PARK CITY, Utah -- Macaulay Culkin taught Marilyn Manson a thing or two on the set of Party Monster. And no, it wasn't how to look into the camera and scream with both hands to your face.

"Mac taught Marilyn Manson how to smoke because he didn't know how," director Randy Barbato told journalists at the 2003 Sundance Film Festival.

The film, based on a fact-based book called Disco Bloodbath, is about as far from Home Alone as you could get. Which, of course, is the idea. Culkin plays real-life murderer and '80s New York club kid Michael Alig, who spiralled into a private, drug-soaked oblivion.

"Mac was terrific. We worked him to the bone," Barbato says. "He basically plays a crack-smoking gay killer."

Culkin's fellow-cast members Seth Green, Chloe Sevigny, Natasha Lyonne and Dylan McDermott all attended the film's raucous premiere. But will even high-profile actors make this bloody, hallucinatory tale palatable to the mainstream? "I don't know," Barbato muses. "Sex, rock 'n roll, crack, rock, crack, sex, gay killers -- I think we've got a blockbuster."


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