00:00Hello, my name is Ian Schrager. You're watching me being interviewed by The Hollywood Reporter.
00:06Studio 54 co-founder and legendary hotel developer Ian Schrager is bringing his latest
00:12vision to West Hollywood. Ahead of the opening of The Public West Hollywood,
00:16The Hollywood Reporter sat down with Schrager to talk about the new hotel,
00:20his love of Los Angeles, and what continues to drive him more than five decades into his career.
00:26California has always been like Mecca to everybody else in this country. I remember during the 60s and 70s,
00:33it's like the country almost tilted over and everybody that wasn't tied down kind of just
00:38rolled into California and it's set the cultural below ever since then.
00:48I'm not talking about the cliches, I'm talking about what's inherent about it and I think it's
00:55just a free spirited place where anything goes. It's in a, it's a, it's a place of a, with a
01:01bunch
01:01of contradictions and they sort of all come together in some kind of funny, strange way
01:06and something comes out that's meaningful to people. What my job is, I'm supposed to come in
01:12and hit the sweet spot in all of those contradictory things that go on with people
01:17and try and do something that resonates with people of all different walks of life, all different
01:23ages, all different stratos of wealth. That's just something that translates and touches people
01:31but speaks of what's going on at the moment. I want to blow people away.
01:40Every hotel was a one-off. Every hotel was starting from scratch and trying to do something that blew
01:46everyone away and that's the part I enjoy. You know almost by definition when you're a big company
01:52you want to get everything from the catalog and use it and I don't want anything from the catalog.
01:58I like to consider myself a creative person, daring and I do what I like and I'm fortunate enough
02:08that if I happen to like it there are also a lot of people out there that also like it
02:13and that's my only criteria.
02:31The real Studio 54 was owned for 33 months. If we didn't run into that difficulty, that problem, it might
02:39have gone on for more than that.
02:41Steve came from Brooklyn as well. We were two kids from Brooklyn. You know we were given this lightning bolt
02:46and we had a hold on for their life and everything was quite innocent and we were just trying to
02:53survive.
03:22I did my first hotel. I sold Studio 54.
03:27I sold a call to a person that would happen to be in the hotel business.
03:34But he didn't give me all cash for the purchase. He gave me promissory notes.
03:40And when he couldn't pay me on the promissory notes, I traded the promissory notes he owed me for his
03:49interest in a hotel.
03:51And that's where I got started in the business. I had never been in the hotel business. I didn't know
03:55anything about it.
03:56Except that it was a hospitality business. I came from the nightclub world. People weren't supposed to sleep over, even
04:04though sometimes they did.
04:05And so it's taking care of people. So I took care of people in the nightclub. Now I got to
04:10take care of people during the day.
04:15You know, I think the public space is spectacular. I think, you know, we have a three quarters of an
04:21acre private park on the roof, which is incredibly unusual.
04:25If you turn this hotel into a resort right in the middle of the city.
04:30If you've ever come to the point where I don't have anything to contribute or, you know, just repeating what
04:36I did before, I'll stop.
04:38It's not the money. I enjoy doing something that I know people are going to come in and think it's
04:45good. It's just gratifying to me.
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