For a long time after its golden era — from 1977 to 1980, the period when disco dominated American pop and the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack was the biggest-selling album in history — Studio 54, with its scads of celebrities in the crowd boogying and snorting away, was the symbol of disco's cultural import, and therefore a laughingstock in American culture. The velvet rope outside the door, keeping out the hoi polloi as cofounder Steve Rubell and doorman Marc Benecke pointed out who could and couldn't get in — Rubell, in particular, was not at all polite about it — was the sort of snotty coastal elitism that made middle America sour. Rock and roll was democratic, the argument went, so yay; disco was exclusive, so boo.

But Studio 54 — which Rubell, who died in 1989, cofounded with Ian Schrager — did more to make disco a household name than anything prior to Fever, which reached theaters December 12, 1977, eight months after Studio's April launch. In a very real sense, Studio 54's out-of-gate success, its domination of New York's tabloid press — both the gossip and news pages, even the front — made the club an instant destination, and drove people to wonder what discos were like, all of which fed into Fever's instant box office success as much as the soundtrack did.

Matt Tyrauner's new Studio 54: The Documentary (which opened in New York and L.A. on Oct. 5 and comes to the Lagoon Theater on Oct. 26) is hardly the first time someone has made a documentary about the place — apart from the Steely Dan episode (a showrunner would murder their parents to have written the "Peg" sequence), the best-ever episode of VH-1's Behind the Music was the 54 episode, featuring every disco-related talking head you could hope for. There are others that treat it in full or in part. But it's the first to have the full cooperation — indeed, the active participation — of its living cofounder, Ian Schrager. In many ways, it's his movie. That's significant because — as he notes at the beginning of The Documentary — Schrager has never divulged, in full, his version of the events that made, and broke, Studio 54 anywhere until now.

Rubell and Schrager met in college — both hustling young Jews from Brooklyn — and instantly became best friends, despite their contrasting temperaments. Rubell was outgoing, knew everyone, the campus's unofficial social director; Schrager mostly kept to himself, observing all. His father — a topic he generally stays mum about — was a Meyer Lansky associate whose nickname was Max the Jew. He became a lawyer and got back together with Steve after the latter's steakhouse chain, Steak Lofts ran into legal trouble. (Maybe its slogan, which we see on a vintage matchbook — "Make Love to Your Stomach" — triggered a harassment suit.) The two decided to go into business together, and spotted inspiration in Manhattan's burgeoning discotheque scene.

Schrager's deep involvement means Studio 54 contains things about the making of the place that we've never seen before. In 1975, in Douglaston, Queens, they opened the Enchanted Garden, a teen-focused disco in a castle-style building that ran a lot of gala-style events. This period is routinely treated as a road sign in the history of Studio 54, not least by Rubell and Schrager, who have steadfastly said Enchanted Garden was a dry run for a Manhattan venture. (Schrager says it again in the film.) But this is the first time I've seen any real footage of the place, and it's revelatory. These are clearly suburban teenagers, as yet unworldly, but they're beaming, all of them — who knew you could go somewhere and have this much fun? Studio 54's backer, Jack Dushey, met Rubell and Schrager after he threw his daughter's bar mitzvah at the Enchanted Garden.

The making of 54 is the making of 54 — quite literally, as it goes deep into the club's planning and execution of opening night. We see the blueprints. We meet the designers and builders — and moneyman Dushey — who actually made the club happen. We tour the building as it stands — today it's the Roundabout Theater, a leading off-Broadway non-profit — to get a sense of how the room felt before we see the old footage. The building had been inactive for years prior to Rubell and Schrager taking charge, and amazingly for a place so full of detailed contour work, Studio 54 was built in roughly six weeks. The interior design stills of the place remain stunning, some of them nearly op-art-like, with vivid, almost irradiated color schemes. This was a place made to be photographed, and we meet the most legendary of disco-era photographers, Ron Galella, who shows us some amazing black-and-white prints from the club's heyday, including a priceless shot of a wild-eyed Rubell, arms aloft, practically yelling through the camera.

Part of the reason the place got so tricked out is because the owners largely left the designers to their own devices, and they made cunning use of what was already there. This doesn't speak well of my reading retention, but even as someone who's returned with pleasure many times to Anthony Haden-Guest's definitive Studio account The Last Party, I had never realized until watching this film that 54's storied balcony was a balcony with seats, like the Broadway house it had once been. But seeing footage of local TV anchors delivering updates on the place while lounging in a theater seat added another dimension to the celebrity-worship aspect of Studio 54's schema.

Yes, celebrities were important; as the film points out, People magazine and the celebrification of news media was already underway, and Rubell's public face as a celebrity hound of the first order intensified that. Wide-eyed yet hawk-eyed way, Rubell was an Andy Warhol with the opposite of a detached personality. Steve cared. The film's historical angle on this — as well as the mid-seventies as a time when everyone was (cue Rubell voiceover) "tired of being serious" — is boilerplate. But not when it comes to Steve and Ian — there's an intimacy to the way it runs vintage Rubell footage for longer than you expect, and usually to revealing ends.

Maybe the most revealing thing about Schrager in the film is that he has a kid-like love for playing with the lights at his clubs. (He did so at Enchanted Garden, and on 54's opening night.) At one point he insists that Studio was the first disco with its own dedicated lighting person — not completely true, but close enough. Studio 54 was hardly the first disco to make music the star, rather than anyone on a stage, but it was the first to go all the way to the mainstream. In fact, one of the most surprising things about it is that this is the first disco documentary in history to utilize Nile Rodgers as a talking head, but not include the story of how his, and Chic partner Bernard Edwards, not getting into Studio 54 one night inspired them to write a tune called "F*** Off." They retitled it "Le Freak"; it spent six weeks at number one in 1978, Rodgers' biggest hit as producer until Madonna's "Like a Virgin" in 1984.

By that time Rubell and Schrager had been through the wringer. In January of 1980, the two of them were sentenced to three and a half years in jail for tax evasion. They'd skimmed millions of dollars from the club's receipts — not a small percentage, but the bulk of it. Worse, they'd kept a separate record book with the amount of the skim written down — perfect for the Feds. They'd been stupidly cocky: 54 had been such a success that — unheard of in New York nightlife — they'd managed to go six months without liquor before acquiring a license in late '77. The first few weeks they'd stayed open by "getting a series of one-day catering permits," Schrager says onscreen. There was such a publicity headwind that no one even cared that they couldn't drink. Then again, they were probably doing something else.

Schrager, for his part, stayed avowedly out of the spotlight; his downfall was to be caught carrying cocaine when the Feds came by. (And, of course, to keep separate books with accurate counts of the skim.) While in prison, he sold Studio 54 to hotelier Mark Fleischman, and he and Rubell began plotting their next step. They also adjusted to prison life their way: As Schrager notes, he made a protection deal with the biggest man in the cells, and after a year the two of them — tempted by an investigator who'd had the pick of the takeout litter from nearby Chinatown brought in to bait them — narced on their nightlife rivals: Bond's, New York-New York, Infinity. "Kind of our enemies," says Schrager, adding that this was "an easy way to rationalize it, I suppose. My father wouldn't have liked it ... 'Do your time like a man.' " Oh yes, he's thought about that one a lot, he says.

When the two of them got out of prison in 1981, the world had changed. Disco — despite going back underground to the gay, black, urban audience that had sired it — would power the great mid-eighties pop explosion; what else do you call the bass and drum pattern of "Billie Jean," never mind the first Madonna album? But Rubell and Schrager prevailed. They opened another successful club, Palladium, in 1985, but more importantly, they took over the Exclusive Hotel, on Madison Avenue in Midtown, from Mark Fleischman, who'd purchased Studio from them. Rubell and Schrager renamed and reopened it in 1984 as Morgans, kicking off the boutique-hotel era. Rubell died from complications of AIDS in 1989 — but as the film notes, from multiple sources, the true reason was kept out of the papers. His mother, apparently, hadn't even known he was gay.

Rubell and Schrager had been seemingly sewed at the hip, twin Janus figures with the same vaulting ambition, the same rough charm, in different packages. The Schrager we meet in Studio 54: The Documentary still carries his thick Brooklyn accent, made sandpapery over the years, but also the vibrancy of the ideas that carried him through the club's glory years and its steep downfall. He and Steve were a team, he explains. Their dynamic transformed the culture. Studio 54 covers its gamut gracefully, but watching their dream become reality is where the film, too, feels most alive.

Studio 54 is available on-demand now via streaming platforms and is open in select theaters nationwide. The film opens in Minneapolis on October 26 at the Lagoon Cinema.