In The Works: Party Monster
by Kerrie Mitchell
(Premiere Magazine; December 2002) Seth Green is dressed like a troll. More precisely, he's dressed like a drag queen troll, in green face pain, a rubber nose and ears, three-fee-tall hair, a pink body sui with moderately sized bosoms, a flowered cape, and striped kneesocks. His companion, Culkin, is more understated, sporting tight red shorts, a white corset, black football pads, red lipstick, blue car paint, and six-inch platform red adidas.

Oddly enough, their costums are historically accurate. Green and Culkin are at Montel Williams's Manhattan studio filming a talk-show sequence for Party Monster, a true story about the ecstasy-fueled New York City club scene in the late '80s and early '90s. Culkin, in his first film role since 1994's Richie Rich, plays Michael Alig, the real-life king of the club kids, who went from Indiana-bred misfit to party promoter extraordinaire, until his 1996 arrest for the brutal murder of drug dealer Angel Melendez (Wilson Cruz, of TV's My So-Called Life).

"From very early on we wanted Macaulay," says first-time feature director Barbao, who along with codirector Bailey wrote the part with Culkin in mind. "He had the ability to combine that pixie innocence with, not evil exactly, but the inablitiy to control himself." The directors, best known for their campy 2000 documentar The Eyes of Tammy Faye, directed a 1998 Alig documentary (also titledParty Monster) and based their film on Disco Bloodbath, a memoir by Alig's friend and rival James St. James(Green).

Bailey And Barbato, Culkin recalls,"had been sending me the script for years. Finally I started reading scripts again and met with them." Eventually, he'd road-trip with them to visit Alig, who's serving up to 20 years for manslaughter in upstate New York. Culkin enjoyed the club kids' outlandish outfits--and not just because they represented a way for the outcasts to transform themselves and seize the limelight. "We put these costumes on, and it's so easy to act like someone else, to say things that you would never say," Culking says. "You look at yourself in the mirror and say, 'Jesus, that's me'"