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>> Michael Alig, Manhattan party promoter turned killer, wreaks havoc in the documentary Party Monster by MATTHEW HAYS
Watching the footage of Michael Alig in the documentary Party Monster, it's difficult to imagine him doing anyone harm. Sure, he seems a bit self-centred, longing for attention and rather pretentious, but no more than any other twentysomething doing the club scene.
The film offers up salacious details of Alig's wild club life, his rise to the top of the post-Warhol party heap in the '80s, his drug habit, his severe attention-grabbing antics, and his eventual conviction on manslaughter charges. While Party Monster--from its very title through virtually every image of the film--reeks of exploitation and sensationalism, Barbato and Bailey contend that they were making the film about Alig and his fabled "Club Kids" following years before any hint of murder arrived. "We wanted to make a movie about this scene for a long time," insists Barbato, from the L.A. offices of their production company. "Long, long, before it got nasty. It was inspired by Michael--then things got dark." Club Kid genesis The filmmakers, who became an item after meeting at New York University's film school in the '80s, first met Alig at the legendary Danceteria in 1984, when he was just a busboy. As Bailey and Barbato tell it, they were soon fast friends with the charming Alig, and within years they were marvelling at his ability to draw a crowd to parties, many of which were held in the strangest places. Alig managed to convince people to get up in front of large crowds at his gatherings and undress completely. He also managed, somehow, not to infuriate partygoers entirely after peeing on them from atop the stage. A drug aficionado, Alig kept a loyal crew about him--many among them drug dealers--who he affectionately dubbed the Club Kids. The Club Kids' behaviour became noteworthy, explains Village Voice columnist Michael Musto during the film, precisely because it was so unpredictable and such an astute mockery of '80s mainstream excesses. The Kids longed for celebrity, appearing numerous times on Geraldo, with Alig scoring the cover of New York Magazine at the tender age of 22. Alig lusted after the attention. When venues were difficult to find, Alig would simply organize surprise bashes on a subway platform or even in a McDonald's restaurant. The climax of each party occurred when the police arrived. And Barbato and Bailey, armed with a lightweight video camera, were there to capture all the action, footage which finds its way into Party Monster. Soon, and perhaps predictably, the rather volatile combination of substances, which included cocaine, heroin and a range of designer drugs, led to serious trouble for Alig. Apparently in the midst of an horrific heroin binge, Alig lost his cool with friend, roommate and drug dealer Angel Melendez. In the fight that followed, Melendez's skull was crushed, his body dismembered and dumped in the Hudson River.
Free from any interfering voiceover, Party Monster appears as a straightforward, if occasionally affected, narrative conveying Alig's rise to club prominence and eventual journey to the Big House. The filmmakers contend that, despite their friendship with Alig, they were as surprised as anyone when the resourceful club entrepreneur turned out to be a killer. "We knew he had an off-colour sense of humour," says Bailey. "But even when he joked about it, we didn't think he'd actually done it." Indeed, the two have gone to great lengths to reserve judgment about the man. "His scene was really interesting," says Barbato. "He was a symbol of post-Warholian self-invention. His scene was in fact very democratic, the antithesis of the circuit party scene." Laurels and darts But despite the feeling of cool distance throughout the film, Barbato and Bailey have earned as many darts as they have laurels for Party Monster. The age-old charge of exploitation immediately springs to mind as one watches the camera ogle Alig and his drugged-out cronies (one of whom, a 22-year old woman who recalls partying with Alig, is dead from a heroin overdose by the closing credits). Others argue that the film and its ensuing publicity has fed the conservative backlash against clubs and strip bars spearheaded by New York's Republican Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, who's successfully shutting down much of the city's nightlife in an effort to clean up the Big Apple. Conversely, others state the film glorifies Alig's sick behaviour too much. "Yes, some people feel it negates the energy of the club scene," says Bailey. "And some argue it falls into Giuliani's hands. It's just Michael's story. If we were making a judgmental film about drugs and the clubs, it would have to be much different than this." Bailey says much of the response to the film has been rooted in what he calls a "daytime prejudice against night people. When you've made it in the night scene, it's very hard to cross over. Some have done it--Madonna, Dee-Lite, RuPaul. One of the challenges of the film was making night people sympathetic--it's tricky." (Bailey and Barbato, incidentally, are producing RuPaul's talkshow for American cable.) "We didn't set out to make any moral judgments," says Barbato. "This is a snap shot of youth culture. You go through a phase at that age of total abandonment. We wanted to make a film that really took you there. Some have also accused us of glamourizing the scene, people want us to say 'drugs are awful.'" Bailey even suggests he had a certain respect for Alig and his Club Kids entourage. "I admired their extremism," he says. The exploitation issue The issue of exploitation did cross the filmmakers' minds, though. Bailey says the principal question for them was how to handle Melendez. "In some respects, he's not really present," says Bailey. "This is largely a story about Michael, not the victim." Bailey says Angel's brother, who led a search for his brother, had to be prodded to appear in the film. This inclusion led Bailey and Barbato to feel Melendez was, in some sense, represented in Party Monster. Still, for all their talk of fairness, it's difficult to escape the sense that Bailey and Barbato are ace opportunists, who stumbled upon the right murder at the right time. Describing the Alig phenom as "a cottage industry," Barbato defends their role in the affair, saying Party Monster was a labour of love from which they've gained nothing financially. But Barbato also concedes the two are putting the finishing touches on a screenplay for the dramatic retelling of Alig's wild story, a film they want to direct. The project has been optioned by queer superproducer Christine Vachon, the moving force behind such landmark projects as Todd Haynes' Poison, Mary Harron's I Shot Andy Warhol and Todd Solondz's forthcoming film, the highly controversial Happiness, among many others. "This won't end up like 54," says Barbato, in reference to the dud feature depicting Steve Rubel's reign at Studio 54, released last month. "We want our film to be incredibly dark and incredibly funny." (Barbato says that while they are interested in Macaulay Culkin in the lead role, he has not been officially signed to play Alig). Meanwhile, Barbato and Bailey are working on two other documentaries which will undoubtedly open them up to further charges of exploitation. The Eyes of Tammy Faye is a documentary about the Christian televangelist movement, featuring Tammy Faye Baker as its centrepiece ("We just spent the weekend with her!" enthuses Barbato). Their other film is 101 Rent Boys, a series of profiles of L.A. hustlers. But for all their other projects, these self-described workaholics still consider Alig their friend and stay in touch with him at the correctional institute in Fishkill, N.Y., where he's detained. "We talk to him on the phone, write letters," says Barbato, who says that at times they feel almost like his press agents. "We send him clippings about what's been written about the film. He reads everything that's been written about him and the film. He's a media junkie. He gets really pissed off if we haven't xeroxed things properly." Party Monster screens Friday, Oct. 2 at 7:30pm at the Parisien
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But there he is, early on in the hour-long film, boasting about killing one of his cohorts, Angel Melendez. The film itself is a bizarre and chilling profile of Alig, a documentary which condemns and demonizes the man at its centre, while simultaneously celebrating his creative energy and blind ambition. The movie, which has cruised the festival circuit, arriving this week at Montreal's Image&Nation Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, has raised almost as many charges against its co-directors and producers, Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato, as it has against Alig himself.