“On Tuesday, July 18, at the Harmony Gold Theatre in Hollywood will be the world premiere of Marc Saltarelli’s Studio One Forever (2023), a 95-minute documentary that tells the story of the famous gay disco that dominated the West Hollywood scene for three decades. Studio One was more than just a disco. It was a mecca for gay men looking for identity in a world that saw them as outcasts. Its adjoining nightclub, The Backlot, merged the gay community with the Hollywood elite for the first time. From 1974 to 1993 it became the center of nightlife in West Hollywood.
A former factory converted to commercial use, Studio One sat prominently between two city blocks just off Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood. With its massive dance floor that could hold well over 1,000 people and its adjacent Backlot Theater, which presented some of the finest cabaret performers of the time, including Bernadette Peters, Chita Rivera, Joan Rivers and Madeline Kahn, Studio One was considered by many the place to see and be seen through much of the 1970s and 1980s…”
