Miami on screen: The Birdcage and The Carlyle, the back story

The Birdcage (1996) moved La Cage aux Folles from Saint-Tropez to Miami Beach. Its exteriors were filmed on Ocean Drive and in the Art Deco District in 1995, with The Carlyle at 1250 Ocean Drive as the front of the club, and you can still walk them today.

How Hollywood found South Beach

When the director Mike Nichols and the screenwriter Elaine May set out to adapt La Cage aux Folles for American audiences, they needed a setting as vivid and unashamed as its characters. The 1978 French-Italian film, itself drawn from a 1973 French play, had been set in Saint-Tropez. Nichols and May moved the story to Miami Beach and its historic Art Deco District.

It was their first screen collaboration since their years as a comedy duo in the 1950s and 1960s. Filming ran from late April to late July 1995, and when The Birdcage opened on 8 March 1996, South Beach had become one of its stars.

The Carlyle on Ocean Drive

For the outside of the Birdcage, the drag club run by Armand Goldman (Robin Williams), with his partner Albert (Nathan Lane) as its star, the production chose The Carlyle at 1250 Ocean Drive. Designed by Richard Kiehnel of Kiehnel & Elliott, the three-storey hotel opened in 1941, and its pastel, streamlined front made a ready-made marquee.

The Carlyle had already appeared in Scarface in 1983, but The Birdcage made it one of the most photographed façades on Ocean Drive. It still stands at the corner of 13th Street, its front little changed.

Miami outside, Hollywood inside

The step from the sunny street into the club was a piece of film-making sleight of hand. The exteriors are real Miami Beach, on Ocean Drive and in the Art Deco District, but most of the film was shot in Los Angeles. The club, its dressing rooms and the Goldmans’ apartment upstairs were built on Hollywood sound stages, including Ren-Mar Studios on North Cahuenga Boulevard.

South Beach in daylight

Films about nightlife usually live after dark, but The Birdcage was shot almost entirely in daylight. Ocean Drive, the beach and the pastel hotels look just as they did in the mid-1990s, and anyone who has walked the strip will recognise it.

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A pastel hotel, a drag club that never existed and a summer of South Beach sunshine: how The Birdcage made Ocean Drive a star.

The sunshine is part of the joke. South Beach, bright and unashamed, is where the buttoned-up Keeley family must come to meet their daughter’s future in-laws, with Gene Hackman as Senator Kevin Keeley and Dianne Wiest as his wife, Louise.

Rehearsals and “John Wayne”

Williams and Lane, both gifted improvisers, were given weeks of rehearsal before filming began, and Nichols and May kept the best of what they invented. Nichols wanted to shoot the film like a play, with as little editing as possible.

The best-loved result is the scene in which Armand tries to teach Albert to walk like a man, John Wayne style, and Albert turns the lesson into a performance of his own. Hank Azaria steals scene after scene as Agador Spartacus, the Goldmans’ Guatemalan housekeeper, who would much rather be on stage.

A lasting legacy

The Birdcage opened at number one in North America and stayed there for four weeks, taking about $185 million worldwide on a $31 million budget. The cast won the Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Cast, and the film was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Art Direction. It is remembered as one of the first films from a major studio to put a gay couple at its centre.

A fan’s route

Start at The Carlyle, 1250 Ocean Drive, on the corner of 13th Street, and look up at the façade that fronted the Birdcage. Then walk Ocean Drive past the Art Deco hotels of the 1930s and 1940s, cross Lummus Park to the beach, and finish a few blocks south at 728 Ocean Drive, the Scarface steps.

Our advice: go in the morning, when the light is closest to the film’s and the pavement is still cool, and watch the trailer before you set out.