Saturday Night Fever

Saturday Night Fever is a 1977 film starring John Travolta based around New York discotheques of the disco era period, the associated music and dancing, and the subculture surrounding such. The movie significantly helped to popularise disco music around the world, and made Travolta a household name. The soundtrack, featuring disco songs by the Bee Gees, was also hugely popular. See Saturday Night Fever soundtrack The actual plot of the movie has been largely forgotten by history behind the music, dancing, and the perceived coolness of Travolta's image as the polyester-clad dancer. In fact, it is basically a rather gritty coming-of-age tale, as Tony Manero (Travolta), along with his friend and dancing partner, Stephanie, decides to leave behind the grit of his uneducated, working-class life in Brooklyn and move with her to Manhattan. The story is based upon a 1975 New York Magazine article by Nik Cohn, "Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night. In the late 1990s, Cohn acknowledged that the article had been fabricated from whole cloth. A newcomer to the United States and a stranger to the disco lifestyle, the British Cohn was unable to make any sense of the subculture he had been assigned to write about. The characters who were to become Tony Manero and his friends sprang solely from his imagination. A sequel, Staying Alive, was released in 1983; this sequel also starred John Travolta reprising his Tony Manero role from the first movie. The unsentimental depiction of the subculture of the main characters contrasts with another Travolta film, the sanitized Grease (a 1978 Travolta musical about the teenage subcultures of the 1950s). Category:1977 films