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 bullsh*t. 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 ‘f*ck’s out. It became one of those ridiculous arguing sessions, where they said, ‘Take out two “f*ck”s and I’ll let you have one “spic.”’ Stigwood finally agreed to take two ‘f*ck’s out of the movie, and that was it—he wouldn’t change.” They did leave in the term “blow j*b,” 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 hom*oerotic 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.
