer on the cover. I remembered he'd stopped coming to the set at some point. Now, this article repeated rumors that Angel was dead at the hands of Freeze and Michael Alig. The story was that they had gotten into a fight over drugs, Angel had tried to choke Michael, Freeze had hit him with a hammer, and the apartment had ended up covered in blood. Michael and Freeze had then finished Angel off by either pouring drain cleaner into his mouth and duct-taping it shut or injecting him with it, depending on who you asked. They then left him in the bathtub for a week while they tried to figure out what to do with the body, until they finally decided to cut up his corpse and dispose of it in the Hudson River. And the thing was, these rumors had been started by Michael, who had been calling people up and asking the best way to dispose of a body, then going around telling everyone this story. Nobody knew what to think: was he actually fucked-up enough to do all that, or just to pretend he had done it to get attention? But when, a few months later, Angel’s body surfaced in the Hudson, and Freeze confessed, it turned out the murder had indeed happened during filming. Freeze and Michael went to Rikers, and James St. James wrote a book about it all called Disco Bloodbath that got made into two movies, one a feature, one a documentary, both called Party Monster.
Several years ago, I rented them both. Partly, I'll admit, it was out of tabloid curiosity about the details: Would the films reveal what we’d been filming on the day it happened? We'd actually filmed a scene in a bathtub, could it have been the bathtub? Mainly, though, I wanted to revisit those crazy weeks with perspective — and not exhausted and drunk, or hopped up on hormones and five cups of coffee. Unfortunately, from that standpoint, I found watching the movies unsatisfying. You won't find me booming, or Santiago pulling focus, or the line producer with the mysterious missing half an ear in either version of Party Monster. Moreover, it's hard to recognize a person you knew for a brief time decades ago when he's played by Macauley Culkin. It did, however, make the whole experience even more bizarrely meta when I saw verified, in the documentary, just how much of Shampoo Horns reflected the insanity of the club scene it was depicting with very little exaggeration. Not to mention that both Manuel’s film and real life contained an incident of death and body disposal, even if Junkie Jonathan’s was in a dumpster, not the Hudson. (And by the cast and crew screening, Jonathan had gotten sober. Maybe the experience of playing himself dying from an overdose had been a wake-up call.)
So if I gained no additional insight into the details of what really happened back then, it did drive home something else: how, when a movie so fully immerses you in someone else’s reality, the relationship between truth and fiction can be so close that you may never know exactly which was which. Even, or perhaps more so, if you lived it. And not just because it was a long time ago and I was drunk.
*Side note on Fall: While writing this, I went and looked it up on Rotten Tomatoes. It has a 0% tomato rating based on 7 critics’ reviews, but 85% popcorn based on 1000+ ratings, with reviews that are nearly all raves, like, “The best love story i have EVER had the good fortune of seeing,” and “Watch it just for the poetry and then fall in love with it...” and “One of the THE best movies i have ever come across. Amazingly directed and with a reality that resonates with anyone who has ever been in Love with the impossible. Masterpiece!” I seriously think Eric Shaeffer is paying for a keyword bot farm so that people will keep giving him money to make movies — which they seem to be doing. He even made what looks like a sequel of sorts, After Fall, Winter, released in 2011, perhaps thanks to the cluster of these reviews in 2007 and 2008…And now, thanks to this rabbit hole, I’ve given Eric Shaeffer yet another hour of my life that he doesn’t deserve.