A FEVER THAT STILL CHILLS, 40 YEARS ON
Saturday Night Fever danced into hearts in 1977, immortalizing the era’s disco craze for generations to come
Saturday Night Fever caught almost everybody by surprise when it arrived in the cold winter of 1977.
Based on the disco craze that cultural pundits had already dismissed as a fading fad, it starred John Travolta as Tony Manero, a teen from a tough part of Brooklyn who was trying to dance his way to a better life.
Travolta had a growing following as one of the “Sweathogs” in the hit ’70s TV high school sitcom Welcome Back,
Kotter, but he was hardly a household name and nobody’s idea of the new Gene Kelly or Fred Astaire. Co-stars Donna Pescow and Karen Lynn Gorney were complete unknowns.
Who, apart from manic producer Robert Stigwood, could have foreseen how a combination of Travolta’s screen magnetism (later Oscarnominated) and a killer soundtrack would reignite the disco phenomenon, create a classic film of youthful rebellion and send twentysomethings in quest of three-piece suits, sexy dresses and dance lessons? Just the multitudes who bought Saturday
Night Fever movie tickets and record albums, perhaps.
On the line from Los Angeles, English-born director John Badham and Brooklyn-born actress Donna Pescow share some Saturday Night Fever memories as the movie celebrates its 40th anniversary with a 4K Blu-ray restoration and other festivities:
Saturday Night Fever was certainly strong for its day, with Tony and his gang exhibiting the worst kind of macho behaviour with their sexist, racist and homophobic words and deeds. I must admit I found it a little shocking, viewing it today after not seeing it for a decade or so.
Badham: I can tell you that when we started the restoration we ran it in the big Paramount theatre and I was totally shocked. I’m going, “Whoa, I don’t think we can do this today!” It’s every thing you say it is, yet in a peculiar way it seemed to make the movie grounded. It brought the dark side to it; it’s not just whipped cream and birthday cake. The dark underside to these characters is part of the story, the main story of the film which is this young guy growing up in a world that he’s better than. He needs to get out of there. It takes the whole film for him to finally make that giant move.
Pescow: The political correctness now is a whole other topic. And what I mean by that is what they’ll put in films today, I don’t know if any of this or a lot of this would make the final cut now. But I think at the time, that it was very true to form. People really were like that, and I hate to say it.
As unfortunate as it is, that was the general attitude in that neighbourhood, certainly, as sad and pathetic as it is.
Donna, I still can’t stand the way Tony treats your character Annette. It breaks my heart when he does something terrible to her and she says, “All I ever did was like you.”
How do you view Annette now?
You know, we all knew girls like her. To me, she was a composite of girls I went to school with, girls I met in the neighbourhood before we started filming there. She was someone who people would relate to because she was trying her best, and trying to make good choices, but ultimately they all went south and nothing worked out for her. Because there was nothing malicious about this character, people felt for her.
John, legend has it that in the scene where Tony does the amazing solo dance sequence to “You Should be Dancing,” the studio wanted to trim the scene and also show Travolta mainly in close-up, but Travolta demanded it run in its entirely and show all of him. True or false?
Badham: There is some truth to that and I don’t have to throw the studio under the bus here. It’s my fault and my editor David Rawlins’ fault. We were in cutting the dance scene and we got a little overaggressive in cutting it. John came in one afternoon to look at it, and said, “Anybody could be doing this dance! You should at least see me (in full frame).” And right away David and I looked at each other and we said, “Yes, of course.” Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly had it in their contracts that you had to see them head to toe. There was never a fuss about it, we just went back to the drawing board and said to John, “Come back tomorrow … you’re right!”
John, prior to this movie, the Bee Gees were seriously not cool. Suddenly they became so, with multiple hits like “Stayin’ Alive,” “Night Fever” and “How Deep Is Your Love.” How did you initially react when you were told you had to use the Bee Gees for your soundtrack?
Badham: Robert Stigwood handed me a cassette and said, “The Bee Gees have written five songs for us and there are three No. 1 hits on here.” I said, “OK” but my (hidden) reaction was, “Are you kidding me? How arrogant is that? Who knows there are three No. 1 hits on here?” And he was wrong. He totally screwed it up — there were four No. 1 hits!
Being a tall man myself, I can’t help but notice that most of the women who dance with Travolta, who is six-foot-two, are at least a foot shorter than him. Was that accident or design?
Badham: It was pure accident. We weren’t casting for height. And he had some heels on that gave him a couple of more inches. None of these women were particularly short.
Pescow: I can tell you that my shoes got higher and higher as the movie went on! There’s a dance we did together where John spins me under his arm. At one point, I was so much smaller than him, they had to make my shoes higher so it would look like there was some sort of interesting move there and I wasn’t under a doorway! That’s just how it worked out.