The studio ruined this movie...
...by 1998, the subject matter shouldn't have been considered all that shocking.
But the studio removed most of the rawer or homosexual stuff, and then beefed up Neve Campbell's role to create more of a tacked-on "hetero" romance.
It made the movie feel like an Aaron Spelling cartoon, seeming to apologize for its own subject matter and ruining it completely.
Why would the studio do this??
They apparently thought that it would be safer to turn "54" into a mall movie for 14 year old girls instead... The short-sightedness of that is that 14 year old girls were never going to flock to a film about pre-AIDS 1970s club life, even if Ryan Phillippe was the star.
So by changing the film so dramatically, it was also now unwatchable even for the portion of the audience that would have been interested in the topic.
The result: it sucked (in a bad way) and bombed.
It's a classic example of the old Hollywood axiom that when you try to please everybody (especially an imaginary audience demographic you're never going to have) you wind up pleasing nobody.
Or another axiom: Nobody knows anything, but studio executives know even less.
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