Fever Pitch

In 1976, producer Robert Stigwood placed a million-dollar bet on a young TV star, signing John Travolta to a three-movie deal. First up, a low-budget production based on a New York magazine article about disco-crazy Italian-American kids in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn: Saturday Night Fever. From Travolta's famous "Stayin' Alive" strut to the mid-filming death of his girlfriend, to three harrowing nights on the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, SAM KASHNER has the story of a culture-bending hit, whose music–by a revitalized 60s band called the Bee Gees–became the best-selling soundtrack of its time

Robert Stigwood, the 42-year-old Australian impresario known as "the Darryl Zanuck of pop," was out of his mind. That was the talk in Hollywood, Bill Oakes remembers, on September 25, 1976, when his boss held a lavish press conference at the Beverly Hills Hotel to announce that the Robert Stigwood Organisation-RSO-had just signed John Travolta to a million-dollar contract to star in three films. Oakes, then in his mid-20s, had worked for the Beatles and had once been Paul McCartney's assistant. By this time he was running RSO Records, which boasted Eric Clapton and the Bee Gees among its roster of pop stars. "Everyone thought it was madness," says Oakes, "because nobody had ever made the transition from television to movie stardom. So, a lot of us thought to pay a million dollars for Vinnie Barbarino [Travolta's character on the TV sitcom Welcome Back, Kotter] is going to make us a laughingstock."

Stigwood wanted Travolta to star in the movie version of Grease, the long-running Broadway musical (in which Travolta had already appeared as Doody, one of the T-Bird gang members, in a road company). Five years earlier, Stigwood had auditioned the actor-then just 17-for Jesus Christ Superstar, and though Ted Neeley got the job, Stigwood had penciled himself a note on a yellow pad: "This kid will be a very big star."

But Stigwood's option for Grease stipulated that production could not begin before the spring of 1978, because the musical was still going strong. While they waited, Stigwood and his lieutenants began to look around for a new property.

A few months before, an English rock critic by the name of Nik Cohn had published a magazine article entitled "Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night." Appearing in the June 7, 1976, issue of New York, the article followed the Saturday-night rituals of a group of working-class Italian-Americans in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, who held dead-end jobs but lived for their nights of dancing at a local disco called 2001 Odyssey. Cohn's hero, named Vincent, was a tough, violent guy but a great dancer who yearned for a chance to shine, and to escape the mean streets of Brooklyn.

On an icy winter night in 1975, Cohn had made his first trip to Bay Ridge with a disco dancer called Tu Sweet, who would serve as his Virgil. "According to Tu Sweet," Cohn later wrote, "the [disco] craze had started in black gay clubs, then progressed to straight blacks and gay whites and from there to mass consumption-Latinos in the Bronx, West Indians on Staten Island, and, yes, Italians in Brooklyn." In 1975, black dancers like Tu Sweet were not welcome in those Italian clubs; nonetheless, he liked the dancers there-their passion and their moves. "Some of those guys, they have no lives," he told Cohn. "Dancing's all they got."

A brawl was in progress when they arrived at 2001 Odyssey. One of the brawlers lurched over to Cohn's cab and threw up on his trouser leg. With that welcome, the two men hightailed it back to Manhattan, but not before Cohn caught a glimpse of a figure, dressed in "flared, crimson pants and a black body shirt," coolly watching the action from the club doorway. "There was a certain style about him–an inner force, a hunger, and a sense of his own specialness. He looked, in short, like a star," recalled Cohn. He'd found his Vincent, the protagonist of his New Journalism-style piece.

Later, Cohn went back to the disco with the artist James McMullan, whose illustrations for the article helped persuade Cohn's underwhelmed editor in chief, Clay Felker, to run it. The title was changed from "Another Saturday Night" to "Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night," and a note was added insisting that "everything described in this article is factual."