Robert Stigwood, the 42-year-old Australian impresario known as “the Daryl Zanuck of pop,” was out of his mind. That was the talk in Hollywood, Bill Oakes remembers, on September 25, 1976, when his boss held a lavish press conference at the Beverly Hills Hotel to announce that the Robert Stigwood Organisation—RSO—had just signed John Travolta to a million-dollar contract to star in three films. Oakes, then in his mid-20s, had worked for the Beatles and had once been Paul McCartney’s assistant. By this time he was running RSO Records, which boasted Eric Clapton and the Bee Gees among its roster of pop stars. “Everyone thought it was madness,” says Oakes, “because nobody had ever made the transition from television to movie stardom. So, a lot of us thought to pay a million dollars for Vinnie Barbarino [Travolta’s character on the TV sitcom Welcome Back, Kotter] is going to make us a laughingstock.”
Stigwood wanted Travolta to star in the movie version of Grease, the long-running Broadway musical (in which Travolta had already appeared as Doody, one of the T-Bird gang members, in a road company). Five years earlier, Stigwood had auditioned the actor—then just 17—for Jesus Christ Superstar, and though Ted Neeley got the job, Stigwood had penciled himself a note on a yellow pad: “This kid will be a very big star.”
But Stigwood’s option for Grease stipulated that production could not begin before the spring of 1978, because the musical was still going strong. While they waited, Stigwood and his lieutenants began to look around for a new property.
A few months before, an English rock critic by the name of Nik Cohn had published a magazine article entitled “Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night.” Appearing in the June 7, l976, issue of New York, the article followed the Saturday-night rituals of a group of working-class Italian-Americans in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, who held dead-end jobs but lived for their nights of dancing at a local disco called 2001 Odyssey. Cohn’s hero, named Vincent, was a tough, violent guy but a great dancer who yearned for a chance to shine, and to escape the mean streets of Brooklyn.
On an icy winter night in 1975, Cohn had made his first trip to Bay Ridge with a disco dancer called Tu Sweet, who would serve as his Virgil. “According to Tu Sweet,” Cohn later wrote, “the [disco] craze had started in black gay clubs, then progressed to straight blacks and gay whites and from there to mass consumption—Latinos in the Bronx, West Indians on Staten Island, and, yes, Italians in Brooklyn.” In l975, black dancers like Tu Sweet were not welcome in those Italian clubs; nonetheless, he liked the dancers there—their passion and their moves. “Some of those guys, they have no lives,” he told Cohn. “Dancing’s all they got.”
A brawl was in progress when they arrived at 2001 Odyssey. One of the brawlers lurched over to Cohn’s cab and threw up on his trouser leg. With that welcome, the two men hightailed it back to Manhattan, but not before Cohn caught a glimpse of a figure, dressed in “flared, crimson pants and a black body shirt,” coolly watching the action from the club doorway. “There was a certain style about him—an inner force, a hunger, and a sense of his own specialness. He looked, in short, like a star,” recalled Cohn. He’d found his Vincent, the protagonist of his New Journalism—style piece.
Later, Cohn went back to the disco with the artist James McMullan, whose illustrations for the article helped persuade Cohn’s underwhelmed editor in chief, Clay Felker, to run it. The title was changed from “Another Saturday Night” to “Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night,” and a note was added insisting that “everything described in this article is factual.”
In the l970s it was almost unheard of to buy a magazine article for a movie, but “Tribal Rites” attracted enough attention that producer Ray Stark (Funny Girl) and a few others bid on it. Cohn had known Stigwood back in London and liked him. Stigwood came from humble stock: farm people in Adelaide, Australia. He’d made his way to London in the early l960s and ended up managing the Beatles organization for Brian Epstein. Ousted in the power struggle that followed Epstein’s death, Stigwood went on to create RSO Records, and in l968 he branched out into theater, putting together the West End productions of Jesus Christ Superstar, Hair, and Grease. His movie-producing career began five years later, with the film version of Jesus Christ Superstar, followed by Tommy, the rock musical written by the Who and directed by the flamboyant Ken Russell, which became one of the biggest movies of l975.
So the deal was made, and Cohn was paid $90,000 for the rights.
Now they had to find a director.
In Los Angeles, Stigwood’s assistant, Kevin McCormick, a brilliant, lean 23-year-old from New Jersey, went from office to office looking for one. “Kid, my directors do movies,” one agent promptly told him. “They don’t do magazine articles.” But while McCormick was packing to return to New York, the phone rang, and it was the agent saying, “Kid, you’re in luck. My client came in and looked at this, and he’s interested. But you should see his movie first.”
“So we saw Rocky on Monday, and we made a deal,” recalls McCormick, now executive vice president of production at Warner Bros. The client was director John Avildsen, and he brought in screenwriter Norman Wexler, who had earned his first Academy Award nomination for the screenplay for Joe, the popular 1970 film about a bigoted hard hat, played by Peter Boyle. (Incidentally, the film gave Susan Sarandon her first screen role.) Wexler had also co-adapted Peter Maas’s Serpico for the screen (which brought him a second Oscar nomination). That seemed fitting, as Al Pacino was something of the patron saint of Cohn’s article, as well as of the film—in the story, Vincent is flattered when someone mistakes him for Pacino, and in the movie, the poster from Serpico dominates Tony Manero’s Bay Ridge bedroom, going face-to-face with Farrah Fawcett’s famous cheesecake poster.
Wexler, a tall man, often wrapped in a trench coat, puffed on Tarrytons so continuously he was usually wreathed in cigarette smoke. McCormick thought of him as “a sort of tragic figure, but enormously sympathetic.” A manic-depressive, Wexler was on and off his meds; when he stopped, all hell broke loose. Karen Lynn Gorney, who played Stephanie Mangano, Tony’s love interest in the movie, remembers, “He would come into his agent’s office, or try to pitch a script to somebody, and start giving nylons and chocolates to the secretaries.” He could turn violent, and was known to sometimes carry a .32-caliber pistol. In the grip of a manic episode, he once bit a stewardess on the arm; on another flight he announced that he had a plan to assassinate President Nixon. “You’ve heard of street theater?” he yelled, holding up a magazine picture of the president. “Well, this is airplane theater!” He was arrested and escorted off the plane.
But McCormick was pleased when the script came in. At l49 pages, “it was way, way, way, way too long, but quite wonderful. I think what Norman did so well was to create a family situation that had real truth, an accurate look at how men related to women in that moment, in ways that you would never get away with now.” Wexler transformed Vincent into Tony Manero and gave him a young sister and a favored older brother who breaks his mother’s heart by leaving the priesthood. During one row at the dinner table, Tony explodes at his mother when she refuses to accept that her eldest has turned in his collar: “You got nuthin’ but three shit children!” he yells. Tony’s mother—played by acclaimed stage actress and Off Broadway playwright Julie Bovasso—bursts into tears, and Tony is overcome with remorse.
Before John Travolta became a teen idol, he was a dancer. “I think my first turn-on to dance was James Cagney in Yankee Doodle Dandy, when I was five or six,” recalls Travolta on a break from filming the musical version of John Waters’s Hairspray in Toronto. “I used to try to imitate him in front of the television set. I liked black dancing better than white dancing. I used to watch Soul Train, and what I wanted to create was a Soul Train feel in Saturday Night Fever.” That famous strut to the Bee Gees’ “Stayin’ Alive” in the opening scene? “It was the walk of coolness. I went to a school that was 50 percent black, and that’s how the black kids walked through the hall.”
“Nobody pushed me into show business,” Travolta says. “I was aching for it.” Born in l954 in Englewood, New Jersey, he was one of six kids, five of whom pursued careers in show business. His mother, Helen, was an actress who taught in a high-school theater-arts program and who set a record for swimming the Hudson River. His father, Salvatore (known as “Sam”), once played semi-pro football and was a co-owner of Travolta Tyre Exchange. John’s parents agreed to let him drop out of Dwight Morrow High School, in Englewood, at 16, for one year, to pursue a theatrical career. He never went back. Soon after, in 1970, Travolta caught the attention of agent Bob LeMond when he appeared as Hugo Peabody in a production of Bye Bye Birdie at Club Benet in Morgan, New York. LeMond quickly got him work in dozens of TV commercials, including one for Mutual of New York, in which Travolta played a teenager crying over the death of his father.
Travolta moved to Los Angeles in 1974 and auditioned for The Last Detail, but lost the role to Randy Quaid. He landed a small role as Nancy Allen’s creepy, sadistic boyfriend in Brian De Palma’s Carrie, just before auditioning for Welcome Back, Kotter, the ABC sitcom about a group of unteachable Brooklyn high-school students called the “Sweathogs” and their local-boy teacher, played by the show’s creator, Gabe Kaplan.
After signing to play the dumb but sexy Italian kid, Vinnie Barbarino (who thrilled the girls with his goofy grin, curly forelock, and swiveling snake hips), Travolta landed the lead role in Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven. But ABC wouldn’t let him out of the Welcome Back, Kotter production schedule, and Richard Gere took his place. “I thought, What’s happening here? Will I ever get my big break?” Travolta recalls.
What Travolta didn’t know was that he had already gotten his big break. The network was receiving l0,000 fan letters a week—just for him. Soon there were beefcake Vinnie Barbarino posters everywhere—that cleft chin, those cerulean eyes. His public appearances were mobbed. When his 1976 debut album was released, thousands of female fans packed E. J. Korvette’s record department in Hicksville, Long Island, and an estimated 30,000 fans showed up at what was then the world’s largest indoor mall, in Schaumburg, Illinois. When Carrie was released, Travolta’s name appeared above the title on some movie marquees.
ABC asked him to star in his own show, based on the Barbarino character, but Travolta turned it down, worried about ever getting a major film role. Then Robert Stigwood called.
While still appearing on Welcome Back, Kotter, Travolta had played the lead in an ABC TV movie called The Boy in the Plastic Bubble, the true story of a teenage boy who had been born without an immune system. It aired November 12, l976, and his co-star was Diana Hyland, who played his mother. Hyland—often described as “a Grace Kelly type”—had appeared on Broadway with Paul Newman in Sweet Bird of Youth, but was best known as Susan, an alcoholic wife on the TV series Peyton Place. A romance flowered between 22-year-old Travolta and 40-year-old Hyland, which baffled many who knew the young actor, and was toned down so as not to raise too many eyebrows in the press or alienate his teen fan base.
“We were fairly dead in the water at that point,” Barry Gibb recalls. “We needed something new.”
It was Diana who persuaded Travolta to take the role of Tony Manero. “I got the script, I read it that night,” Travolta recalls. “I wondered if I could give it enough dimension. Diana took it into the other room, and in about an hour she burst back in. ‘Baby, you are going to be great in this—great! This Tony, he’s got all the colors! First he’s angry about something. He hates the trap that Brooklyn and his dumb job are. There’s a whole glamorous world out there waiting for him, which he feels only when he dances. And he grows, he gets out of Brooklyn.’” Travolta remembers answering, “‘He’s also king of the disco. I’m not that good a dancer.’ ‘Baby,’ she said, ‘you’re going to learn!’”
Stigwood “just had blithe confidence that the movie’s going to be up and ready to go,” according to McCormick. “And he had no financier. He was financing it himself with his new partners, for two and a half million dollars. I knew that the budget was at least $2.8 [million] already. I had a stomachache every day. We were making this low-budget movie out of l35 Central Park West—we literally put together the soundtrack in Stigwood’s living room.”
And they had to hurry: Travolta and Stigwood were slated to film Grease soon after. This was just a little movie to get out of the way.
After six months of prepping, a huge problem reared its head: the director turned out to be all wrong. McCormick noticed that Avildsen was becoming increasingly difficult. “First he couldn’t figure out who the choreographer should be. We met endlessly with [New York City Ballet principal dancer] Jacques D’Amboise. [Alvin Ailey star] Judith Jamison we talked to for a while. So, it just got to a point where Avildsen wanted to be put out of his misery. He was acting provocatively: ‘Travolta’s too fat. He can’t dance, he can’t do this, he can’t do that.’”
Avildsen brought in a trainer, ex-boxer Jimmy Gambina, who had worked with Sylvester Stallone on Rocky, to get Travolta into shape, “which was really good,” McCormick says, “because Travolta is prone to be soft and not that energetic, and Gambina ran him like he was a fighter.” But Avildsen still wasn’t satisfied, and wondered if maybe Travolta’s character “shouldn’t be a dancer—maybe he should be a painter. It was just weird. It became Clifford Odets,” recalls McCormick. Travolta, ultimately, wasn’t happy with Avildsen, either; he felt the director wanted to smooth Tony’s rough edges, make him the kind of nice guy who carries groceries for old ladies in the neighborhood—another Rocky Balboa.
Just weeks before filming was set to begin, Stigwood summoned Avildsen to an emergency meeting. That morning, Stigwood had learned, Avildsen had been nominated for an Oscar for Rocky. McCormick says, “Robert walked in and said, ‘John, there’s good news and bad news. The good news is you’ve just been nominated for an Academy Award. Congratulations. The bad news is you’re fired.’” (Avildsen won the Oscar.)
“Now what do we do?” McCormick asked Stigwood.
“We get another director.”
So, John Badham came on the scene, three weeks before principal photography was to begin. Badham was born in England, raised in Alabama, and educated at the Yale School of Drama. Like Travolta, he came from a theatrical family. His mother was an actress and his sister, Mary, had played Scout, Atticus Finch’s daughter, in To Kill a Mockingbird. It was her connection to Gregory Peck that had gotten her brother’s foot in the door in the industry: in the mailroom at Warner Bros. At 34, Badham still had few credits to his name—some television and a baseball movie starring Billy Dee Williams, Richard Pryor, and James Earl Jones (The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars & Motor Kings). He had just jumped from—or been pushed out of—directing The Wiz, because he objected to 33-year-old Diana Ross being cast as Dorothy. McCormick sent him the Saturday Night Fever script and promptly flew him to New York.
When Travolta met Badham, he was surprised that his new director knew so little about New York. The actor took it upon himself to show Badham Manhattan and Brooklyn. “I said, ‘Let me be your guide. Let me take you by the hand and show you New York and its environs—the real New York. I know this town.’” He was a quick study, says McCormick. “Badham, the most unmusical guy in the world, brought in the choreographer, who was fantastic”—Lester Wilson. Travolta had already been working with Deney Terio, a disco dancer who would later host a TV disco competition called Dance Fever, but it was Wilson, many in the crew believe, who breathed life into the movie.
Wilson was a black choreographer who had worked with Sammy Davis Jr. as a featured dancer in Golden Boy on Broadway and in London. A legend in gay dance clubs, he’d won an Emmy for choreographing Lola Falana’s television specials. Paul Pape, who played Double J, the most aggressive member of Tony Manero’s entourage, says, “Deney Terio did show John the moves, and I give him credit for that. But I don’t think Lester Wilson got nearly the credit that he deserved. The movie was Lester.”
Travolta describes Wilson as “such an interesting guy. He taught me what he called his ‘hang time.’ He would smoke a cigarette to greet the day, and he infused my dancing with African-American rhythm. I’m the kind of dancer who needs thought and construction—an idea—before I dance. I need an internal story. Lester would put on some music and he would say, ‘Move with me, motherfucker—move with me!’”
Before they could start filming, they had to get the setting just right. Lloyd Kaufman, co-founder of Troma Entertainment and the film’s executive in charge of locations, says, “We looked at every disco in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens, and even considered converting a loft to our own specifications, before deciding to go with 2001 Odyssey, in Bay Ridge. That was always our first choice, since that’s where the story really happens.” The movie, except for two days’ filming on the West Side of Manhattan and the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge scenes, was shot entirely in Bay Ridge.
“There were 10,000 kids on the streets, and we only have four security guys,” says Kevin McCormick.
Filming in Brooklyn brought a whole new set of challenges. It was a rough place, and the production started to have some neighborhood problems. A firebomb was thrown at the discotheque, but it didn’t cause any serious damage. McCormick asked John Nicolella, the production manager on the shoot and a tough Italian character, “‘What the fuck is this about?’ And he said, ‘Well, you know, it’s a neighborhood thing. They want us to hire some of the kids.’ Then these two guys appeared on the set, pulled me off to the side. ‘You know, you’re being disruptive to the neighborhood. You might need some security. And if you want to put lights on the bowling alley across the street, Black Stan really wants seven grand.’” They paid him.
Tom Priestley, then a camera operator on his first feature film, says, “We all grew up on locations in New York because Hollywood had all the studios. We had one or two stages that were decent. But most of the time, all our work was in the streets. We didn’t have all the bells and whistles that Hollywood had. And that’s what made us, I think, tough and adaptable. You figure if you can work in New York you can work anywhere.”
To research his character, Travolta began sneaking into 2001 Odyssey with Wexler. So great was his popularity as Vinnie Barbarino he had to disguise himself in dark glasses and a hat. Before he was spotted, he watched the Faces—the cool, aggressive dancers Cohn had based his article on—concentrating on every detail of their behavior. When he was recognized—“Hey, man! Hey, it’s fuckin’ Travolta!”—the actor noticed how the disco’s alpha males kept their girls in line. “Their girlfriends would come up, and they’d say, ‘Hey, stay away from him, don’t bug Travolta,’ and they’d actually push the girls away. Tony Manero’s whole male-chauvinist thing I got from watching those guys in the discos,” says Travolta.
Priestley remembers, “I would’ve thought the real guys [in Brooklyn] would have resented a film like this, like we’ve come to make fun of them or something, but they loved it. There was one brother-and-sister team that was very good. Remember, all those people in the show are extras. You see them dancing next to Travolta and Donna Pescow [who played Annette]. They were really good dancers.”
There were no special effects in Saturday Night Fever, except for the smoke rising from the dance floor. Bill Ward, the film’s sole gaffer, explains that it wasn’t from dry ice or a smoke machine—it was “a toxic mix of burning tar and automobile tires, pinched from a Bay Ridge alley.” It created such heat and smoke that at one point they had to wheel in oxygen for Travolta. The filmmakers also went to great trouble and expense—$15,000—to put lights in the dance floor, designed to pulsate to the music. The walls were covered with aluminum foil and Christmas lights. When the club’s owner saw the dailies for the first time, he said, “Holy shit, you guys made my place look great!”
Filming began on March 14, l977. “The first day’s location was outside the dance studio,” recalls McCormick. “I got a phone call from the production manager, and he said, ‘This is chaos!’ I came out and there were l0,000 kids on the streets, and we only have four security guys. So we had to shut down for a couple of hours while we just regrouped and tried to figure out a way to make it work. It was the first time that we actually had a sense of who John was.” By the end of the first day, they had to shut down and go home because “there was no place you could point the camera without seeing l5,000 people. We’d have to put out fake call sheets and get out there at 5:30 in the morning” to avoid the crush of fans.
Brooklyn-born actress Donna Pescow, who breaks your heart as Annette, the foolish local girl whose adoration of Tony nearly destroys her, was in the makeup trailer with Travolta when fans surrounded them and started rocking the trailer back and forth. “That was terrifying,” she remembers. “So, they got the right people in the neighborhood, who said, ‘Don’t do that anymore.’ They were practically paying protection—I mean, it was really tough.” Karen Lynn Gorney, however, felt that the sheer energy released by thousands of Travolta’s female fans yelling “Barbarino!” added to the set. “It helped the film,” she says. “A lot of female hormones raging around—that might have been a good thing. Women aren’t supposed to express their sexuality, but that’s what you get, all that screaming and crying, because they’re sitting on their gonads.”
A personal tragedy was unfolding for Travolta, however: Diana Hyland’s struggle with breast cancer. By the time he began preparing to play Tony Manero, she was dying. Travolta made many trips from New York to Los Angeles to be with her through her illness, so he was in a state of constant jet lag and distress. Two weeks after shooting began, he flew to the West Coast to be with Diana one last time. “He did not know Diana was sick when he fell in love,” Travolta’s mother, Helen, later told McCall’s magazine, “but he stuck with her when he did know.” On March 27, l977, Hyland died in his arms.
Andy Warhol was on Travolta’s return flight to New York. He later wrote in his diary, “John Travolta kept going to the bathroom, coming out with his eyes bright red, drinking orange juice and liquor in a paper cup, and he put his head in a pillow and started crying. I saw him reading a script, too, so I thought he was acting, really cute and sensitive-looking, very tall…. You can see the magic in him. I asked the stewardess why he was crying and she said, ‘death in the family,’so I thought it was a mother or father, until I picked up the paper at home and found out that it was Diana Hyland, who’d died of cancer at forty-one, soap-opera queen, his steady date.”
Karen Lynn Gorney later said that she could feel Diana’s spirit on the set, “protecting him, because he was going through deep grief and he had to get through it. If he fell into the grief, he wouldn’t be able to pull himself out of it. But he was very professional and he was right there on the money. I remember the scene at the Verrazano Bridge when I lean over and kiss him. The poor thing was suffering so, and that kiss was totally spontaneous. That wasn’t Tony and Stephanie—that was because I really saw he was hurting.”
There’s another lovely scene between Travolta and Gorney, when Stephanie agrees to accompany Tony to a Brooklyn restaurant. “We wanted to see how much of it we could do in one shot,” Badham says about that scene, which was filmed through the restaurant’s window, so you see them through a glorious, dreamlike reflection of a city skyline—“magic and distant.” They try to impress each other with their savvy and their cool, but they are hilariously unpolished. (Stephanie informs Tony that worldly New Yorkers drink tea with lemon.) “These kids are trying to pretend like they’re a lot more sophisticated than they are,” Badham says, “though obviously anybody that says ‘Bonwit Taylor’ hasn’t quite got it all together.” As the scene unfolds, the light subtly changes, late afternoon moving into dusk.
Badham and Travolta clashed on a number of occasions. When Travolta first saw the rushes of the opening scene, in which a stand-in—shot from the knees down—takes that famous walk along Brooklyn’s 86th Street to the beat of “Stayin’ Alive,” he insisted that his character wouldn’t walk like that. He made Badham reshoot the scene, this time with Travolta strutting down the avenue. Later, when Travolta got his first look at how his big dance solo had been edited, he had a meltdown. “I was crying and very angry because of the way the dance highlight was shot. I knew how it should appear on-screen, and it wasn’t shot that way. You couldn’t even see my feet!” The sequence had been edited for close-ups, so that all his hard work—the knee drops, the splits, the solo he had labored over for nine months—had been cut off at the knees. He knew that for the scene to work, he had to be seen head to toe, so no one would think someone else had done the dancing for him. One of the most famous dance numbers in the history of film almost didn’t make it to the screen.
“I called Stigwood,” Travolta says, “crying and furious, and said, ‘Robert, I’m off the movie. I don’t want to be a part of it anymore.’”
Stigwood gave Travolta license to re-edit the scene, over Badham’s objections. At 23, Travolta knew what he wanted and what he could do, and he was protecting his character and his dazzling moves.
“The Bee Gees weren’t even involved in the movie in the beginning,” says Travolta. “I was dancing to Stevie Wonder and Boz Scaggs.” Once they came in, however, everything changed.
Afterward, Stigwood thought of the Bee Gees as co-creators of the movie. “Those first five songs,” says Bill Oakes, “which I put on the first side of the soundtrack double album—‘Stayin’ Alive,’ ‘How Deep Is Your Love,’ ‘Night Fever,’ ‘More than a Woman,’ and ‘If I Can’t Have You’ [written by the brothers Gibb but sung by Oakes’s wife at the time, Yvonne Elliman]—that’s the side you couldn’t stop playing.” But in l976, before Stigwood bought the rights to Cohn’s article, “the Bee Gees were broken,” remembers McCormick. “They were touring Malaysia and Venezuela, the two places where they were still popular. They were a mess. Everybody [in the group] had their own little soap opera.” But Stigwood “still had this innate ability to spot where a trend was going, like he had this pop gyroscope implanted in him,” he adds.
The Bee Gees are three brothers—Barry, Robin, and Maurice Gibb—who were born on the Isle of Man and grew up in Australia, and whose first big hit, “New York Mining Disaster l941,” had some people believing that it was secretly recorded by the Beatles under a pseudonym. It was followed by two more hits: “To Love Somebody” and “How Can You Mend a Broken Heart.” Quick fame and riches put tremendous strains on the group—they broke up, tried solo acts, regrouped, and by the time of Saturday Night Fever were considered a dated 60s band, awash in drugs and alcohol and legal problems. Nonetheless, Stigwood signed them to his record label and released “Jive Talkin’” to radio stations anonymously, because no one wanted to hear from the Bee Gees. Oakes recalls that in the early l970s “it was hard just getting the Bee Gees back on the radio, because they were virtually blacklisted.” But when “Jive Talkin’” hit, people were surprised to learn that “these falsetto-singing disco chaps were in fact your old Bee Gees—that again was Stigwood’s genius.” The song and the album it came from, Main Course, were huge hits. Even though they weren’t a disco band—they didn’t go to clubs, they didn’t even dance!—Stigwood felt they had “the beat of the dance floor in their blood,” Oakes says.
When Stigwood told the band about Cohn’s article and asked them to write songs for the movie, they were back living on the Isle of Man, for tax reasons. Barry Gibb suggested a few titles, including “Stayin’ Alive” and “Night Fever,” but it wasn’t until they convened at the Chateau D’Heuroville studio, in France, to mix a live album called Here at Last Live, did they flesh out those songs—and they wrote them virtually in a single weekend.
Stigwood and Oakes turned up in Heuroville, and the Bee Gees played their demos: “How Deep Is Your Love,” “Stayin’ Alive,” “Night Fever,” “More than a Woman.” “They flipped out and said these will be great. We still had no concept of the movie, except some kind of rough script that they’d brought with them,” according to Barry Gibb. “You’ve got to remember, we were fairly dead in the water at that point, 1975, somewhere in that zone—the Bee Gees’ sound was basically tired. We needed something new. We hadn’t had a hit record in about three years. So we felt, Oh jeez, that’s it. That’s our life span, like most groups in the late 60s. So, we had to find something. We didn’t know what was going to happen.”
Oakes mixed the soundtrack on the Paramount lot. Senior executives would call across the commissary to ask, “‘How’s your little disco movie, Billy?’ They thought it was rather silly; disco had run its course. These days, Fever is credited with kicking off the whole disco thing—it really didn’t. Truth is, it breathed new life into a genre that was actually dying.”
The music had a profound effect on cast and crew. Priestley remembers, “We all thought we’d fallen into a bucket of shit, and then we heard that music. It changed everything. We didn’t hear the soundtrack until we were about three weeks into the movie. But once you heard it, you said, ‘Whoa!’ An aura came over it. I mean, I’m not a disco fan, but that music transcends disco.” For the first time, everyone dared to think this movie could be big. Gorney, whose father was Jay Gorney, the songwriter who wrote such hits as “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime” and “You’re My Thrill,” had the same reaction: “The first time I heard the music I said, ‘Those are monster hits.’”
“How long was the Fever shoot?” asks Karen Lynn Gorney rhetorically. “Three months and 30 years, and it’s not over yet. I seemed to be always working on the film, because of the dancing. Physically, I was weak when I started. I was terrified, because the first time I danced with John he’d been working for half a year on this stuff. I felt like I was trying to dance with a wild stallion—he was that strong.”
An actress and dancer who was well known at the time as Tara Martin Tyler Brent Jefferson on ABC’s endlessly running soap opera All My Children, Gorney landed the part after sharing a cab with Stigwood’s nephew. When he described the movie to her, she asked, “Am I in it?” She then auditioned for Stigwood in his apartment in the San Remo, on Central Park West. “I remember this giant silk Chinese screen along the wall—the whole history of China. I did the best acting of my life in front of him.” She landed the part of Stephanie, a Brooklyn climber who has already made the big move to “the city” and is hell-bent on self-improvement—taking college courses and drinking tea with lemon. Tony reminds her of the neighborhood she’s trying to escape. It’s a touching and comic role—at one point, while showing off her erudition in her Brooklyn accent, she insists that Romeo and Juliet was written by Zefferelli. “I was trying to convince myself to stay away from Tony,” she says about her role, “because he wasn’t going to get me anywhere. I wanted you to see the voices in her head saying, ‘Oh, he’s too young. He doesn’t have any class.’”
“I’m not that good a dancer,” Travolta told Hyland. “Baby,” she said, “you’re going to learn!”
There was some early grumbling about Gorney when filming began. Certain crew members felt she was too old for the part, and that her dancing wasn’t up to par. (She had sustained serious injuries in a motorcycle accident a few years earlier.) But Pauline Kael, in her review of the film, found the performance affecting: “Gorney wins you over by her small, harried, tight face and her line readings, which are sometimes miraculously edgy and ardent. The determined, troubled Stephanie … is an updated version of those working girls that Ginger Rogers used to play.” Her toughness, her ambition—even her comic cluelessness—contribute to the authenticity of the film. As does an accent so thick it needs subtitles.
The other important female character is Annette, played by Donna Pescow. She auditioned for the role six times—three for Avildsen, three for Badham. When she got the part, at 22, she said it was the first Christmas in years she wouldn’t have to work at Bloomingdale’s selling ornaments. She had spent two years at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, in New York, trying to get rid of her Brooklyn accent, but when she finally landed the role, she had to reclaim it. Legendary casting director Shirley Rich told her, “Donna. Move back home, hang out with your parents. You sound like you don’t come from anywhere.”
“I grew up never calling it ‘Manhattan.’ It was always ‘the city’—‘We’re going to the city,’” Pescow recalls. “I was living with my folks because it was close to the set, and I didn’t drive. And so the Teamsters used to pick me up. My first night of shooting, my grandfather Jack Goldress drove me to the set in Bay Ridge. He was a former lighting man in vaudeville and then a movie projectionist at the RKO Albee, so movies were not a big thing for him. He was more interested in finding parking.”
Badham rehearsed Pescow and the Faces for a couple of weeks, “just to get us to be kind of a gang. We went to the clubs together. Travolta couldn’t go because he was too recognizable, but the other guys went. I’d never been in a discotheque, ever.”
One of the first scenes shot with Donna was the gang-rape scene, still a harrowing thing to watch. An acting coach at the American Academy once told her, “If you play a victim, you’re lost,” and she seems to have followed that advice. Though we cringe at the way her character is abused, we see her strength and her resilience. In her effort to become the kind of woman who can attract Tony, she allows herself to be abused by the boys she probably grew up with, went to school with, danced with. Yet her character has the most insight into how women’s roles were changing: Tony contemptuously asks her, “What are you anyway, a nice girl or you a cunt?” To which she replies, “I don’t know—both?”
“John Badham and I had a running disagreement” about that scene, Pescow remembers. “I said, ‘She’s a virgin.’ He said, ‘No, she’s not.’ That’s why I never played it as if she were really raped—she wasn’t—she was off in her own little world,” offering up her virginity, by proxy, to Tony Manero.
Pape admits how difficult it was to film that scene. “What Donna did was an incredible piece of acting. We were really worried it was going to affect our friendship. We talked about it a lot before we did it. We had to go into this choreographed situation where you’re violating your friend with no concern for her feelings whatsoever. We had to go to a place where we weren’t protecting her at all. She was willing to give it up to the wrong guy. And what did she really want? She just wanted to be loved.”
Everyone on the set seemed to respond to Pescow’s vulnerability. Says Priestley, “The crew just loved her. She was so great. But we all felt sorry for her. There’s that great scene where she walks up to Tony and says, ‘You’re gonna ask me to sit down?’ And he says, ‘No,’ but she said, ‘You’d ask me to lie down.’ She was perfect—it was so Brooklyn. I mean, the little outfit with the white fur jacket? It makes you feel bad for every girl you screwed over.”
Tony Manero’s Faces—his entourage of homeboys who watch his back, admire his dancing, keep the girls from bothering him, and rumble with the Puerto Ricans—were played with pathos and humor by Pape (Double J), Barry Miller (Bobby C.), and Joseph Cali (Joey). When he first moved to New York from Rochester, Pape says, “Pacino was the actor to be—he was the hottest thing. He was the presiding spirit of the movie. When Tony comes out of his room in his underwear and his Italian grandmother crosses herself, he says, ‘Attica! Attica!’—that’s from Dog Day Afternoon.” Pape managed to land this, his first film role, on his first audition—almost unheard of—and his character was a kind of “lieutenant figure who could easily have been the leader. But he had one flaw: he had a bad temper. That’s why he was in second position.”
Like his cohorts, Cali, a stage-trained actor, would end up being typecast by the role of Joey. “People thought I was that street guy. I had to be Joey,” he later said. Miller, as the hapless Bobby C., has the most shocking moment in the film when he falls—or jumps—to his death from the Verrazano Bridge. He’s depressed because his girlfriend is pregnant and he knows he has to marry her, ending his carefree days as one of Tony’s entourage.
The actors rehearsed for a few weeks in Manhattan, around Eighth Street and Broadway. “We just played basketball together and did that scene where we’re making fun of the gay guys,” Pape says. “We were all brand new—it’s what we’d been dreaming about, having a chance to prove ourselves. We all improvised well together.” (Travolta, in fact, was an inspired improviser. Manero’s overbearing father slaps him on the head during an argument at the dinner table. Travolta improvised, “Would you just watch the hair? You know, I work on my hair a long time, and you hit it! He hits my hair!”)
In prepping for their roles, the Faces went to Times Square with the costume designer, Patrizia von Brandenstein (who would later win an Oscar for her art direction on Amadeus.) The wardrobe was bought off the rack, adding to the film’s authenticity. “We were buying all these polyester things, picking out all this costume jewelry. She had a great feel for it,” Pape says. Von Brandenstein found Travolta’s famous white suit at a boutique in Bay Ridge just under the El. “It was l977,” says Priestley. “You had to have bling—all the gold around your neck, the pointy shoes. You had to have the suit. It was called ‘the Hollywood Rise.’”
Pape took inspiration from the crush of local Barbarino fans hanging around the shoot. “It wasn’t just that they were there to see Travolta,” he says. “If they could get within five feet of you, they wanted to be sure you were doing them right. They didn’t want Hollywood bullshit. These were the guys who went to the clubs on the weekends, who worked in the paint stores, who had the dead-end jobs. This was important to them. It wasn’t just about hanging around movie people. It was like, Yeah, you’re welcome to be here. But regardless of what you think, respect it. This is our life, this is our world. One of the guys said, ‘You can touch it, but don’t spit on it.’”
The Verrazano-Narrows Bridge looms over Saturday Night Fever as a nearly mythical structure. Named after the l6th-century Italian explorer Giovanni da Verrazano, the bridge is a source of ethnic pride for Italian-Americans. When it opened, on November 21, 1964, it was the longest suspension bridge in the world, connecting Brooklyn and Staten Island. An American achievement with an Italian name, it symbolizes the realization of unreachable dreams. Tony knows that bridge, and in one scene he lovingly describes its history, its dimensions, its grandeur. It’s where Tony’s entourage—full of alcohol and sheer animal energy—hang from the girders and dare one another to climb higher. The crew spent three harrowing nights filming on the Verrazano, and it was a nightmare, as the March weather veered from freezing on one occasion to nearly 90 degrees on another. The high winds posed additional threats to the camera crew and stuntmen. Doubling as Travolta’s stand-in and wearing Tony Manero’s shoes and pants, Priestley, the camera operator for the scene, took a handheld camera out on the bridge’s main beam and filmed himself with just a key grip holding his waist. “I was young. You couldn’t sense danger then. But you’re 600 feet off the water. I had my camera in my hand and we just did it. We wanted to show Hollywood we could make great films.”
“They were talking about putting a guy wire on us,” Pape reminisces, “and I said, ‘No.’ I just jumped up on the cable to show them I could swing around. There was no safety net. I was [hundreds] of feet above the water. All that was improvised—it wasn’t planned. I just jumped up there and said, ‘Let’s do it, let’s get it done.’”
The cast and crew thought that Paramount didn’t care about Saturday Night Fever. “They gave us an office on the lot the size of a broom closet,” Oakes says. “They didn’t believe in it. Only Stigwood knew it was going to be something big. It was just the studio’s ‘little disco movie’—that was the phrase that haunted me.”
In fact, word was getting back to Michael Eisner, newly ensconced as Paramount’s head of production, that the movie was too vulgar. At previews in Cincinnati and Columbus, half the audience walked out because of the language and sex scenes. McCormick remembers being paged in Kennedy Airport: “I pick up the phone and it’s Eisner, who starts screaming at me because we’d only taken two ‘fuck’s out. It became one of those ridiculous arguing sessions, where they said, ‘Take out two “fuck”s and I’ll let you have one “spic.”’ Stigwood finally agreed to take two ‘fuck’s out of the movie, and that was it—he wouldn’t change.” They did leave in the term “blow job,” however, which, some believe, is the first time the phrase was uttered in a feature film. (Attempts to reach Eisner were unsuccessful.)
It wasn’t just the language. Some of the suits at Paramount were made uncomfortable by the way Travolta was so lovingly photographed in one scene—preening in front of the mirror in his bikini briefs, his gold chain nestled in his chest hair—by the cinematographer Ralf D. Bode. “We got all kinds of hassle,” remembers Badham. “We were letting some man walk around in his underwear, showing his body off.” The image of lean, sexually vibrant Travolta was so homoerotic that the production designer, Charles Bailey, put up that Farrah Fawcett poster just to cool things off.
There was another little problem that Paramount had to deal with before the film could ever be released. Hairspray would not be the first time John Travolta dressed in drag. Letting off steam at the end of the shoot, Travolta and members of the crew filmed a mock wedding at the disco—for laughs—with John dressed as the bride and one of the grips appearing as the groom. “They wanted to blow Paramount’s mind,” Bill Ward explains. But when the studio executives arrived, according to Tom Priestley, “they didn’t see the humor in it. They sent someone to take control of the film, and I’m sure they burned it.”
Stigwood released the music before the film—his strategy not only worked, it changed the game. “He basically pioneered an entirely new way of doing business in the distribution of films, records, stage, and television,” Oakes believes. “I think his being from Australia had a lot to do with it—that sort of buccaneering adventurism, that entrepreneurship. I don’t think he would have been as successful if he’d been English.”
Eisner was skiing in Vail two weeks before the movie opened, on December 7, l977. “I heard ‘Stayin’ Alive’ at the lift, at the bottom, and then we went up to the top, to the restaurant, and they were playing ‘Stayin’ Alive’ there, too, so I called up Barry Diller, head of Paramount, and I said, ‘Do we have a hit here?’ And then it opened,” Eisner recounted, and Travolta “was the biggest thing that ever happened.” When the film debuted, at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, it was a phenomenon. In its first 11 days, it grossed more than $11 million—it would go on to gross $285 million, and the soundtrack became the best-selling movie soundtrack album of all time (until Whitney Houston’s The Bodyguard, in l992).
Travolta, who thought they were just “doing a little art film in Brooklyn,” was stunned. Not only did it breathe new life into disco, it changed the way American youth looked: “Thousands of shaggy-haired, blue-jean-clad youngsters are suddenly putting on suits and vests, combing their hair and learning to dance with partners,” wrote Newsweek. The Abraham & Straus department store in Brooklyn even opened a “Night Fever” men’s-wear boutique. John Travolta look-alike contests were drawing lines two blocks long. Fans no less prominent than Jane Fonda and Chicago Tribune movie critic Gene Siskel—who saw Saturday Night Fever 20 times—bid on Travolta’s suit when it was auctioned at a charity benefit in 1979. Siskel outbid her at $2,000. (It’s now valued at $l00,000 and has ended up in the Smithsonian Institution.)
Pape and Pescow went to see the film in a theater in Brooklyn. “It was my first time seeing it with the people that we made it about,” recalls Pape. “It was amazing. They were talking back to the screen, they were screaming and yelling, and as we came out of the theater, we were caught. But the crush was not mean—the crush was, ‘You nailed it! What part of Brooklyn are you from?’ It was a crush of affirmation.”
The film was, finally, so authentic, Karen Lynn Gorney believes, that it was more of a documentary. “We improvised for two weeks, so that by the time it came to filming, Badham just shot what was happening. It wasn’t acting.”
For the Bee Gees, once the music hit, life became insane. “Fever was No. 1 every week,” remembers Barry Gibb. “It wasn’t just like a hit album. It was No. 1 every single week for 25 weeks. It was just an amazing, crazy, extraordinary time. I remember not being able to answer the phone, and I remember people climbing over my walls. I was quite grateful when it stopped. It was too unreal. In the long run, your life is better if it’s not like that on a constant basis. Nice though it was.”
When the reviews came out, Travolta noticed his manager, Bob LeMond, quietly weeping in the Palm Court of the Plaza Hotel. He was reading Pauline Kael’s review in the December 26, l977, New Yorker. To this day, Travolta treasures Kael’s words: “[He] acts like someone who loves to dance. And, more than that, he acts like someone who loves to act…. He expresses shades of emotion that aren’t set down in scripts, and he knows how to show us the decency and intelligence under Tony’s uncouthness … he isn’t just a good actor, he’s a generous-hearted actor.”
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences nominated Travolta for a best-actor Oscar, along with Richard Dreyfuss, Woody Allen, Richard Burton, and Marcello Mastroianni (Dreyfuss won, for The Goodbye Girl). But the Bee Gees were snubbed. Stigwood threatened legal action, and McCormick threw an “anti—Academy Awards party” at his house, in Los Angeles, in protest. The guest list included Marisa Berenson, Tony and Berry Perkins, Lily Tomlin, and the writer Christopher Isherwood—even Ava Gardner showed up. “It was the last blush of Saturday Night Fever” for McCormick. “It was over after that, for me.”
The movie changed John Travolta’s life. What Brando and James Dean had been to the l950s, Travolta was to the l970s. Saturday Night Fever, believes Travolta, gave the decade its cultural identity. Pape felt that it was just Travolta’s fate: “Sometimes it’s time for you to have the brass ring. It’s like, in John’s life, it was meant to happen, and everybody just has to get out of the way.” When movie stardom hit for Travolta, there was no one else in his stratosphere. “I had the field to myself,” he recalls. “A few years later, Cruise would come along, and Tom Hanks, and Mel Gibson, but for a long time there was no one else out there. It was like Valentino-style popularity, an unimaginable pinnacle of fame. It’s not that I wanted competition. I just wanted company.”
For Pape, the movie “was like getting strapped onto a rocket ship. I became almost a victim of my own success. All the stage training I’d had, all the stuff that I’d done, it was starting to work against me, because the only work I was being offered were similar kinds of things. The very thing that made us trapped us.” Pescow, who won the New York Film Critics Circle Award for best supporting actress for the film, later got rave reviews playing a waitress on television in the short-lived Angie. After that, she “spent years waiting for a film part to come through. And when it didn’t I realized I was turning my entire life into a waiting room. I wasn’t going to do that anymore.” Today, Pape is in demand doing voice-overs for television and film, and he’s C.E.O. of his own production company, Red Wall Productions. And Pescow’s return to acting was not an insignificant one. As if to forge a link between Tony Manero and Tony Soprano (could there possibly be a white suit hanging among the other skeletons in Soprano’s closet?), Pescow appeared in the controversial final episode of The Sopranos.
By the end of the 90s, Joseph Cali had occasionally turned up on television, in shows such as Baywatch Hawaii and Melrose Place, but he now primarily sells high-end home-theater equipment for Cello Music & Film Systems, a company he founded six years ago. Gorney has appeared in dozens of independent films since Saturday Night Fever. She might well have ushered in the era of the tough heroine with the thick Brooklyn accent, embodied by actresses such as Marisa Tomei, Debi Mazar, and Lorraine Bracco.
McCormick now says that working on Fever “was the most exciting time of my life. I couldn’t get up early enough, and I couldn’t wait to see the dailies every night. It went from a dark winter of John losing Diana to a glorious summer. And we didn’t know at the end how it was going to work out. All I prayed for was that it would be enough of a success that I’d get to work on another movie.” His prayers were answered. At Warner Bros., McCormick has overseen such films as Syriana, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, The Perfect Storm, Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, Fight Club, and Blood Diamond.
Stigwood’s comet also continued to burn—for a while. Fever was followed by Grease, which did even better at the box office. But inevitably, perhaps, Stigwood and the Bee Gees fell out. The band filed a $120 million lawsuit against him, which would later be settled out of court. RSO folded in l981. “I know I’d worked for a magician—an alchemist,” McCormick says, but after Saturday Night Fever “you could never get him interested in anything again. He really had no serious desire. He wanted to be safe. And all that money went offshore to Bermuda,” where Stigwood maintained a baronial estate for a number of years. Oakes says, “He removed himself from everyday life, almost like Howard Hughes. He was literally on his yacht, or in a suite somewhere. To get him to go out was a major achievement.”
Travolta believes that “the big difference between me and Stigwood was, when something is that big, people feel in a way that they’d rather get out if they can’t replicate that incredible success. He pulled up his ladder, moved to Bermuda, decided to get out of the game.” For Travolta it was different. “It was never just about money. I’d wanted to be a film actor my entire life. For Stigwood, if it wasn’t the pinnacle every time, he wasn’t going to stay.”
Travolta found himself in the wilderness, too, after the success of Grease. His third film for RSO, Moment by Moment, with Lily Tomlin, was a disappointment for everyone. (Critics nicknamed it Hour by Hour.) In 1983, Stigwood co-produced a sequel to Saturday Night Fever called Staying Alive, with its writer-director Sylvester Stallone. Although Norman Wexler co-wrote the screenplay, the movie was a disaster. “I called it Staying Awake—it was ego gone mad,” recalls Oakes. “It was shorter, five times more expensive, and not any good.” Oakes withdrew from Hollywood soon after. “That’s when I said, ‘I’m putting down my tools.’” After writing a film for Arnold Schwarzenegger (Raw Deal, in 1986), Wexler started turning down work. “I was fired by my agent,” he told friends gleefully, before returning to playwriting. His last play, in l996, was a comedy, Forgive Me, Forgive Me Not. He died three years later.
Travolta’s career had a brief boost with two comedies, Look Who’s Talking and Look Who’s Talking Too, in l989 and 1990, but by 1994, when he came to the attention of an intense young filmmaker new in Hollywood, his asking price had plummeted to $150,000. Quentin Tarantino was a huge fan of Travolta’s, and he cast him in the role of Vincent Vega, a hit man who can dance, in Pulp Fiction. After Welcome Back, Kotter and Saturday Night Fever, it was the third time a character named Vincent would transform Travolta’s career.
As for Nik Cohn, he admits that “in America I have always, and will always be, the guy that did Saturday Night Fever.” Twenty years after its release, he published an article in New York magazine explaining how he had come to create the character of Vincent, cobbling him together from all the Faces he’d seen while trawling through pop-culture venues in the U.K. and America. There was in fact no Tony Manero, except for the one made flesh by Wexler’s screenplay and Travolta’s performance. For Cohn, “the whole phenomenon was just Travolta, because his particular gift is sympathy. There’s something about those puppy-dog eyes and the wetness around the mouth. And the other ingredients—my character, the Bee Gees’ music, Wexler’s script—they all had their function. But it would not have been a touchstone, it wouldn’t have worked with anybody else—nobody else could have done it.”
In the early 80s the disco craze ended with a thud, followed by a backlash, from which the Bee Gees have never quite recovered. Those embarrassing white suits and platform shoes went to the back of the closet, or have been sold on eBay, and the disco sound evolved into the four-on-four beat of club divas such as Madonna and hip-hop artists such as Wyclef Jean (who remade “Stayin’ Alive” as “We Trying to Stay Alive”). In 2005, a memorabilia company called Profiles in History put the 2001 Odyssey dance floor up for auction, but the attempt just ended up in a lawsuit. The nightclub continued to exist, for a while anyway, at 802 64th Street in Brooklyn, with a new name—Spectrum—ending its life as a gay, black dance club, where the disco craze first began.
But the characters of Saturday Night Fever live on in the collective imagination. I remember a moment nearly 10 years after the film when the poet Allen Ginsberg asked the Clash’s Joe Strummer if he believed in reincarnation, and Strummer jumped the gun and said he’d like to come back as “Tony Manero, the guy from Saturday Night Fever—he had great fucking hair.” Bay Ridge calling! Bay Ridge calling!