THE TRUE STORIES BEHIND THE MAGIC

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“La Bare, for those not in the know, is a popular strip club in Dallas, dubbed the world’s most popular male strip club. One of the pluses for the film is just how engaged it gets you during its 90 minute run time. The men at La Bare range from a former army ranger who has only slept with 5 women in his lifetime (he’s 31 by the way) to a former restaurant owner whose intro to us lets us know “can’t dance at all, but I can fuck” to a young kid named “Channing” who did The Music Man in high school and got his start after seeing Magic Mike. These men are just presented as guys who have interesting quirks and a job they like. But not everything is glitz and glamor, as La Bare digs into the effects this job has had on its workers and the murder of one of their own.
Strippers, particularly male ones, have come into pop culture with a vengeance since Magic Mike. In fact it’s particularly hard to write this without referencing that film in this review. La Bare wisely hews close to what made that movie successful but does enough to move away from just being Magic Mike: The Real Life Story! Joe Manganiello, in his directorial debut, feels at his strongest when he crafting characters from the male dancers. Whether it’s through interviews or actual footage from the club, he has a gift for making these men and their personalities pop off the screen, which is no surprise when you consider his background as a Carnegie Mellon trained actor. You care about each of these guys, and much of that is credited to Manganiello’s eye as a storyteller….La Bare is an engaging forray into a particularly interesting workplace that should make for a fun watch for anyone who decides to check out the film.”

– Terence Johnson / AwardsCircuit.com

Director’s Statement

When I got the call letting me know that not only was Stephen Soderbergh not retiring but that he was offering me the role of “Big Dick Richie” in his new movie about male strippers, MAGIC MIKE, I honestly didn’t know what to think. I, like most of the mass general public was full of pre-conceived notions about the profession of male entertainment. Lucky for me, I remembered a conversation I had had with an old friend of mine in which he mumbled something under his breath about having been a male stripper during the 90s at some club with a funny name in Dallas, Texas. At the time, I had no interest in prodding any sort of conversation out of him due to my fear about what I might learn about one of my best friends… I let that one lie. BUT, just a few short years later, here I was with an offer to work with an Oscar winning director and a great cast of guys on a film looking to tackle this mysterious sub-culture. I called my friend and asked if I could take him out to lunch and pick his brain about everything he could remember. The result was two full hours of me laughing as hard as I’ve ever laughed at anything in my life.

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La Bare Director Joe Manganiello

The next part of the story you know… MAGIC MIKE became the indie underdog smash of 2012, going on to become not only a financial home run for all involved but a legitimate cultural phenomenon, igniting some very interesting discussions about hot button topics like objectification and post feminist relations between the sexes.
Throughout all of MAGIC MIKE’s success, the one prevailing compliment/complaint I received from just about everyone who saw the film was that they wanted more of the guys. People were unanimously interested in knowing more about our characters, who they were, where they lived, how they grew up, who they dated, etc. So, when my brother and I started our production company 3:59 in the late fall of last year, we decided that as our first order of business, we’d take a small crew to Dallas to see if we could find a story capable of satisfying everyone’s curiosity.

What we found was a goldmine.

Much to my surprise, there were no Victorian era male strippers. The profession owes its birth to the opportunities created by late 70s feminism and LA BARE, DALLAS was one of the first clubs in the world to open its doors. We had unknowingly stumbled onto the “Mt. Ararat” of the entire male entertainment profession and along with it, its “Noah.” Enter Randy “Master Blaster” Ricks, the self professed “205 lbs. of twisted steel and sex appeal.”

He’d been dancing since LA BARE opened its doors in ’78-’79 and was still going strong. Backing up Randy, was a motley crew of characters no screenwriter could have cooked up in their wildest dreams. They were unique, and funny, and likable, and full of wisdom about men and women. They opened their lives to us extrapolating on the perils of navigating their wild lives of sex, drugs, and rock and roll, living as rock stars in a bubble filled to the brim of every temptation a young man could possibly fathom.

LA BARE is available now for pre-order on iTunes.Pre-order
Official La Bare Movie Poster

An insider’s look at the history, the lives and the culture of the most popular male strip club in the world, La Bare Dallas.

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LA BARE will be available on the following platforms on August 19th.

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