Saturday Night Fever was to be the first star vehicle for the actor Stigwood had recently signed a three-film deal with: John Travolta, eager to expand beyond the confinements of Vinnie Barbarino, the dim Italian stallion he played on Welcome Back, Kotter, the Bensonhurst high school sitcom that had made him an object of pinup lust.Īs Tony Manero, the peacocking nineteen-year-old prince of Bay Ridge in Saturday Night Fever, Travolta remains one of the most intriguingly irreconcilable icons of the Seventies. (The film would gross almost two and a half times that.) Cohn’s article, a chronicle (largely fabricated, as the journalist admitted years later) of 2001 Odyssey, a real-life Bay Ridge disco, was reworked by screenwriter Norman Wexler, whose earlier credits included scripting two other New York stories, 1970’s Joe and Serpico, from ’73.
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In Nik Cohn’s “Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night,” the cover story for the June 7, 1976, issue of New York magazine, the mogul had found a promising source text: “I see a $100 million movie here,” Stigwood said. Saturday Night Fever‘s producer, Robert Stigwood, the Australian-born music grandee who had been crucial to bringing the rock operas Jesus Christ Superstar (1973) and Tommy (1975) to the screen, was eager to make a disco movie. With this revival comes the opportunity to consider anew - or to choose or switch sides in - a partisan battle that’s been fought since December 1977, the month Saturday Night Fever premiered: Did this resolutely straight, white movie about a musical idiom and subculture that was predominantly gay and black betray and banalize disco or democratize it?īy the time Saturday Night Fever began filming in mid-March 1977, disco had been ascendant for at least three years some of its early top-ten singles include the instrumental “Love’s Theme” by Barry White and the Love Unlimited Orchestra, from 1973, and Gloria Gaynor’s Jackson 5 cover “Never Can Say Goodbye,” from ’74.
House murdered it,” per a T-shirt worn by a celebrant at a dance party deep in Prospect Park that I stumbled across a decade ago.) But one of its totems now officially enters middle age: John Badham’s Saturday Night Fever, first released forty years ago, returns to theaters nationwide on May 10 with an updated sound mix and four minutes added to the original 118. (Or, put less charitably: “Disco didn’t die.
Disco's democratizer - or its death? Courtesy Fathom Eventsĭisco isn’t dead and never has been - not even the mass psychosis evinced during the grotesque spectacle known as “Disco Demolition Night,” held in Chicago’s Comiskey Park in the summer of 1979, could snuff the music out.
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