Disco Has the Fever: Saturday Night Fever

Which of us, I Love Disco followers, has not seen ‘Saturday Night Fever’? Who has never tried to dance disco music like Tony Manero?

Released in December ’77 (the year disco-mania exploded), the film was the greatest disco product of all time.

We all know the story:
Tony Manero (played by an extraordinary John Travolta), a Brooklyn kid trapped in a life without prospects, whose only joy is going out dancing on Saturday nights: youthful rage is the common thread of the story. What perhaps not everyone knows is that it was a “disco film” made for an absolutely non-disco audience (the film ends with a sort of condemnation of disco music), just as the soundtrack was only partially “disco.”

A screenplay valid for any era and a charm capable of seducing a broad and varied audience: these are the keys to the enormous timeless success of the film directed by John Badham.
Saturday Night Fever, using a cross-strategy of symbiosis between film and soundtrack, had a double impact: the film reached earnings of $100 million, and the soundtrack (dominated by the Bee Gees’ falsettos) sold 30 million copies by the end of the year.
Many called it a “lie film” because it was based on a story invented by an English journalist, Nik Cohn, who only years later admitted to having made it up entirely.
But even if Cohn’s story was a fake, there was an indisputable fact: disco had exploded like a bomb in the white ethnic communities of New York neighborhoods.
Thus the film had enormous success, attracted immeasurable media attention to disco, and launched the commercialization of the phenomenon.

‘Saturday Night Fever’ essentially legitimized the affirmation of discotheque culture, creating a sort of mass model for them, first in America and then here.
And it is precisely from this moment that nothing was ever the same for young people—the modern conception of the discotheque was born, and nothing could stop it.