Behind the Scenes: Saturday Night Fever (Badham, 1977) with John Travolta and Karen Lynn Gorney

There's three elements. There's how Travolta figured, came from one source, Nick Curran, another source, and the Bee Gees. The first thing I saw was a script that did not read as a musical, even though there were musical elements clearly indicated there, but it read as a story of this, you know, young boy in a city that he was going to be too big in, and it was a wonderful character piece. I liked John Travolta in his Cotter television series a lot, and when he was about 17 he auditioned for me on Broadway for Jesus Christ Superstar. I thought he would make a marvellous movie star, so I started thinking of a film subject that would be good for him. The thing that sparked it for me was I picked up New York Magazine and saw a cover story by Nick Curran called Tribal Rights of the Saturday Night, and I read it. This is the film. We were looking for the right thing for John, and this was something that, John read the article and instantly committed, and there was something about the character of Tony Manero that just caught his attention. You know, it was more than a dance disco movie. For us, it was a real gritty film about this experience, and that's what was the appeal to me when I looked at the original article and I looked at the script that they had. And I went to the Odyssey Club before my first audition to check out the experience because I wanted to see how these guys dressed and stuff, and it was intense. Very tough, very Italian, very gritty. And so I think we really tried to capture that. Something primal in the place, you know? That's why he called it Tribal Rights of Saturday Night. It's like, it's as if you stumbled on it, and this probably really sounds far-fetched, but it's between the loud music and the pulse, it's like you stumbled onto some, you know, tribal African where they're beating the drums and they're all dancing themselves into a frenzy. And it was this moment with the first sort of shiver that went down my spine of like, oh, my God, there is something really special that is going on here. When anything, I think, becomes that hugely, you know, dominant, people tend to forget what originally made it dominant in the first place. That's lost, that's erased, that kind of becomes a distant memory. And, you know, it tends to overwhelm the source of what caused that popularity to happen in the first place. But the basis, the foundation, the basic script by Norman Wexler is just first rate, and that's the thing that holds up over time. I would have to say that the integrity of the movie would have to be a testament to Robert Stiglitz. Some of the sexism and some of the racism and some of that content is stuff that we would never put in a movie today. Certainly it was Robert setting a standard about what he felt the movie needed in order to be real. Everyone was nervous about the film, paramount about the language particularly. I wouldn't budge on that because Norman's dialogue was perfect. That's how the kids spoke. Oh, f*** the future. No, Tony, you can't f*** the future. The future f***s you. It catches up with you, and it f***s you if you ain't planned for it. It was really raw, you know. I can remember going, seeing the movie, and kids on lines, would you get me a ticket? This was after the screening, and young kids wanted tickets to see it, you know. When I went back to Michigan, where I grew up, back near Detroit, all of my buddies that were still around thought that I wrote this film. One guy said, they all identified with the different characters, and they were convinced I had something to do with it. The director had us improvise as the characters for 2 weeks, and that created the reality, and it was real, it was really happening. This film was more like a documentary than a Hollywood movie, you know what I mean? I've always felt this was kind of a commentary of that decade, really, in a way, similar to how Rebel Without a Cause is the 50s. This is the 70s in many ways. I talked to John very extensively about Rebel Without a Cause. We were very conscious of that film, very conscious about the James Dean, Salmonia relationship in Rebel Without a Cause. I remember bringing it up to him constantly, and John being extremely excited and receptive about that, and it fed, it fueled our relationship in the movie. Tony Manero is a real original, and yet he's very evocative of a lot of other things that I think are part of the history of the motion picture business, and it's why you're able to get a great actor and a great performance out of John Travolta, and certainly some of the best work of everybody else that's involved. It was pretty awesome to work with somebody that was that famous, and when you think of his fame now and his fame then, it's a totally different world. Initially, when we started outside on the streets of Brooklyn, we were hit by a riot of 15,000 people who were just so excited to see him and wanted to get in and completely stop our filming. I don't think they were malicious, but there was just like a big party out on the street, and we literally had to shut down and go home because we couldn't get anything done. Before the film was announced, when we had begun work on it, I went shopping with John Travolta one day. We were in the store about 45 minutes, and John tried on a couple of things, everything was very pleasant, and we began to realize that there was a big crowd forming outside. So to get us back into the limo and through the street, we had to make a call to the local precinct and get escorted, because within that 45 minutes, a huge crowd of kids had gathered outside. I do remember one particular time we were in the trailer, and John had gone in there a little earlier. I think he had his hair and makeup done, and he was waiting to start, and I went in there after him. The kids in the neighborhood knew he was in there, and they started calling him, and obviously he couldn't go out because that would have been a mob scene. They started to shake the trailer, which was really scary. Suddenly this trailer started to rock like a boat, and I think they pushed up the security at that point. Even though it was really nice that they liked him and they wanted to see him, it was really frightening to be inside that trailer. I think the third day of shooting, and this is all a little overwhelming because you've got to understand there's crowds of thousands. There's got to be 3,000 kids behind barricades at the end of a street, and you've closed the street and you're shooting. So here we are, and we're in this ridiculous Chevy, this yellow and red Chevy, so Barry's behind the wheel of this car, and the barricades break. The kids rush the police, and they break through like we're in Cuba in some foreign country with a political unrest, and they run up and they're beating on the car. John's screaming, let's get out of here. We're all freaking out. He's laying down low, and we're yelling at Barry to get going. He hits the gas, and we take off, and we end up blocks away, hearts beating, adrenaline pumping, kids grabbing on the car trying to run after us. I mean, it was unbelievable, that experience. My wife is Didi Kahn, known, among other things, as Frenchie in both Grease movies. She told me an interesting story this morning. John had finished shooting Saturday Night Fever and was working on Grease and hadn't seen it all put together and was very concerned about both the movie and his performance. He hadn't seen any of it yet, and the kids kept asking him, you know, what is this? And he said, I'm not sure, I don't know what it adds up to, I haven't seen it, I'm not sure about my performance, but he invited them all to a screening when he first saw it and they first saw it, and they got up and cheered at the end. And they said, John, stop worrying, the movie's fantastic. When you saw people start turning up, and then day after day after day and week after week for weeks seeing that continue to happen, it was, you know, very exciting to watch. Within, like, two weeks, Bob Hope is in a white suit dancing on some Bob Hope special. Parodies of Saturday Night Fever were, for me, one of the greatest thrills of doing the movie. And in particular, I think the Saturday Night Fever sketch where Dan Rakroyd, I think, played Paul's character, Double J. It probably has been parodied, probably because it's so clear what it is. And they always say that flattery is complimentary. And then they made the Broadway musical of it. I was in London doing this movie, United 93, which we filmed there, and Saturday Night Fever was there in London. Big hit. One of the significant effects of the movie on culture, I guess, is, you know, you've got to look at the reality show like Dance Fever. I mean, everybody wants to know who's going to be the next John Travolta, who's going to win the contest, which is what the movie was about. Is he going to win the dance contest? And this show became one of the most popular shows, you know, ever. Well, I think the good thing was it made way for a film like Billy Elliot and for the consciousness of men to say, ooh, I could dance, that's cool. It's a great compliment to the film and to John Badham that people are still touched by it. And even though it's 30 years ago, it still does touch a chord with people. 30 years? I mean, that's unheard of. I mean, there are movies that are classics. Yes, Casablanca, those films that are called so-called, you know, the classics, and they'll pop up, but not with the mass audience that Saturday Night Fever generates. I was thinking about years ago when we were making the movie, nobody sat around and planned to make some great pop culture, kitsch, Smithsonian time capsule of bell-bottoms, glitter balls and platform shoes. It was merely a story set in a working-class discotheque that dealt with an identity crisis and a kind of profound questioning of society's rules and society's values. And if the film had been set, say, in a fishing plant, a cannery in some small industrial town in northern Scotland, I wondered if we'd be sitting around here today discussing the nostalgic charms of a halibut. Thirty years later, we're sitting here having a conversation about a movie that impacted people's lives in such a way that I continue to hear about it to this day from people. It was a turning point in their life. It was a seminal moment in their life. It said something to them. It spoke to them. I can think of other films from different eras. I mean, for something for the disaffected youth or something that struck a chord in young people especially, you had Rebel Without a Cause in the 1950s. You had Easy Rider in the 60s. You had Saturday Night Fever in the 70s, probably Fast Times at Ridgemont High in the 80s. Something touches a nerve. This movie somehow did that and also transcended it. Norman Wexler hit such a nerve, you know, with characters that we believe in, we recognize, they speak to us. You know, I was from Alabama, a little kid from Alabama, and I understood those characters. You know, they're enjoyable to watch. And that seemed to work all around the world. So that's pretty rare that you get that kind of feeling and it should last for a very, very long time. Oh, they're genius composers. I mean, have you heard the harmonies? Those are harmonies that go way back into the 15th century. They were the fuel that drove the music in that movie and I think drove the feel of it. I give them complete credit for that. They were just, they did a fantastic job. The music from this film, I think, had its own life. It was so successful and so much the anthem, I think, for this decade. The Bee Gees were very popular and then even became more so. Really, the soul of that movie, you know, John strutting down the street at the beginning, what would that be without staying alive? I was very keen to promote the film ahead, so I released I Think You Should Be Dancing. It was the number one hit before the film was released. People still all over the world, you play How Deep Is Your Love, no matter where you go, and it'll crowd the dance floor. But it's still the biggest ever-selling soundtrack in the history of the business. The Saturday Night Fever soundtrack had a very sort of complex beginning because we were coming off two major hit albums. First of all, the main course album, which was produced by Arif Mardin at the time. Then the Children of the World album, which we did ourselves, which was our first for Universal at that time. And they all produced quite a few hits, including You Should Be Dancing, Of The Children Of The World, Jive Talking, both were number ones on Billboard. And up to that point, I think in 1973 or 74, we were pretty much done for. I mean, any group that was popular in the 60s, nobody really wanted to know about in the 70s. That's just how it went. And I think we were looking to revitalise ourselves or to do something with great energy. And during main course, we discovered my falsetto voice, which I didn't know I had until Arif Mardin suggested I go into the studio and sing some ad-libs over nights on Broadway. And I did that and discovered that there was this falsetto voice hiding back there. And not for long, folks. And we started using that for everything, and that became the new sound, you know. They've had 3 or 4 lives, as you know. Their writing's so brilliant that they reinvent themselves. They're still the Bee Gees, but then you see another aspect of their talent. Well, I think Robert was very clear from the beginning this was an opportunity, and the Bee Gees had been in a really interesting creative trajectory for 2, maybe 3 albums before the Saturday Night Fever album. It was during that time, that year period, that Robert called up and told us all about this article by Nik Khan called Tribal Rights of a New Saturday Night. And he said, can you give me some ideas for songs for it? And a few ideas which had been rolling around at that point were Night Fever and Stayin' Alive, and all probably would have been turned into songs and recorded anyway, you know. And I gave him those titles, and the humorous thing about it was that he felt that Night Fever was too pornographic to be used as a title for a film. I said, well, that's the back of my head right now, but I'll call you if I have any more ideas, and we'll get together and see if we can come up with something. And that's how it started. I think the great thing about writing music for Fever was that we never saw Fever, we never saw the film. Remember, it wasn't even called Fever, because we didn't know what it was called. I'm calling it Fever now because that's what everyone knows it as. We would just have to be in the studio in France at the time this was happening, and he was able to call us and ask if we could start writing. And we said, well, we've actually got a lot of songs written. If you want to come over and listen to them, they're here. And really, it just snowballed from there. It was a great studio, and it had an amazing echo chamber, which was an old baronial hall, I think. And so it was a great experience in that respect. There was nothing else to do but record. It was a 16th-century building. We'd live there, sleep there, and there was a little village nearby, and Elton John had recorded Honky Shat over there, a lot of artists had gone there to record. And just, you know, just have fun and make music, and it kept you focused, and that's what we did. It wasn't written in the middle of New York City, it wasn't in the middle of the London Club City, it was actually done in the middle of French countryside. You Should Be Dancing was taken from Children of the World, so some songs were taken from previous albums because Robert liked them and wanted to put them in the film and felt that they applied. So in a sense, everybody at the time thought that all those songs had come from one album, and they hadn't. So it was only really about four or five new songs. The reason they end up in the film is because while we were writing, those were the songs that John Travolta and the cast were rehearsing to. Staying Alive, for instance, is really all about the strife that our culture's in, and New York City is a perfect example of that. And quite prophetic, in fact, because it talks about buildings breaking and everybody shaking. If you listen to the lyrics of Staying Alive, it's not really about dancing at all, it's about surviving in the modern world, particularly in New York at the time, surviving in New York City, being part of all the struggles and stresses of modern-day life. And, for instance, you had the 9-1-1 trade centre attack in September of 2001, and the following February and March, when the Grammys was on, they played Staying Alive with the images of that terrible time, which highlighted the way New Yorkers felt, because in the lyrics, you know, New York times affect the man, feel the city shaking... It actually portrayed a feeling about how New Yorkers felt at that time after 9-1-1. The first reaction we had when we first saw the film, which was at the Chinese Theatre in L.A. with John Travolta, watching the audience in front of us, all of us standing at the back of the theatre, watching the backs of all the audience. And that was thrilling, just to watch that, to see the responses. And the one thing that stood out was that you could hear the feet on the dance floor louder than the music. And so we had to point out to Robert that when you're in a club, you can't hear the feet. You can't hear people stepping and making moves. You only hear the music. And they took that point and raised all the music up, all the dance music. The Bee Gees had always written very strongly melodic music with usually a very strong hook in every one of the songs. And what they were able to capture here was really music that was incredibly strong, also had a musical hook, but lyrics that sort of matched up to a character that appeared elsewhere. And it seemed, you know, thinking about it afterwards, that they had really deliberately written songs for specific places because they worked so well where they were placed. It just seemed to fall naturally into place. And of course, I mean, the reaction was amazing, considering that there was no hype, no promotion, there was no budget promotion. And it was like queues around the block, lines around the block in every city from Chicago, New York, every major city in the States. And I remember being with Robert in December and him getting a phone call from the Hare of Paramount saying they'd seen nothing like it. And we had suddenly reached another level, a level we never dreamed we could reach. My first thoughts were that this had never been done before. This is a movie with music about today, that day, the time they lived in. And right up until then, most musicals were period films, they were about another time. And this was, strangely enough, one of the first films made about the day that people actually lived in and about what was happening at that moment. And I think that's what really excited the imagination of a lot of people around the world. So from being pretty much dead in the water in 1973 and 74, we were certainly back again. It was just a very specific time where people were very into their look and really wanted to create that look and be that person and they kind of all had that swagger and they wanted to wear those polyester clothes that I think now are outlawed. I think the early 70s began coming out of the 60s, obviously, as a broader, more cartoony, brightly colored, awkward fabrics. Some of the classic looks of the 70s would be tight-fitting jeans, high-waisted tube tops, dance dresses, clothes worn much tighter than you would ever expect them to be nowadays. Companies like Jordache and Calvin Klein really came to the front. The things that I saw when I visited the clubs were always clothes that were geared toward movement and light. Clothes were mostly synthetics, usually shiny, sometimes enhanced with sequins or embroidery or what have you, but they reflected light. If you were going out to a club in New York in 1977, you would, as a woman, wear as little as possible, a great disco dress with some nice movement in the skirt and spaghetti straps or a tube top. I'm going to call it a menacing era. Everybody was emulating what they couldn't be. Everyone wanted to be John Travolta. Everybody felt they could be him, a guy from Brooklyn. I think everybody wanted to be those guys in a car. I actually used Saturday Night Fever as a bit of research when we started the 70s show, and the things that I always, always think about are those fitted leather jackets that the guys wore with the gold chains, and it was a real sort of New York culture. I think many of us felt when we began the film that there was a strong component of class and class differences. Our guys in the film are not fashionable people. They are lower middle class. They are simple boys. They don't have a tremendous amount of education, and yet they have dreams and hopes and aspirations, but their dreams center on being the absolute best dancers in the best club. For Tony Manero, in his circle, he is the king because he's the best dancer, and that's what gives him prestige and honor in his neighborhood. You want the characters to be true, true to the story, and yet because they are heroic characters, you want them to look very good. So we took great care with very small things, exactly the right belt and exactly the right handkerchief and etc., etc. We had to make sure that the clothes moved beautifully in dances, and we wanted them to not look custom, and we wanted them to look not expensive. These are not kids that have a tremendous amount of disposable income, and yet they would save and scrimp and go without lunch all week in our story to buy that special shirt out of their meager salaries. One of the major things in the film is the right shoes. It is a film about dancing, and they had to have just the right shoes. Our shoes were not especially popular at that time, but we kind of made them so, and we found most of those shoes in a strip in Manhattan called 8th Street with many, many men's shoe stores, and all of them pretty outrageous and usually very uncomfortable, but they got used to it. Grooming was intensely important for the guys. I virtually do not recall seeing face hair at all, but I saw lots of hair, lots of hair, beautifully styled and coiffed even, one might say, and trimmed and wonderfully styled. When I think of the 70s, I think of the fashion and the hair. The hair was so hairsprayed and so stiff that if a strong wind came, it would just break off and blow away. Obviously, the Farrah Fawcett hairdo was the hairstyle of the century, practically. I mean, everybody wore it for way too long. And Dorothy Hamill, that was another iconic 70s look, the wedge, and it was sort of the beginning of big hair as we know it, I think. I love the way they did my hair as Doreen because it went like perfect flip. It's so out of it. It's great. You know, it looks like she worked on herself for hours. You know, have the groove. It was great. The story behind the sketches is that I very often attended rehearsals, dance rehearsals, because I wanted to see how the characters moved. I made this quick pencil sketch. This was before we filmed the actual work, and it's not especially accurate as to what the suit looked like. I kept it in a notebook, not knowing the dance would in fact become such an icon. The sketch of Stephanie actually turned out to be worn by someone else. I did make the sketch for Stephanie before she was cast. I hadn't seen her and didn't know her. So I elongated the figure quite a bit. Stephanie, the actress, Karen Lynn Gorney, is a very petite girl, very delicately boned, and this was way too much dress for Stephanie. She wore another dress, and she looked wonderful in it. Once the film was released, there were 20, 30 people at a time wearing white suits walking down 44th Street, and it was a little strange to see. I pressed hard for the white suit because I think in this world that these guys live in, I think heroes wore white, and I think Tony Manero is a hero. I was given a John Travolta shirt with the image of him in the white suit pointing his finger to the sky that is now part of my collection that I believe we used once on the 70s show on Wilmer Valderrama. One of my first jobs was a television film, filming in Georgia, and I had taken a truck one afternoon to go to a shopping center that I'd heard about, and as I rounded the hill, I saw a 30-foot blow-up of John in the suit in a parking lot. And racks and racks and racks of suits. And every kid who was going to a prom within 50 miles was there picking out his suit. You could see right away, you know, this tremendous energy and talent. One of the nicest people I've ever met in his heart, in his class, and his caring for people. He loves to work. He loves to act. There's a reason that John Travolta's a star. A very generous actor to work with, very present. That was really a gift. He was so down-to-earth, and he was so concerned with the project and making everyone feel comfortable. I've never known John, in my experience, to ever put himself above anybody. He started to get a lot of buzz, you know, a lot of teen mag buzz off of Welcome Back, Cotter. And Stig would say, let's go sign this guy to a three-picture deal.