So who is the bad guy? That was a big struggle,” she said. But Schultz said it was difficult to distill those conflicts into a single character. It appears in Ricky’s relationship with his family and Chernoff’s struggle to build Tracks and keep it open. Homophobia is ever present in Schultz’s script.
She told us she worked for a year to convince Chernoff’s family to green-light a movie about him. He was straight, Jewish and always described himself as “a businessman not an activist.” And yet, Schultz said he was an ally and a champion of a community that was still years away from broad acceptance in the city. She said she was drawn to him because he occupied an unusual position in Denver’s gay culture. While most of her characters are fictionalized, Chernoff is a character in Schultz’s script, someone she could not leave out of the film. “Marty created a place for them to live,” Shultz said.Ī photo of the original Tracks location, behind Union Station, on display in History Colorado's new Rainbows and Revolutions exhibit. Ricky’s fictional character draws from interviews with several real people who landed at the club after they became homeless. It was a home in more than a figurative sense: Schultz said Chernoff was known to keep cots in the back for employees and guests who had nowhere else to go. It became a place of refuge for many gay people who were ousted from their families and mainstream society. It wasn’t just the music that so endeared Tracks to patrons. While lesbian bars have seen a particularly high rate of closure in recent decades, he said the romantic matchmaking and activist planning that allowed these businesses to thrive have moved online and made it harder for any such venture to survive. Tracks, he added, has had an unusually long lifespan for a LGBTQ bar. It quickly became a major centerpiece in Denver’s LGBTQ community. Tracks had the best music and sound systems, and it was one of the only gay bars in town that offered a true dance scene. Though it was surrounded by neglected infrastructure, Marcus said it was cutting-edge inside. When he realized nightlife could be good business, he purchased an old taxi warehouse across the street and called it Tracks.Ī photograph of a young Marty Chernoff from Mass FX Media's film "Remembering Marty Chernoff." Courtesy: Mass FX Media
When Chernoff was still an up-and-coming entrepreneur, he bought a gay bar called the Fox Hole in the area between Union Station and the South Platte River. “You had to take 15th and go down this weird dirt road to get there,” he remembered, laughing. Aaron Marcus, History Colorado’s LBGTQ curator, remembers his first visit. The neighborhood, known then as “the bottoms,” was years away from redevelopment. Denver looked different when Tracks opened behind Union Station in the early ’80s. They’re planning to film most of the movie in Denver. She said Mass FX Media and partners Listen Productions have raised about half of the $4 million they need to begin production. Schultz said Ricky and the rest of her characters are composites of Denver’s and Tracks’ real histories, gathered through interviews and historic documents. There, he discovers a community and a place to belong. Ricky finds his way to Tracks when he arrives in Denver without much but the clothes on his back. Schultz’s script centers around a character named Ricky, a teenager whose parents kicked him out of their home when he came out as gay. A photograph of Tracks Nightclub from Mass FX Media's film "Remembering Marty Chernoff." Courtesy: Mass FX Media