Club Kid Was Really at the Party

Club Kid Was Really at the Party How the crew scouted venues, hired scenesters, and created what one producer called “a time capsule.” By , an Emmy Award–winning Curbed writer who has reported on New York City for four years A scene set in the office of Porto Rocha, a design agency that let the crew in to one of their afterparties. Photo: Courtesy of A24 A scene set in the office of Porto Rocha, a design agency that let the crew in to one of their afterparties. Photo: Courtesy of A24 In 2024, when Jordan Firstman was planning shoots for Club Kid, he took the crew clubbing in Bushwick. The movie follows a gay party promoter, played by Firstman, who is tiring of the scene when he learns he has a son. He sobers up and reinvents himself while his old life falls apart. Stephen Phelps, the production designer, was inclined to shoot at real parties; he comes from an anthropological school of filmmaking that trails actors through unstaged locations and captures the real reactions of bystanders, as he did for Sean Baker’s Anora. But there may be no space more averse to cameras than underground clubs, where it’s common to lock up phones in pouches and lockers or put stickers over the lenses. “Basement wanted nothing to do with us,” said Phelps. What else could they do? Staging a party would require paying hundreds of extras, an idea that Firstman rejected. “I’m like, ‘These are not cool people,’” he said at a recent talk. “No shade, dilapidated extras. But then, me and my producers all got on Grindr and just started being like, ‘Come to Bushwick for $100.’” “We did post on Grindr, but I don’t think anyone showed up,” said Ben Hannon Hubley, a friend who was working in documentaries when Firstman called with a gig. They partied together in the past, and Hubley came on as a co-producer focused on casting, creating what he calls a “nerdy spreadsheet” of actual scenesters to fill out party scenes. “You can’t capture chosen family vibes if everyone is a stranger,” he said. Zak Stone, their mutual friend, had thrown his own parties and had pivoted to run a record label and manage talent. He knew artists, locations, and a promoter who was open to their pitch. In the end, two real parties stood in for three different locations, and many of the extras are regulars in those spaces. “It’s a real time capsule of our lives,” said Hubley. “And during the process of making it, some of us were going on a similar journey.” Spoilers ahead. A shot in the trailer shows the detritus left behind after the party at the Market Hotel. Photo: A24/Youtube The film begins on a high note: a birthday celebration at the party that Peter (Firstman) founded with his friend Sophie (Cara Delevigne). The producers booked the Market Hotel in Bushwick to stand in for Club Labor, the fictional venue. “There’s not that many places that are still active today that have been going as long as they have,” Stone pointed out. “And you have the subway going by, which is iconic.” The venue sits against the elevated section of the J/M/Z on Broadway, and the triangular room was preferable to a big empty box, said Phelps. “If you have different shapes, it’s easier to create different nooks,” he said. Firstman had handed him Eric Goode’s book on Area, the legendary 1980s Tribeca club, where a corner might display a cheeky conceptual piece by Andy Warhol or a nude model dressed to look like a statue. The crew booked a tattoo artist to do live ink, put in a cage for dancers, and invited Amanda Lepore, who shows up in the film with a whip and a sub. “There was also an element of theater, where the acting within the fake party created real entertainment for the fake party goers,” said Stone. “The DJ was playing music and everyone was dancing, so you felt like you were at a party, but 30 seconds later someone was saying, ‘ACTION!’ and cutting the music for dialogue.” Everyone had to keep dancing and try not to laugh while the actors said their lines.. Party goers included people tagged in Facebook pages for parties he’d gone to ten years ago, including China Chalet, Heaven on Earth, and Ladyfag. Photos of those parties also inspired the look, as did a scene in the 1995 film Bad Boys, where silver mylar confetti streams across a dance club. “Jordan loved that,” said Phelps. They deployed similar confetti, wrapped columns in silver mylar, and even built a shiny hanging moon and six-foot penis. (Neither shows up clearly on screen.) When Firstman enters, he doesn’t use the venue’s actual narrow, dark entrance, but instead a grander stair on the other side of the building. There, Phelps hung fabric streamers and a neon sign with bubbly, purple-pink letters. The font suggested that the scene “isn’t taking itself seriously,” he said. Ten years later, Peter trudges into a more corporate iteration of Club Labor. This time he doesn’t ascend into adoring crowds and a heavenly, silvery space, but goes down a staircase into a gloomy cloud of fog and red light. The font on the club’s sign has gotten more bland and the bodies on the dance floor look different: fewer costumes, more skin. “What we were trying to show is that a lot of cool New York parties that have a more queer and inclusive vibe became popular with big groups of ‘muscle gays’ and started to lose their community feel,” said Stone. “Now, promoters are in a bind because those rich gays are the ones who pay to get in.” The 2026 sign is sans-serif and much more serious. Photo: A24/Youtube The party shot in the scene is real, but “it’s a more underground, cool party” than its film version, said Hubley. The real party, Pit // Stop, is run by Noah Shakoor, a friend who agreed to give the team access to the event’s East Williamsburg iteration. Shakoor warned attendees about the shoot, hung signs at the entrance, and many in attendance already knew the producers, said Stone. “If you wanted to be on camera, you could, and if you wanted to completely avoid it, you could,” he said. “We were shooting on film with a huge camera, so it was quite obvious where this was happening in the party.” Funnily enough, the lighting that was already installed for Pit // Stop happened to have been done by GUMGUM Studio, who the producers had hired to light other sets in the film. “Lighting the underground in New York is mainly just navigating small, unconventional spaces with sometimes shaky structural integrity and finding ways to create the illusion of expansive, otherworldly universes,” said Zanzie Addington-White, GUMGUM’s Creative Director. “We’ve put a lot of effort into doing that. But not much of that work gets shown because phones aren’t allowed at 90 percent of the spaces we exist in.” Pit // Stop, a real rave, stood in for two locations. GUMGUM lighting made the place feel more sinister. Photo: A24/Youtube Peter hears about the next spot when a character played by Miss Benny yells through the bathroom door about an afterparty “at that cracky WeWork.” It’s a hilarious way to describe the office of Porta Rocha, a design agency whose clients include MoMA PS1 and Nike, and whose airy, industrial office in a former Bushwick factory is decorated with tangerine-colored Haller cabinets, Clerici Lounge Chairs, and kelly green sofas by HAY. Leo Porto and Felipe Rocha, the married couple at the helm, moved their business into the space in 2022 and started throwing casual happy hours for employees and clients on the first Friday of every month. But the location of their office in the center of the local club scene led friends to stop by between parties as well. “We’ve always had the DJ equipment, and we have a lot of friends that are DJs too, so they would come for a drink, play some music,” says Porto. The happy hour evolved into a larger afterparty that draws famous regulars who they’re tempted to divulge, but decided not to name. “It’s a safe space where people feel really comfortable being themselves, and that’s really rare nowadays,” says Porto. The Porto Rocha office used in the after party scene. Photo: Porto Rocha/Brian W. Ferry, all rights reserved The couple first met Firstman through a friend, and then again at the bar Animal when he was in the middle of research. He wanted to know if they’d be open to him shooting their party. They were, and the crew scouted the space, but Porto and Rocha were still shocked when Firstman showed up with cameras and sound equipment. “I was like, ‘Jordan, you didn’t tell me this is like a movie movie,’” Porto said, laughing. A shot filmed in the office at dawn. Photo: A24/Youtube The crew was just as surprised. They had expected a muted hang out, and brought their own extras and DJs, said Stone. “We ended up not even having our people DJ because they had great people,” he said. “They were having a raging after party at like, 4 a.m.” Dialogue written for the scene also ended up being cut. “The vibe was so good, and visually it gave you everything you needed,” he said. A shot through the smoke at Porto Rocha’s after party. Photo: Courtesy of A24 “Everything you see there is exactly as it is. There’s nothing changed at all,” Porto says, then corrects himself. “Actually I was controlling the smoke because too much smoke can be bad for filmmaking, apparently.” They had asked the producers to avoid filming signs with the firm’s name and tried to stay away from the cameras, so they were shocked by the first published film still that became the official poster. “It’s a photo of Jordan at the party and in the back, it’s Felipe,” said Porto. “Lincoln Center was showing this image!” said Rocha. If they feared clients were going to recognize him, that ship has sailed. “We tend not to mix our professional image and our private lives,” said Porto. “But we are married, our friends work with us, and everything’s already very mixed.” Firstman’s character reluctantly heads to another party later in the film to make money the only way he knows how: by selling drugs. The scene was shot to seem like a different space we haven’t seen before, but it’s actually the Pit // Stop party again, which stood in for Club Labor in 2026. As Firstman wandered through the real party, he started to improvise. “We kind of rolled with it,” said Hubley. “It feels doc-style in that way.” A makeout scene between Firstman and a stranger was “completely improvised,” Stone said, as was Firstman’s decision to wander into the bathroom. “People thought I was really selling them drugs,” Firstman told Andrew Scott for Interview. “Then other people were coming up to me, and I would give them a bump and they’d be like, ‘What the fuck is this? This isn’t K.’ And I was like, ‘It’s like lactose.’” The film shows the main room at H0L0 before it’s set up for a party. Photo: A24/Youtube After taking a break from nightlife, Peter and his crew reinvent Club Labor and allow his now 10-year-old son Arlo (Reggie Absolom) to open the party with the night’s first DJ set. For this iteration of Club Labor, they looked for an existing venue they could rent and landed on H0L0, a Bushwick club in a building with nubby brick walls and warm wood floors. “It has a more intimate feeling, and some DJs – like Juliana Huxtable – prefer that,” said Stone. Two support columns helped make the DJ stand feel built-in, and Phelps added cascading fabric, plants, and rows of candles, a design based off a party image that Hubley had taken. It helped set the tone for a creative, caring party, like the one set in 2016. “We wanted to show the magic of community – when the party is joyful,” said Hubley. GUMGUM Studios put in a custom lighting setup at H0L0, where it regularly sets up lights for real events. Photo: Andrew Deng GUMGUM, who knew the room and had license to build a custom set-up, landed on a blue and orange palette with a wholesome feel that echoes the colors and decor in Arlo’s bedroom. When the film returns to the same space for a different party, GUMGUM shifted the lights, adding strobes. “We wanted to work in a different way for each club scene, rather than have the film feel like, another party, another party, another party,” said Phelps. Firstman was struck by how the film documents an era. “We were so lucky to be let into these spaces that are not easy to get into, even as a civilian,” he said at a festival this fall. “Often it takes movies a couple years to catch up with culture. But we were live. It was almost like we were live streaming the party because we were let into the actual parties that were happening in the moment.” Club Kid Was Really at the Party Your product is saved! You’ll receive emails when your saved products go on sale. Manage preferences.