Saturday Night Fever
Saturday Night Fever, released in December 1977 (the year disco-mania exploded), is the greatest disco product of all time.
THE STORY: DISCO OR NOT DISCO?
The film tells the story of Tony Manero (portrayed by an extraordinary John Travolta), a young man from Brooklyn trapped in a life without prospects, whose only joy is going dancing on Saturday nights: youthful rage, a familiar theme, is the thread running through the story.
Saturday Night Fever, more than a film about dance culture, becomes a film about escaping it. The film ends with a sober condemnation of the lifestyle it was supposedly meant to celebrate. It is a “disco film” made for an absolutely non-disco audience, just as the soundtrack is only partially “disco” (the music has all the typical elements of disco, but it is a type of pure pop adaptable to any era). A screenplay valid for any period and a charm capable of captivating a broad and diverse audience: these are the keys to the enormous timeless success of the film directed by John Badham. Saturday Night Fever, using a cross-promotional strategy of symbiosis between film and soundtrack, has a dual impact: the film achieves earnings of $100 million, and the soundtrack (dominated by the Bee Gees‘ falsetto) sells 30 million copies by the end of the year.
A “DECEPTIVE” FILM
Many define it as a “fabricated film” since it is based on a story invented by an English journalist, Nik Cohn, who knows very little about Brooklyn. Even though Cohn’s account is false, there is one clear and indisputable fact: disco is spreading like wildfire through the white ethnic communities of New York neighborhoods.
THE MODERN CONCEPT OF THE DISCOTHEQUE
In any case, Saturday Night Fever achieves enormous success, attracts immense media attention to disco, and launches the “commercialization” of the phenomenon. The film, in essence, creates an imaginative framework to legitimize the rise of discotheque culture: for the first time in America, a mass model for discotheques is born. From here, the modern concept of the discotheque begins to take root.
