Who: Jen Gatien is a New York-based film producer who has utilized the state for several productions over the past few years. A former resident of the Chelsea Hotel on 23rd Street in Manhattan, Gatien collaborated with director Abel Ferrara to document its story for 2008’s Chelsea on the Rocks. She then crossed the East River to film in ultra-Orthodox Jewish areas of Queens and Brooklyn for the 2010 film Holy Rollers, based on the real-life case of Sean Erez — a Jewish youth convicted of ecstasy smuggling during the late 1990’s. It was during that period when Gatien’s father, Peter Gatien, fought drug-related charges in federal court, in a case he would win (at great financial cost) in February of 1998. The elder Gatien owned several successful Manhattan nightclubs where music culture flourished just as ecstasy became the nightlife drug of choice, but was forced to eventually sell all of them to pay his debts. Peter Gatien’s rise, fall and eventual deportation to his native Canada in 2003 is examined within his daughter’s new documentary, Limelight. The film is named for Gatien’s signature club — a former-church at the corner of 20th Street and 6th Avenue in Manhattan — and directed by Billy Corben, whose 2006 documentary Cocaine Cowboys includes a crucial prison interview with hitman, Jorge “Rivi” Ayala. For Limelight, Corben conducted another prison interview with Michael Alig: the former-Limelight party promoter whose own murder case featured prominently in the 2003 film Party Monster, with Dylan McDermott playing Peter Gatien. Camera In The Sun sat down with Jen Gatien on the eve of Limelight’s release at NYC’s Landmark Sunshine Cinema to discuss her New York films, the importance of tax incentives to on-location shooting, and her take on recent remarks by New Jersey Governor Chris Christie condemning incentives given to Jersey Shore — this, in light of the high-profile criticism her North Carolina-shot film Hounddog received over a similar tax incentive-related issue.

What inspired you to produce Chelsea on the Rocks, and what do the Limelight and the Chelsea have in common?

I feel like in many ways Chelsea on the Rocks and Limelight are really interrelated, even though their approach is very different. They’re essentially about a dieing breed of iconic places in New York that are now no longer. The Chelsea Hotel was somewhere I was living, and I was the last resident to enter the building sort of before the new regime took over. I remember the day Stanley Bard was given his walking papers, and the despair of this man who had built his entire life’s meaning from putting together this eclectic group of artists and having hotel guests in there. Seeing Stanley lose something that meant so much to him in many ways reminded me of what happened to my father, and it really profoundly affected me that this guy was going to lose something that was rightfully his. And so, Abel and I connected because I was doing a King of New York retrospective screening at Lincoln Center. They were showing films that had premiered at the New York Film Festival, and I’m part of that group. So I got in touch with Abel through Arthur Weinstein, who was a resident in the Chelsea Hotel who has since passed, and is the reason that I connected with Abel. So he came to New York for that screening, and the minute I met him, I’m like, “This guy’s just addictive.” I mean, he’s just the most creative, intellectual madman that I’ve ever met. And so I was asking if he’d be willing to be interviewed for the Chelsea film, thinking that I wanted to capture him while he was in the United States — not knowing he would ultimately direct, or if I was gonna do it. And Abel takes over, and essentially turned the camera around and started directing the film.

I feel the Chelsea, by virtue of its architecture, was appealing to artists because those walls were so thick. You could play music, and a lot of people treated their rooms as their studio spaces. I think that the Limelight was essentially as epic of architecture as the Chelsea, and in that way they really matched at being these iconic buildings in New York — that you passed them and they stand out. And like the Chelsea, I think that Limelight embraced rock ‘n roll, and their rock ‘n roll Sundays are a legendary night, and unfortunately the film doesn’t delve into just how meaningful that music was to Limelight.

How club-friendly was the Chelsea neighborhood from the Limelight’s opening in 1983?

It was incredibly frustrating, in terms of Limelight’s later years, being a target of the New York Post with the residents in the Chelsea neighborhood complaining — because Limelight was there first. And there was no one that moved into that neighborhood not knowing that nightclub was there far before it was gentrified into a residential neighborhood. Chelsea was not the neighborhood it is today. And when that club first opened, it was essentially a no man’s land. So it was frustrating for it to get such a bad rap from residents.

Everything in the media was negative about my father. Everything was propaganda by the government issuing press releases and sensationalizing what was going on in that building, because headlines guarantee politicians being reelected. And I think that the only way for DEA agents, mayors, politicians, police chiefs to get press is to kind of sink their teeth into someone or something that is coverable by the New York media. So when we sourced the film’s media coverage, we were able to find quite easily the negative stuff. The positive stuff, because this is a pre-cellphone camera decade, was really about me remembering who worked there, who might have something. It was like a scavenger hunt in many ways, trying to find old footage and photographs. So I think that that’s where producorialy I was meaningful to the project, in sort of knowing where to source that material. Unfortunately for my father, he did not own the photographs of the photographers that had worked at the Limelight over the 17-year, 18-year span. We were able to find house photographers who kindly let us license photographs, but it is a strange thing to need to license a picture of your father.

What was the Limelight’s importance to NYC’s other boroughs, and to music culture in general?

I feel like Manhattan was this touchstone for the boroughs, but that you couldn’t necessarily be a part of what was Manhattan. And I feel like both Chelsea and Limelight embraced the boroughs and every other sort of type of person. That no one was excluded, and that everyone was invited to the party.

It was so much an incubator of new music, because Limelight by way of it’s design had different rooms. And so it appealed if you were into hip-hop, that would be there. But it’d also be alongside techno in another room, and upstairs in the VIP room would be yet another DJ. So, we’re talking on any given night — and you’ve gotta remember that nightclub was open Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday — that’s a lot of music, and a lot of artists coming in and out of those places. I think breaking new genres of music was a massive component to Limelight’s success, because they were given an opportunity to sort of introduce it and see how crowds responded.

What is your opinion on the Limelight’s connection to drug culture, and was it difficult for you to include interviews with people who had previously accused your father of drug-related crimes?

I think it’s pretty reasonable to say that it exists to this day that there’s something about creativity and drug use. And while drugs are not integral to being creative, there’s certainly more apt to be experimental drug use, or worse than that, [among creative people]. But I just think that until drugs are not in the music industry, or part of anybody on the street in New York, to expect that a nightclub is gonna be a drug-free zone is completely insane.

It was very hard to watch [Michael Caruso’s] interview and other interviews, but I abide by Billy’s desire to interview who he thought was integral to his vision for our film. I knew walking in who was going to say things that could be slanderous or hurtful to my father’s reputation. I was prepared to face that, knowing that nothing could be as bad as what the New York Post had already written.

Every informant, with the exceptions of Sean Kirkham and Michael Caruso, ran for the hills when we broached the topic of having to confront their past. I think a lot of informants and cooperators reinvent themselves. They change their names. They never serve time for the crimes they committed, by virtue of cooperating, and don’t want any association with a reminder of what their decision was — in terms of having to face that they were willing to ruin someone else’s life to save their own hide.

[Regarding police interviews] I wanted them in there. I wish that the questions had been more hard-line. For example, when [former-NYPD Chief] Howard Safir in the news footage says something about all the hospital records showing ecstasy use, I’d like to know how many are we talking about and how many people really died as a result of this, because that created a big media hoopla. I feel like I would have loved the DEA agents, Matt Germanowski and Bob Gagne to be interviewed for this film. I have questions for them. I wanted both sides to be looked at, knowing that the questions would be really hard for the government side to answer. And unfortunately, I don’t know that the film gets their answers. That’s because many of them not only would not participate, but when we did get the DEA to participate, it was under the condition that we couldn’t bring up the Gatien case.

Why did you pursue a prison interview with Michael Alig?

Michael Alig was essential for many reasons. First of all, because he started out as a government informant, and so he was really instrumental in building a case against my father. What’s interesting to me, and I think the film delves into this, is that the government works in a way where cooperation agreements are given to people, and your other crimes get sentenced based on how “helpful” you are to the government — not how truthful you are. And so, what was interesting to me was hearing Michael’s take on how he morally decided to become an informant, at what point it shifted for him, and certainly when his usefulness as an informant was no longer how the government treated him. And I felt that aspect of Michael Alig’s story had yet to be told.

I absolutely think that his interview was a gesture to my father to go on the record, which is not an easy thing to do, especially when you’re incarcerated. I can’t imagine that the corrections officers and government are looking favorably on Michael Alig for admitting to not just cooperating against my father, but the fact that the DEA agents let him use heroin while he was incarcerated, and turned a blind eye to murder.

What did you think of the Limelight’s portrayal in Party Monster, as compared to your own film?

I saw that film when it first came out. And I feel like if their intent was to do a film about club kid culture, then I think they succeeded, and I give them credit for taking on that subject matter. Where I feel Limelight differs very strongly, is this is much more of a sociopolitical crime thriller set with a backstory of the Limelight. I think it’s a much bigger look at New York, and at a pre-and-post Giuliani New York, and the price we paid in some ways for Giuliani’s clean-up campaign of Manhattan.

What was it about the Sean Erez ecstasy case that made you want to produce a film based on it?

I felt like it was steeped in a true crime story that I recall well in New York. And so it resonated deeply with me to be able to do a feature film that really examined ecstasy, club culture, importing of drugs and how it got into this country. And I felt that Jesse Eisenberg, knowing that he was attached to film, was a big lure. So I like stories that somehow move me, or that I am personally familiar with, because I felt that that film handled it really quite well.

We had difficulty shooting in Hasidic neighborhoods, and hence the decision of when we went to those neighborhoods to have a really small crew. I feel that in the opening of the film, of Jesse walking through Hasidic neighborhoods, was done in a way that we tried to be unobtrusive and under the radar, and we shot him walking in the very neighborhoods we were portraying. But we ultimately needed to get extras. We were able to find an extras casting guy who exclusively dealt with Hasidic actors. And so we were able to sort of recreate the neighborhoods with extras. Crown Heights and Williamsburg were our two principle neighborhoods. We shot in one synagogue in Queens. The homes I believe were not Hasidic-owned homes, but homes that were in those neighborhoods. Because you know New York now, while there are Hasidic neighborhoods, everything in New York is cross-populated. There is no one neighborhood, I think, that only exclusively belongs to one sect.

The director researched thoroughly, and he and Jesse spent a lot of time in Hasidic neighborhoods. But I feel like the film isn’t steeped heavily in Hasidic culture, but more as a coming-of-age story. It’s a very personal story. So it wasn’t just about the Hasidic community. It was about a much larger picture of New York — and a pre-9/11 New York.

Is it still possible to capture a gritty pre-gentrified New York City on film?

It’s funny, I was just talking to Vanessa Ferlito, who’s an actress I know from back in the day. And we were saying we’ve gotta make a gritty New York movie in the vein of Bad Lieutenant, and have like an Abel Ferarra voice in there. But I don’t know where we’d shoot it. I don’t think it’d be in Manhattan. It couldn’t be. Where would we go? You’d have to find somewhere. I think that Red Hook, and there’s certain parts of Brooklyn that probably have that old feel of New York that I grew up in. That I remember Tribeca as being a really desolate industrial neighborhood, and today is strollers and Starbucks. So I think it’s really hard, and we did have that challenge on Holy Rollers of finding places that could actually look anything like New York City once did.

I’ve actually twice now shot in upstate New York. Once with Meskada, and most recently on a film called For Ellen with Paul Dano, Jon Heder and Jenna Malone that was directed by So Yong Kim. I feel like New York is certainly an independent filmmaker-friendly state. And tax incentives make it that much more attractive to investors in knowing that that there is some cushion to their investment. And if things go south, that there is a revenue stream that can come back to investors.

What’s your take on N.J. Gov. Christie’s criticism of Jersey Shore receiving tax incentives?

It’s really interesting, since I had a similar experience in that I produced a film called Hounddog that was shot in North Carolina almost at the inception of the tax credit phenomenon. It was North Carolina’s tax incentive for film, and we were the first film to qualify. And at that time there was someone looking to build a name for themselves, and went out against Hounddog — saying, how could a child’s sexually pornographic film profit off our state tax money? So I just think that to determine what constitutes art, and what should qualify, is something I’d rather not leave to politicians. And for the State of New Jersey, my guess is that show is generating a lot of revenue for filmmakers, crews, locations — I’m sure that show has brought a lot of revenue to the state.

I always look to find states in which there are tax incentives. I’ve been approached to do films in California, and I get that it’s got to be the most convenient state because of the resources there, but the tax credits are really meaningful. Especially when you’re talking about 20 to 30 percent of your budget coming back. So, I most recently shot in Connecticut. Killer incentive. Great state to shoot in. Had an awesome experience there. And having lived in Atlanta at one time, I’m now looking to do something in the south.