Selections from Face Magazine's Macaulay Culkin Interview
By Chris Heath
(Face Magazine: August 2002)– Party Monster – which is expected to premiere at the Sundance film festival and be released later in 2003—tells the story of Michael Alig and the club kids who took over New York club land in the early Nineties. Theirs was a world of crazed, joyous hedonism, fuelled by copious drugs (most of them, but particularly ketamine and heroin) and insane stunts and theatrical nightlife escapades, into which, in 1996, a stubbornly persistent rumour spreads: that the reason a drug-dealer called Angel has abruptly disappeared from the scene is that Michael Alig, who is sometimes known as king of the club kids, has murdered him. For months the story hovers – Alig even does drugged-out interviews with trendy magazines, berating them for spreading this awful gossip, even as he goes out clubbing with the word GUILT written on his face—until the police realise that a dismembered body they have been storing for some time after fishing it from the river is indeed Angel’s. And the truth comes out.

Though versions differ, most accounts concur that there is a fight which ends up with Angel being hit in the head with a hammer and then smothered with a pillow, and then injected with Drano (a liquid more properly used for unblocking drains) and then—after being left in the bathtub while Alig and his friend Freeze shop and party and don’t deal with any of this for a week or tow—they chop off Angel’s legs with cutlery bought from Macy’s, put the legs in a duffel bag, then the torso in a box, and thew both , one day apart, into the Hudson river. Michael Alig is eventually convicted of murder and is incarcerated in prison four or five hours north of New York City, where he is expected to remain.

And now Macaulay Culkin is Michael Alig. Party Monster is adapted from the compelling book Disco Bloodbath, written by Alig’s former buddy James St. James, (the relationship between Alig and James, played by Seth Green, is at the centre of the movie). The book is a spellbinding rush of what happens when consequence interrupts a world where lives are lived as if there are no consequences; about what happens to the nightlife dream when the sun comes up, or the lights are switched on, or the bags under your eyes won’t go, or the drugs start working against you; about what happens to the fabulous people when fabulousness falls off a precipice.

And the strange thing is, when you read about Michael Alig, you find yourself thinking that—apart from almost always being an awful selfish person who treats almost everyone, including his closest friends, appallingly (and, who, for instance, phones in a bomb threat to delay a plane to Chicago he’s late for and needs to catch)…and that anyway he wouldn’t have like you…and, also, you know, that he was a murderer—he seems weirdly charming and like he’d be such fun to hang around with.

The book is also, perhaps strangest of all, one which mentions Macaulay Culkin twice. The first reference is fairly innocuous, at least in regard to Macaulay; it is where James recounts the moment that Alig told him in detail about the murder (months before the story came out) and, he writes, ‘I was frozen in an adorable Macaulay Culkin pose, with my mouth wide open, throughout.'

The second describes the club kids’ antics aboard the previously-mentioned flight to Chicago: ‘There was a runway show down the aisles, a vogueing battle, drugs consumed off the seat-tray tables (which should have been in their upright, locked position). There was a spirited debate over who it would be more fun to fuck: Macaulay Culkin or Emmanuel Lewis (that would have been my choice).’ (Emmanuel Lewis was the child star made famous in the Eighties TV show Webster.) Macaulay is aware of this passage.

Is it weird to think that they were sitting on an airplane discussing that?

‘It’s a little odd, yeah,’ he says. ‘I’m sure. But that’s alright. It didn’t faze me, at least.’

Are you offended that James expressed a preference for Emmanuel Lewis?

‘No, not at all.’ A pause. ‘He always had a very unique taste.’