The Rum House, a meticulously restored Theater District cocktail lounge, stands out for several reasons.
It’s the place where Bill Murray wandered in one recent night and spontaneously serenaded the crowd on the piano while Emma Stone sang along.
It’s where Tony Danza, star of “Honeymoon in Vegas” at the nearby Nederlander Theatre, has been known to nip in for a tipple or two, and it’s the spot where George Wendt, famous for portraying Norm on “Cheers,” casually sparked up a joint not long ago, according to co-owner Kenneth McCoy.
On other recent nights, Jake Gyllenhaal enjoyed glasses of straight-up Oban Scotch whisky at the bar, Molly Ringwald opted for whiskey sours after a vocal turn with the house jazz band and Jon Hamm kept it “Mad Men” real by sipping an Old-Fashioned.
But, despite its steady stream of celebrity patrons, on Sunday night everyone in the bar will be pulling for one man to win a Best Actor Oscar: Michael Keaton, nominated for his portrayal of off-the-rails movie star Riggan Thomson in “Birdman.”
The reason for partisanship? Two of the movie’s more memorable scenes, both featuring Keaton, were shot in this very bar. With a menu filled with classic cocktails and rare spirits, the Rum House isn’t the sort of establishment that typically has TVs blasting the game, but on Sunday night, they’ll break the no-television rule and show the awards. They’ll even have a special cocktail, the Birdman, on offer.
In the run-up to the Oscars, the hype around the film — which received nine nominations and is a Best Picture front-runner, while Keaton is a near-sure thing for Best Actor — has been mounting, and the Rum House patrons are excited to see their watering hole represented.
Last Friday night, Kevin Knights, a 23-year-old who works in finance and lives in Westchester, puts down his drink, takes in the room and appears suddenly stunned.
“Oh, my God,” he says. “This is the ‘Birdman’ bar. I remember the exact scenes that were shot here. This is totally bizarre.” After the astonishment dims, he and his fiancée, Britney Tommasone, also from Westchester, proceed to check out the watering hole’s best angles.
“This is so cool,” Knights says. “It actually makes my drink taste better.”
At the bar, Keaton’s washed-up Riggan, who once played a famous superhero, and Ed Norton’s stage-acting hotshot, Mike Shiner, engage in a tense conversation over glasses of whiskey.
Another scene in the bar is the film’s turning point: Keaton’s character confronts a steely theater critic (Lindsay Duncan), who sits at the far end of the saloon, coolly sipping a martini and writing notes. She vows, “After the opening tomorrow, I am going to turn in the worst review anybody has ever read, and I am going to close your play . . . I hate you and everyone you represent.”
These days, everyone at the bar has plenty of love for Keaton and the movie.
“I recognized Rum House immediately,” boasts Alexandra Belenkaya, 25, a paralegal from Queens. Sipping a drink on a busy Friday night, she adds, “I’m always excited when a place I’ve been to is in a movie. It merges me right into the action.”
A cocktail waitress at the bar, Monica Lara, 21, says she’s seen plenty of unusual behavior due to the “Birdman” connection.
“One couple came in here and sat down for drinks. Then they came back the next night and didn’t order anything. They had just seen the movie and wanted to soak up the atmosphere,” the Bedford-Stuyvesant resident recounts. “We get people coming here from Europe, wanting to see the ‘Birdman’ bar.”
Only one of two New York-based movies up for a major Academy Award (the other is “Whiplash”), “Birdman” was shot on location, largely around the Times Square area.
Part of the film’s Oscar buzz is due to its sense of authenticity. Charged with securing a drinking spot in the West 40s, the film’s location manager, Joaquin Prange, knew he had to find a joint that would evoke the neighborhood and also suit the narrative arc of the movie.
“The place needed to fit with Michael Keaton’s character,” Prange says. “He’s a recovering alcoholic. Just the fact that he’s taking a drink is a big deal, and the look of the place needed to reflect that. Rum House is dark and woody, with a bit of a patina, like the kind of place where Riggan Thomson would go for a drink by himself. This is not about drinking during the good times, but we also wanted a bar that looked classy, a place that could make you a good cocktail. It was not about finding a dive.”
Despite the potential for notoriety, McCoy wasn’t immediately sold on having his bar on the big screen.
“They required us to close for a week, so there was a lot of negotiating,” he says of the production. “Then they wanted to cut the bar in half for the sake of a tracking shot. We said no.”
The set was closed for the actual shooting of the film, but McCoy saw a few rehearsals in the bar and was impressed by the laid-back nature of the movie’s key players: “They wore jeans and baseball caps,” he recalls. “If you saw them, you thought they were stagehands rather than movie stars.”
One of McCoy’s business partners, Ryan Burke, says that they were eventually sold on the potential to be part of an Oscar-worthy production.
“The people involved in the movie and the fact that it all takes place in Times Square definitely combined to make us want to be a part of it,” says Burke. “We think of Rum House as a neighborhood gem and thought that this would be a great film.”
What did he think after watching the movie? “I loved it. It was like seeing my baby on the big screen.”
That makes sense when you consider that when McCoy, Burke and their partner, Abdul Tabini, took over the place four years ago, it was a Midtown dump. They lovingly converted it to its currently stylish state, complete with Edison bulbs, a new copper-topped bar, fresh tile flooring (they had to replace the battered, beer-stained green carpeting) and refurbished mirrors.
“We wanted to bring back the feeling of a Times Square piano bar in the 1940s or ’50s,” says McCoy, adding that the Rum House dates back to those glory days of the Square. “We added 80 rums and came up with some great cocktails.”
The centerpiece offering is a bottle of Havana Club, smuggled in from Cuba. It’s illegal to sell, but favored guests get gratis shots of the contraband booze.
Prange likes the place so much that it became his go-to spot for unwinding after long days of filming. “I developed a liking for the sidecars,” he admits.
Fittingly, the Rum House served as the spot for a last-minute wrap party on the final night of filming. Extras from a Times Square scene were still wearing their Elmo and Iron Man costumes, Keaton drank dark ’n’ stormy cocktails all night, and director Alejandro González Iñárritu went for Negronis.
“They let us take the place over, and, after 4 a.m., locked the doors until 7 in the morning so we could keep going,” Prange recalls. “There were a lot of Champagne toasts and a round of top-shelf tequila shots at 6 a.m. Filming was so intense that it was the first time we could all socialize without feeling stressed out.”
Behind the ‘Birdman’ theater
If there were an Oscar for Best Building in a Motion Picture, the winner would be the St. James Theatre. As seen in “Birdman,” it teems with assignations in the stairwells, back-stabbing in the dressing rooms and gossip in the wings.
It was built in 1927 by producer Abraham Erlanger, who had a Napoleon complex — he has his hand inside his shirt in his official portrait — and named the theater after himself. But he died broke in 1930, and the Shubert brothers bought it and renamed it the St. James.
In 1943, a musical by Richard Rodgers and his new writing partner, Oscar Hammerstein II, opened at the St. James. “Oklahoma!” ran for 2,212 performances. In 1951, Rodgers & Hammerstein produced another hit: “The King and I,” starring Gertrude Lawrence and an unknown Yul Brynner.
But there was sadness in the wings. Lawrence died of cancer six months into the run. The day she passed, Brynner performed “Shall We Dance” alone onstage.
In the 1960s, the St. James became the lair of the most diabolical showman in Broadway history: David Merrick. His office in the theater was all red — walls, carpets, phones. It was, an old agent once told me, “the devil’s red.”
It was there that Merrick hatched his plots against his enemies. When he heard a New York Times critic planned to attend an early preview of one of his shows, Merrick sent a handwritten note to the Times’ building around the corner.
It read: “At your peril.”
Merrick had a feud with producer Joe Kipness, who had more than a passing acquaintance with — what shall we call them? — men in the garbage-hauling business. One night Kipness had a few friends drop by the St. James. They broke into Merrick’s office and trashed it.
Today, all traces of Merrick’s “devil’s red” office are gone. But some say that if you pass by the theater late at night, you can hear cackling.
By Michael Riedel