'Tiger King' Director Eric Goode Once Ran Area, One of NYC's Most Iconic Nightclubs
As the co-director of Tiger King, the viral murder-mayhem-and-mullets Netflix documentary, Eric Goode has highjacked the culture, captivating even the White House briefing room.
It’s not hard to see why. In the engrossing seven-part series he created with Rebecca Chaiklin, which is back this Sunday for a wrap-up episode hosted by Joel McHale, Goode mines the underbelly of big-cat owners like latter-day Errol Morris crossbred with John Waters.
“I’ve always been fascinated by these hidden subcultures that exist in America,” Goode tells T&C, calling from his home in Ojai, California, “and with passions that border on pathological.”
A deep-pocketed animal rights activist behind such concerns as the Turtle Conservancy, Goode is referring to his interest in the exotic-animal hobbyist world. But it’s a penchant for strange creatures and obsession to the point of mania that dates back to his days of navigating the wilds of downtown New York.
From 1983 to 1987, Goode was one of the co-owners and the public face of Area, one of the most canonical clubs in the history of New York nightlife. Located on Hudson Street below Houston, on the site of the former Pony Express stables, Area assumed the baton from clubs such as Studio 54 and ran with it like an amphetamine-charged anchor.
As notoriously difficult to get into as 54, and every bit as hedonistic, Area had loftier ambitions from the get-go. It was known for its elaborate themes—Fashion! Confinement! Suburbia!—that changed every six weeks and recalled the “happenings” of Jim Dine and Claes Oldenburg and its equally artful invitations (the one for Gnarly included a mousetrap that smashed open an ammonium capsule redolent of amyl nitrate).
Those lucky enough to get in rubbed oversized shoulder pads with artists such as Warhol and Basquiat, and celebs from Madonna and Sting to Malcolm Forbes and Yul Brynner, as well as a menagerie of fabulous nobodies whose theatricality made the dramatizations of self in Tiger King look toothless by comparison.
“It was a remarkable cast of actors, who really dressed the part,” recalls Goode, whose own look usually comprised boulder-shoulder Jean Paul Gaultier suits. “I was definitely an 80s fashion victim who drank the Kool-Aid.”
According to Goode mythology, it’s about all that he consumed: every story written about him at the time was at pains to point out that, unlike most of his patrons, he abstained from alcohol and drugs. “I never said that,” Goode bristles. “Look, when we were building Area, we were so driven and focused, partly because none of us came from money. If we had we been doing drugs all the time we would not have been able to accomplish what we did. But, you know, I was young and as time goes on you explore life.”
Which might explain some questionable lapses in judgment, especially when it comes to his use of animals in the club’s vitrines. “We definitely used live animals and other things that I would not do today,” Goode admits. “I knew a notorious reptile dealer who would send me animals for Area. I regret that. I mean, the landlord had wolves and an arctic fox upstairs and quite possibly a tiger.”
Just as he has resisted calls for a second series of Tiger King for fear of overstaying its welcome, Goode and his partners always conceived of Area—lovingly chronicled in the coffee table book of the same name published, in 2014, by Abrams—as having a built-in use-by date.
“We approached it more like a limited run show on Broadway,” he says. “It was a place to meet and hang out for all kinds of reasons, obviously sex and drugs and all that, but also a forum to experiment with whatever you were working on. The second it became formulaic and predictable we closed. But up until that point I think it was pretty magical.”
The Tiger King and I recap premieres on Netflix this Sunday, April 12.
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