In the clip above, I discuss “Saturday Night Fever,” directed by John Badham. The story on the film is based, “Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night,” by Nik Cohn, appeared in the June 7, 1976, issue of New York magazine; I read it then, a week or two after returning home to Long Island after my freshman year of college. My interest in the art of movies was still new—mere months old—but I knew immediately that there was a terrific movie to be made from the article, so it was no surprise when I learned, a year and a half later, of the impending release of “Saturday Night Fever.” I saw the movie three or four times soon after it came out, a few more times a few months later, and three times in one night when, a year or two later, I projected a 16-mm. print of it for the college Film Society, and was at no time troubled by the drastic differences between Cohn’s story and the film (which retained only a few specifics from it), because the movie was so good—so satisfyingly concrete, with its location shooting, its expressive and salacious dialogue, its sharply characterized performances, its mapping of social and political conflicts, and its highly specific sense of style (not visual but sartorial). In other words, I loved the actors, the script, the locations, the costumes, the ideas, the moods, the catchy dialogue, and even the music—I was fascinated by the depiction of a nearby world I had never seen, and didn’t worry whether it was faithful to Cohn.
In 1994, in the Guardian, Cohn, a British journalist, admitted that the story was “a fraud” that he had concocted, under deadline pressure and ignorance of the Brooklyn disco scene, based largely on a person he had known in the U.K.; in 1996, he told Charlie LeDuff, of the New York Times, that the main figure in the story was “completely made-up, a total fabrication.” Which is to say that the real auteur of the movie is the screenwriter Norman Wexler, who had a sadly scant and troubled career in movies and, for that matter, a troubled life. (He died in 1999.)
And the story he told, in essence, is one of liberalization—of growing up, leaving home, and leaving behind the hitherto-unquestioned, narrow, and cruel attitudes that a traditional community often perpetuates. Tony comes to recognize the limits—of consciousness and of conscience—that his upbringing and surroundings instilled in him. Cohn’s story, by contrast, suggests only the slightest glimmer of hisl character’s self-awareness. Wexler, however, turns the protagonist into an incipient moral hero, whose future course of action the ending leaves fascinatingly open. He wrote the sequel, “Staying Alive,” but he bitterly denounced the changes that the director, Sylvester Stallone (who has co-writing credit) made to the script; I wonder whether Wexler’s original script for it has turned up.
P.S. In the Guardian last year, Sean Michaels reported that Simon Cowell is attempting to persuade the film’s producer, Robert Stigwood, to let him use Wexler’s script for a remake that would feature Timbaland and Zac Efron.
