Saturday Night Fever - The Ultimate Disco Movie

This programme contains strong language, and scenes which some viewers may find upsetting

40 years ago, one film changed the world. It was the greatest disco film ever made.

# Well, you can tell by the way I use my walk I'm a woman's man... #

Saturday Night Fever was made for peanuts

but it became one of the biggest box office sensations of the decade.

It's a little disco movie. We have no budget for anything.

To me, it felt more like an art film and not a pop commercial film.

The last thing I thought was we were going to have a movie

and we'd be talking about it 40 years later.

That movie is Taxi Driver with dancing.

# You should be dancing, yeah

# Dancing... #

It was a tale of love and ambition

that sparked a worldwide disco craze.

It inspired a new passion for flamboyant disco dancing

and its soundtrack captured the imagination of a generation.

The album was huge, right from the day.

It gave the Bee Gees a string of number one singles.

In that moment, this was the greatest time of our lives.

It wasn't just this hit movie, it was this phenomenon,

and you couldn't get away from it.

Overnight, it turned John Travolta

into one of Hollywood's biggest stars.

My whole life has been a blessing with that movie.

It's the foundation, it's the blueprint for my whole career.

It gave me a job as a character actor,

I got my first Oscar nomination.

And it broke new ground with high-octane action scenes.

It was more than just a dance movie

and it had a gritty sense of reality to it.

It was one of the most iconic movies of all time

but the journey from script to screen was far from straightforward.

Saturday Night Fever only got made

because of a series of accidents and lucky breaks.

# Yeah, you should be dancing, yeah

# Dancing, yeah

# What you doin' on your back, aah?

# What you doin' on your back...? #

In 1977, I was a dancer here, in New York, and I lived for the disco!

Saturday Night Fever was my life in time.

I thought I remembered it all but, in fact,

I'd forgotten just how incredible the story was.

Great performances.

Even some of that dance floor action that gave us all "the fever".

It was a New York story made at a time

when the city was crime ridden, filthy and almost bankrupt.

Unemployment was running high.

Times were hard in Manhattan and harder still out in the boroughs.

The biggest of these, Brooklyn, is just across the East River

and, back then, was home to Italian-Americans,

African-Americans and Hispanics.

On Saturday nights, in the neighbourhood of Bay Ridge,

young Brooklynites danced their troubles away

in a club called 2001 Odyssey.

Really, at that time, disco was the minorities' haven

and, of course, in Brooklyn,

it was a very predominantly Italian club,

the 2001 club.

And in spring, 1977, Hollywood came here

to recreate this Saturday night ritual

that saw kids seeking escape on the dance floor.

MUSIC: Night Fever by Bee Gees

Four decades later,

Italian-Americans who were extras in the film

remember the story like it was yesterday.

I've got this guy, his name is Tony Manero,

he works in a hardware store.

MUSIC: Stayin' Alive by Bee Gees

-It starts out with him...

-The feet walking.

Walking with his tin of paint and then he stops at Lenny's.

-"Give me two slices."

-Right.

"Hey, Phil, I want that shirt. Hold that shirt for me."

The mother, she's kind of religious...

..and the brother, he was a priest.

The father was out of work, so he's pissed off anyway.

-What are you doing?

-"One pork chop!"

-One pork chop!

He's got a dead-end job and he lived for Saturday night,

combed the hair and everything, and it was a thing.

Tony dances at the discotheque

and then he realises that he wants to go other places in his life.

"Annette, cigarette?" She was good.

When he saw Stephanie, he was like,

"Oh, my God! See you later, Annette."

I changed my mind about us dancing together. I got another partner.

I don't know what he saw in her. "She's a snotty bitch, man."

She's a snotty bitch, man.

And after the Spanish people dance, then they dance and they killed it.

When he gives the prize away, he grabs her hand

-and he walks up to this dancer and he goes...

-"Shithole!"

And everything just came to a point at the end

when the friend dies and all that.

SCREAMING

He fell off the Verazzano bridge.

White suit, he's all dishevelled.

He was trying to understand what he's doing with his friends

and they're just hoods that got no future.

And he says, "I've got to get out of here and try to start my life over."

Astonishingly, the man who spotted the story potential

of Brooklyn's nightlife wasn't a New Yorker at all.

He wasn't even American.

He was a British journalist called Nik Cohn,

who was scouring New York's disco scene for material.

I started going first of all to these gay clubs

and then the disco dance contests all over the five boroughs.

I went to 2001 Odyssey,

where the story is set

and I got the cold shoulder. Nobody would really talk to me.

Outside the door, there was this guy in a body shirt and striking a pose.

At that point, the light bulb went on.

I'd seen this culture before with Teddy boys and with mods,

a certain self-sufficiency,

and I wrote a fictional story about what was inside his head.

And that was my story that became Saturday Night Fever.

Cohn's story appeared in New York magazine.

He'd been a novelist since he was 19

and you could tell that by the way he described nightlife in Brooklyn,

a world away from Manhattan.

# Controlling my mind and my soul

# When you reach out for me... #

Three great dances featured in Saturday Night Fever,

enrapturing the public and making it a box office sensation.

The line dance is the first and easiest.

It gave audiences something new, a piece of film action

they could recreate in their own local dance hall.

This is Hackney in London and choreographer Carl Parris

is at work with a new generation of disco dancers.

He's introducing them to the routines

that went down in disco history.

One, two, three, four,

five, six, seven, eight.

One, two, three, four...

One, two, three, four,

five, six...

I want to ask you, actually,

how does it feel for this new generation?

How does it feel doing this? It's fun, isn't it?

There is no kind of trying to outdo each other.

There is a sense of having a lot of people together,

having great fun, without giving attitude.

One, two, three, four,

five, six, seven, eight.

To my eye, the line dance has a tinge of country and western

but it turns out it's a glimpse of a dance

that was current in New York in 1977.

Five, six, seven, eight.

I never saw it in the clubs before the movie.

Well, this dance existed from the black clubs,

known as the electric slide -

a line dance, basic, but giving more funk, more soul.

-It's a lot more earthy.

-And then everybody did it.

-Then everybody is doing a black dance.

-Exactly.

One, two, three, four, and round. And here we go.

In the film, we can see how seriously Tony takes his dancing.

He's like an athlete. He treats dance like sport.

This attitude allowed straight white males to feel comfortable

and take to the dance floor.

It has that kind of feel, hasn't it? It makes you feel happy.

Come on, get down to it, kids!

# That sweet city woman She moves through the light

# Controlling my mind and my soul... #

Nik Cohn found the Brooklyn dance story

but it was Australian music supremo Robert Stigwood

who realised that it could transfer to the big screen.

Robert Stigwood is 37, a millionaire and having fun.

I was working for Robert Stigwood.

He'd made his fortune being an outlier.

He was a maverick. He didn't go by the rules.

He wasn't interested in received wisdom

and he took that approach into all the businesses he was in.

# ..To Massachusetts... #

Stigwood managed pop groups, among them the Bee Gees.

By the mid-'70s, the supergroup were in the doldrums,

reduced to playing in working men's clubs.

We did a whole stint

at Batley Variety Club and places like that in Sheffield and around,

during what we used to call the pop wilderness.

We were at a point where we would probably have gone back to Australia

and accepted the fact that we were a five-year group.

# Jive talkin'

# You're telling me lies... #

But Stigwood had seen how disco might salvage the Bee Gees' career.

# Jive talkin'

# So misunderstood, yeah... #

He was a visionary.

He was probably one of the only guys left like that

who created opportunities for the artist.

And he was always the kind of guy

that would make you do something that maybe you'd never done before.

He drew the originality out of you.

Doing something different is always the biggest risk.

# With all your jive talkin'... #

Leaving the R&B ballads behind, the Bee Gees wrote Jive Talkin'.

It was a huge hit and they became a major disco act.

It wasn't long before they'd be singing the soundtrack

for Saturday Night Fever.

Meanwhile, Stigwood had his eye on another career -

that of a young TV actor playing a character called Vinnie Barbarino

in US sitcom Welcome Back, Kotter.

The first time I heard John's name was Robert saying

he was watching Welcome Back, Kotter and he said,

"There's this kid in it who's great and he's going to be a movie star."

It was kind of a phenomenon - at least among young girls, it was.

He'd gotten a lot of attention

and Stigwood decided he wanted to sign him to a three-picture deal.

The three-picture deal, from my end, was what said to me

that everything my manager and I had worked hard for,

since I was 16 years old, had come to fruition

and that it was our job to do the best with that three-picture deal.

No-one had signed a television actor

to a three-picture million-dollar deal and that was typical Robert.

He did nothing by halves.

I was 17 years old

and I was auditioning for a big Broadway musical

called Jesus Christ Superstar and I gave a really good audition

and I didn't know really who Robert Stigwood was but, apparently,

he was in the audience, taking notes on a yellow pad, work pad.

And cut to... That was 1971,

and then cut to 1977 and he said,

"Now I might show you what I wrote about you."

And he took the yellow pad and it read...

"This boy is too young

"for this production of Jesus Christ Superstar.

"However, watch out. He's going to be something." And...

How about that?

Stigwood had the rights to make the musical Grease for the big screen

but it was delayed.

I think Grease was running as a show.

They didn't want to start the movie till later,

so Robert was on the lookout for something for John to do.

One of the first projects I acquired was this magazine article

called Travel Rites Of The New Saturday Night.

Right from the beginning, Robert saw this

as a commercial piece with wide appeal.

He read the article and he said, "I want to do the movie."

The lady I was living with said, "We got a call from a Rabbi Stigfelt.

"I think he was looking for contributions.

"I told him where to go."

Bill just rang and said, "Is that true? Are you available?"

I said, "I'm totally available." So, I bowled around for tea.

We were able to make a deal with him

and so we showed it to John Travolta and he loved it.

There's not a guarantee that the story,

about a slice of life in Brooklyn,

will turn out to be a valid film story.

And, to me, it felt more like an art film and not a pop commercial film.

It turned into that but I'm not sure whether we expected that.

Stigwood had a star, the Bee Gees for the soundtrack, and a story,

but no cash for a big Hollywood production team.

Overnight, his assistant Kevin McCormick became a film producer.

The ramp-up to this becoming a movie was both quick and unguided

and I'm on the front lines of this

with literally no experience and no supervision.

So I went out to California and I went to various agencies

and said I was looking for a director

and I had this magazine article

and basically got a cold shoulder from everybody,

and there was one particular director

that I was kind of interested in.

John Avildsen had just made another Italian-American story

on a tiny budget.

It hadn't been released yet

but everyone said he was a director to watch.

The phone rang and it was this Marvin Moss

and he said, "Kid, you're in luck.

"He read the article and he's interested

"but you'd better see his new movie first."

So, we went to see Rocky before it opened.

And John Avildsen became the first director of Saturday Night Fever.

Avildsen wanted screenwriter Norman Wexler

to work on the Nik Cohn story. It was another gamble.

He was manic-depressive.

He seemed extremely subdued and he chain-smoked a lot

and was very low-key and very slow to speak.

He made it his duty to really do research in Brooklyn and Manhattan.

He would stay up all night and write.

He would haunt those clubs in his old raincoat

and a little scratchpad, making notes.

Norman Wexler's an excellent writer.

He captured the grittiness and the language.

It's probably, beyond a shadow of a doubt,

the most rough language movie in movie history.

And, without repeating the lines, I could tell you,

because we used them so effortlessly

and as punctuations for sentences or operative words,

that it didn't offend, it was just natural communication.

My Vincent is a quite two-dimensional character.

He was able to put much more flesh on the bone.

He was written no differently

than a De Niro character in Taxi Driver

or James Caan in The Godfather.

He was gritty, sensitive, rough, but stylish.

His instinct for dance and dressing was of another level

but, at the same time, he was a Brooklyn tough kid,

but he had hopes and dreams that went beyond the obvious

and that's what made him so special.

We'd all read the first draft

and, as long as it was, there was real cinematic gold in it.

That movie is Taxi Driver with dancing.

It's a rough, tough movie.

People should be offended by everything we do in that movie.

Come on, fuckhead! Hey, son of a fuck won't budge.

Wexler's dialogue was harsh.

John Avildsen began to worry about it.

He also began worrying about other aspects of the film - the music.

But Stigwood had no fears about the soundtrack.

He and his record exec, Bill Oakes,

headed to France to discuss the film with the Bee Gees.

Robert called me up

and said, "Would you write a few songs for this film?"

And it just went from there

because we were really mixing a live album in Herouville

at the Chateau and they came to see us, Bill Oakes, Robert.

They were in the studio mixing stuff and we told them about the movie.

I said, "Do you want to see a script?" They said, "No."

We never read the script.

All we needed to know was what's the subject matter.

"Did I have any titles?" - that's what he said.

And I said, "Yeah, I've got some titles."

I liked Night Fever and How Deep Is Your Love

and Staying Alive.

And Robert liked all the titles but there were no songs at that point.

A few days like later, this cassette arrived, magically,

with five number ones on it. It was extraordinary.

We were in a very, very old building

and we stood on the stairs because the echo was great.

Truthfully, songs were written in a day or two.

It usually happened quick.

I can't recall a time when someone had written

so many obviously smash hits in such a short time.

Back in New York, director Avildsen was now worrying

about the dancing in the film.

He realised Travolta was going to have to deliver

something exceptional.

Dancer Deney Terrio was hired to build his athleticism

and take his performance to another level.

Travolta, already a natural, thought it would be easy.

Because I already know how to dance.

-I turned the radio on, Jungle Boogie, Kool & The Gang.

-Yeah.

And he started dancing and I watched him.

And I said, "That's very good, John. Now sit down."

And I put the music back on and I started doing the Russian leaps,

the splits and the knee drops and he went, "I've got to learn that."

Now, I would show him a move and it wouldn't look good on him.

-So you have to make it good for him?

-Yes.

-Yes.

-So, we used to do...

-And if you notice, if you watch John...

-Yeah, that's the classic.

-The point!

-The point.

-The point.

THEY LAUGH

I mean that is just, like, for ever.

You go from the kind of classic disco, you know, the hand movements.

-The knee drops.

-I call it the knee cracker. Oh, that's hard.

Yeah, one arm comes out and then you cross over like this

and then you start...

Down and up, down and up.

And then the other one was when he did the clock splits.

Where he'd split like this and come over and split.

Yeah, that was to the clock.

Every day, five, sometimes six days a week,

from about seven in the evening until ten,

after Kotter was over, trained.

It's not that I'm limited as a dancer.

I'm an actor who loves to act

but I'm also an actor who loves to dance.

The dance I learned for Saturday Night Fever

took months to train and drill.

A real dancer could learn that in a couple of weeks.

Deney gave John Travolta brilliant moves for a solo dance.

The producers were invited to preview steps

that would go down in dance history.

John comes up to me and goes,

"Robert's coming tonight to the studio."

Robert comes in with Kevin McCormick and they all sat down.

John goes, "Let's go." So, here we are, the two of us.

Yeah, we're together.

We're doing this together and we're doing the point, you know.

Oh, yeah, but it was so much fun.

# Dancing, yeah... #

In London, Carl Parris walks his young troop through the sequence.

-Love that!

-Into above the head.

And then you're doing the roll.

Some are already professionals who know how hard it is.

They understand what Deney put Travolta through

for a career-defining performance.

For these kids, dance is life and work.

Of course, they've spotted the very dangerous manoeuvre

at the heart of this dance and it's a reminder

of the genuine risks Travolta took for his first big film.

The knee cracker and those incredible slides into the rolls,

I will never ask you to do, because he had months to get it right

and, you know, you've got your lives ahead of you.

You put your leg in the wrong place,

you're going to twist your knee and you're out.

If Travolta had been injured, filming would have been delayed.

Time was money and there wasn't any.

Scenes had to be shot in real Bay Ridge locations to save cash.

Tony Manero's family home was found on 79th Street.

Kevin McCormick's career began in this house.

He hasn't been back in 40 years.

Where you been?

Your mother wants to know where you've been.

I don't remember wood floors but they look great.

And it's a lot brighter and bigger than it seemed.

Your father's asking you where you been.

Famous dinner table scene took place around here.

It was full of people and equipment and table.

You were kind of cowering over in corners, holding your breath,

so that you didn't disrupt the shot.

Upstairs is the bedroom Tony shares

when his brother suddenly leaves the priesthood.

I'm leaving the priesthood.

I think it was darker.

You got fired, huh?

I didn't get fired. I quit.

Rather than it being a tragedy for Tony,

it's a completely liberating experience

because, if his brother is not that good,

then he doesn't have to be that bad.

The task of finding the house

and all the other locations fell to Lloyd Kaufmann.

He was a stranger to Bay Ridge and remembers it well,

all things considered.

40 years, 40 years.

Our company, Troma, put together

all those locations in Rocky, so Avildsen brought me on

to make sure that we could get the locations for nothing.

It was a low-budget movie.

I don't think we paid more than 100 a day for anything.

I had never been to Brooklyn. This thing was a nightmare for me.

-I knew nothing.

-What do you mean, you knew nothing?

How did you find all these places without knowing anything?

There was no GPS, there was no MapQuest.

The only thing I had was my partner's mother-in-law.

She gave me some driving directions. It was hell, I hated it.

It was horrible. I hated the job.

John Avildsen, I was there for him,

-cos I knew he would make a great movie.

-Yeah.

-We are approaching 86th Street.

-Yes.

Key location, the famous walk.

Yes, which was done with a skateboard, I think.

# Well, you can tell by the way I use my walk... #

Oh, look! Lenny's Pizza.

-Yeah.

-Here we are. The original.

# And now it's all right, it's OK

# And you may look the other way... #

-Well, Bruno, here we are.

-We are recreating history.

-Was it his sister that actually served him...

-Yeah, his sister.

..the double whammy pizza sandwich?

Hiya, Tony, two or three?

Two, two. Give me two. That's good.

-Give me two.

-Right away.

-We don't have John's sister.

-No.

So, we have to make do.

Oh, there you are! So, we do that.

-I think it's like that, right?

-Oh, like that he did it?

-Yeah.

-Mm.

-Good, huh?

We make it here, it's 100%.

# We can try to understand

# The New York Times' effect on man... #

-Oh! Mm! It's delicious!

-Yeah, it's good pizza.

-Oh, my God.

-The way John had it.

-Yep.

# Ah, ha, ha, ha, stayin' alive... #

Finding the buildings was only the beginning of Lloyd's problems.

The DP, who wants lights on the roof next door.

And then he wants lights in the windows across the street.

And then you have to get the streets wetted down.

We had to have bathrooms outside

and all that stuff I had to provide for nothing, basically.

There was no money for that. It was a constant stress. It was not fun.

-It would cost millions.

-It was amazing.

-It's the hardware store.

-Is it still here? Is this it?

-Oh, Lloyd, this is it!

But it's still a hardware store.

Yeah, it looks like it's now a Home Center.

But how did you convince them to let you have the shop?

They were really nice. I think they just let us do it.

I don't even think they charged us. It went very well.

The people who ran the store were lovely.

Was it his sister or his mother that played one of the clients?

-No, his mother was buying the paint.

-Buying the paint.

I had to get a place for John Travolta to stay

because we didn't have the big honeywagons.

The bathroom couldn't be on location,

because it makes noise flushing the toilet.

If one toilet gets stopped up and you've got a 200-man crew...

-You're done.

-Your whole production is constipated.

But then, just weeks from the start of shooting, John Avildsen,

now lauded director of Rocky, began to lose faith in the film.

The more successful he got,

the more doubt he had about Saturday Night Fever.

He couldn't figure out who the choreographer was.

Should it be like ballet? Should it be like this,

should it be like that? And, in the end,

he never could quite figure out exactly what it should be.

And then John, bless him, changed the script...

..to Mickey O'Neill, an Irish boy,

who was a good deeder on the streets of Brooklyn,

and he did favours for old ladies

and he wanted to show his generosity to all,

which is a fine idea, but it wasn't anything what I agreed to.

So, I went to Robert Stigwood and I said,

"Robert, this is another movie, man.

"This isn't the movie I signed up for."

Stigwood calls from London and says, "What's going on?"

I said, "John Avildsen's been thinking and he thinks

"the Bee Gees are over so he wants to get rid of the Bee Gee music."

He said, "Really?" And I said, "Yeah."

And he said, "Well, tell him to be at my apartment

"tomorrow morning at ten o'clock."

The two of us show up at the appointed hour a little bit early

and Stigwood comes in and goes,

"Listen, John, I have good news for you and bad news for you.

"The good news is I just took a call,

"you've just been nominated for an Academy Award.

"The bad news is you're fired."

The production was suddenly rudderless.

Newby producer Kevin McCormick was facing a disaster.

He didn't even have his leading lady yet.

We didn't have Stephanie yet.

We had seen a bunch of the faces they weren't committed to yet.

This house was picked.

A lot of the key things were already sort of settled on,

but the schedule and the shape of the script

and what we were going to shoot was not.

Now what do we do? You get another director and you go

because you have the slot with Travolta.

And if you don't get him, somebody else does.

But I was shit-scared, I'll say that.

I come out to California,

I go back to a bunch of different people's offices.

There is one particular guy, John Badham, who I'd met.

And John Badham had directed a baseball film, I forget the title.

I thought, "Well, he knows how to put a picture together

"but he's from Texas.

"How the hell will he duplicate, understand Brooklyn?

"I don't know. It's going to be a real task here."

I got to his agent and said,

"Listen, if he wants to do it, we'll fly him to New York.

"He's got to meet with me and Stigwood, and meet with Travolta."

I got on a plane

and went to New York and, as I'm on the plane,

I'm reading this very long script.

I was going, "Oh, my God, this is a great movie."

And as I'm reading it, I go, "This is a bloody musical.

"What's the music going to be? What's the dance going to be like?

"Oh, my god, and we're starting in two and a half weeks!"

He comes into New York and we have this meeting

and it's decided to go with Badham.

Although the film didn't even have a complete cast,

John Avildsen had, however, done some auditioning.

I think I had three auditions with John Avildsen.

John Avildsen had a Super 8 camera

and my screen test was with Ray Liotta and David Caruso

with John Travolta and, eventually, I got put on hold for the movie.

It went away for a while, so I just assumed

I didn't get it, it didn't happen.

Now Badham continued the auditioning process.

And we went casting and, through his casting process,

I realised he was more of a film-maker than I had anticipated.

He was tastier than I thought

and more interesting than I thought and who he liked, I liked.

They would put out a casting call

for guys that were relatively big in size.

I didn't really look like I was from Brooklyn.

So, I showed up for this audition thinking I had nothing to lose

and I just sort of went for it.

I thought, all along, this was a nothing part.

When it came back again and John Badham was directing,

I thought, "Why are they bringing me back in for five or six lines?"

And then the call came in and I was thrilled.

I was brought in to read for a new director, John Badham,

and ended up getting the part.

I came through the two directors and got the part.

And then the script came and I nearly had a heart attack.

It wasn't a bit part,

it was the second biggest female role, Annette.

Badham, meanwhile, still needed to find

his lead female character, Stephanie.

-She came by chance and by taxi.

-We took a taxi

down to see A Star Is Born

and in it was the nephew of Stigwood

and he said he's making this movie.

And I said, "Am I in it?"

She hadn't even been put up for the job.

And she probably went and hassled her agent.

I said, "Submit me for this part or I'll kill you."

She was not even on the short list.

She basically pushed her way into being seen.

When Karen came in, she had it. She just could right away do it.

And she ends up with the job.

Badham had his cast and just days to turn them into characters.

John Badham is an actor's director and he believes in rehearsal,

he believes in promoting a closeness with the cast

so they feel very comfortable once you're on camera.

-JOHN TRAVOLTA:

-Film-makers were doing that at the time.

Scorsese was doing that,

Brian De Palma was doing that at the time.

These film-makers wanted authenticity.

There's less work to do if there's a chemistry that's organic

than to try to create a chemistry on-screen.

The whole idea was that we would do everything we could together

as a gang - play basketball...

That's when we started to create that bond.

We'd all go to lunch as these characters.

We went out to restaurants together, pizza joints,

and we just basically improvised.

And they were just god-awful to me.

They would order pizza and leave me out.

That's the only way the movie would work,

is if we believed that we grew up together in the neighbourhood.

By the time we hit the set, I would say we were a family of sorts.

The Badham bunch finally looked like they'd grown up together

but what about dancing together?

Badham now drafted in another choreographer

to make his actors into disco fanatics.

He brought in this choreographer

who's this hilarious guy, Lester Wilson.

He was a wonderful juicy guy that brightened up the movie.

He'd show up and everybody had to get into it

and you had to learn how to do it right.

And we worked for a long time on the way

the look of the dancing would be, the style of the dancing.

He had a feel for that. He had the rhythms, he had the moves.

-# Night fever, night fever...

-#

I wanted a choreographer who was going to treat all of our dances

like ones that the kids had learned themselves,

learned from each other.

What Lester brought in was very practical,

this is what kids do, authentic basic dance moves.

They wanted the feeling that everyone in that club

was like this, that we did this all the time, that we came together

because of the dancing, you knew the step.

MUSIC: Disco Inferno by The Trammps

I felt very clumsy at first

because a lot of the dance that I did with John had spins

and moves I had never really seen.

For me, it was very new territory.

But John Travolta is such an amazing dancer

and Lester was such a great choreographer

that you had this wonderful safety net.

For the first nine months of training, it was just with Deney

but, by the time we came to the movie, we needed someone

that might have had more experience at film and Broadway,

so we hired Lester.

And Lester basically did something very smart.

He said, "Show me what you got. Show me what Deney taught you."

And I showed him my whole portfolio of dance.

And he said, "OK, we're going to use all of it

"but I'm just going to have to find

"the glue that puts these kind of street steps together

"in a way that we can film." And he did.

He did it beautifully.

That solo was 70% Deney Terrio and 30% Lester,

but Lester put it together so it looked like a performance.

# Dancing, yeah... #

Lester put the soul in the picture

and allowed John Travolta to find the soul that's in Tony Manero

and I think he meshed it well with the music.

By the time I first saw John dancing, it was like a miracle.

It was like, "This guy is wonderful."

# What you doin' on your back, aah? #

And they said, "Well, he's worked really hard to get this good."

It's unbelievable and it's so physical and he's so strong.

I was blown away by how professional he was, how good he was.

You watch that now, you look at the dancing moves

and look at how magnificent Travolta is. He's incandescent.

Lester Wilson shaped all the dances except the most famous one of all.

Do you know the tango hustle?

One day, for one crucial scene we have in the movie,

there was no Lester and I had to speak to his dance captain

and she said, "Oh, Lester took a fashion show today."

And you go, "Oh, no!"

There would be moments when you couldn't find him.

He had a beautiful assistant that was usually covering up for him

when he had another job which nobody knew about.

She said, "I'll work something out,"

and she and John played around and came up with this tango hustle.

The tango hustle came from my inspiration

from the Last Tango In Paris, which is a Brando film,

and it was the first time I really saw a tango on film.

And it worked just great, so we felt like we always had a backup

if Lester were to take another fashion show.

Invented in an emergency, the tango hustle wins

the Odyssey dance contest for Tony and Stephanie.

And eight. Turn one, two, three, four, five and six.

In Hackney, the company have watched the dance that looks simple,

but is anything but.

The unusual stepping pattern

and the flamboyant head flicks made it difficult for Karen Lynn Gorney.

I don't know how he dances it. That is really hard.

You had to take a step, then kick...

-And walk.

-..in the middle of the beat,

step kick, and you were balancing on one leg, doing this kick in the air.

One, two. The kick is one, two.

Yeah, but my leg just can't get there.

Five, six, seven, eight.

And you had to do it in sync with your partner.

That was not easy.

What's difficult is that their phrasing is really strange.

We were weaving within the beat that was set up

and we weren't always stepping on the downbeat.

One, two, three and four.

Walk, five, six. Kick, seven, back, eight.

That particular dance is not easy. Let them find that out.

And one and two, move three, four.

-It's not really a proper tango.

-No, it's not a classic tango.

It's what you thought, in Brooklyn,

-a tango would look like, do you know what I mean?

-Yeah.

Millions of turns,

people lifting people up with their legs spread wide.

One, two, up, three. Take it slowly, six, seven and down.

Because there's such a difference in our height,

he had to pull his steps and I had to elongate my steps

so that it looked like partner dancing. Very difficult.

One and two, three, four, five, six, seven and eight.

Turn. One, two, three, four,

five and six, seven, eight.

The tango hustle sequence became film legend

and so did the white suit Travolta danced in.

Amazingly, it was just an off-the-peg item.

The decision was to only buy things that we could find on the rack.

We wanted to give it that kind of authenticity.

Costume designer Patrizia von Brandenstein had a tiny budget,

just like the characters themselves.

These kids saved in increments of a quarter

to buy a shirt to wear on Saturday night.

It was not going to be Armani!

-It was going to be another kind of way of looking at it.

-Yeah.

She had such a clear vision of what people had to look like.

They brought in things, we chose things from their wardrobes

and we added to those things.

Things just would appear that were wonderful.

Patrizia, who's gone on to win many Academy Awards,

found a shop in the Village in New York that we went to together

and this guy said, "We haven't had that kind of clothing

"in three years, but I have boxes in the back of our store

"that are filled with it, if you want to look at it."

I said, "Bring it out,"

so he brought the mother lode of disco clothes out.

I mean, everything we wore in that movie came out of those boxes.

It was the perfect floral shirt,

it was the perfect pink pants,

it was the perfect short, green, mint-coloured vest

and leisure suit and, oh, my gosh, it was a mother lode.

John wore double pleats, a pair of high-waisted gabardine pants.

He happened to have very good legs and very good bottom

and he looked great in pants,

but they were tailored to his every curve.

-What's up?

-I like colour. He looks good in strong colour.

He can carry it off.

The other members of his gang were like mirrors of him, wannabes.

They did wear the same kind of clothes,

but they're softer colours because he is the king.

-KEVIN MCCORMICK:

-Patrizia was going out

and finding these incredible shirts that were made of no natural fibre.

Polyesters were just coming to the fore and that's what we wanted.

We wanted that shine.

And she really brought this kind of vividness to all of the clothes.

They were just electric and yet affordable.

I had this polyester shirt with the light bulbs on it.

In a way, I was dressed like a pimp.

I remember one thing I ended up wearing

was this peach-coloured suit and rust-coloured shirt

and she just thought it was perfect and I was horrified.

I gave them all platformed shoes.

This kind of height forces a man to walk a certain way.

It made you look absolutely remarkable.

To give Bobby those white platform shoes in that one scene,

when he's walking away after John borrows his car, it's just...

He looks so pathetic that it is just so beautifully done.

That was a stroke of genius on her part. The white suit was too.

MUSIC: More Than A Woman by Bee Gees

Originally, John wanted a black suit.

I had seen a Latin guy dance with this girl

and he looked so cool in this black suit with a white shirt,

I just said to Patrizia, "Only one request.

"I have to have the black suit with the white shirt,

"because this guy looks so cool, spinning her and dipping her."

I said, "I just have to have that look.

"It was just really sexy so, can we do that?"

She said, "We can but, John, could I tell you my thoughts on it?"

And I started to get upset

because I thought she was going to try and talk me out of this

and I want that black suit I want that white shirt.

And she said, "It's a dark club

"and even though you're on a colourful floor

"that's going to blink and do whatever, it won't show up as well.

"Your black suit will disappear into the night."

Two hours later, they came back with two white suits.

She created a bit of history

in that one little talking me out of something.

As I've said often, heroes wear white.

The famous suit was taken apart, seam by seam,

and put back together in such a way

-that it absolutely fit like a glove.

-Like a glove.

Finally, shooting began on March 11th, 1977.

Cast and crew knew they faced two huge problems -

very little money, hardly enough time.

We were really a low-budge kind of consciousness,

which didn't match the appetite of the picture.

You have this fantasy you're starring in a movie

and they'll pick you up in a car and they take you there.

No, the only way we're going to get to the set is to take the subway.

My grandfather dropped me off at the location.

I was making minimum per week, but it was a long enough job.

This was my first film and I didn't know

you could get another take if it didn't feel good.

I didn't know about much of what was going on around me.

The producers were also learning on the job.

They were not ready for the problems of filming in a real community.

We opened up at seven o'clock in the morning on 86th Street

at a shirt shop.

Five or six little girls start calling, "Hey, Barbarino,"

this and that.

And John waves to them nicely.

Well, within minutes, those 8 or 10 little girls became 20

and then 50 and then 100.

Next thing you know, we had 1,500, 2,000 people crowded around

and you couldn't get them to move.

There was 40 million people a week that watched Welcome Back, Kotter,

and I was already a favourite in New York,

so now you're going to shoot outside in Brooklyn

where the character is supposed to be from?

It's a low-budget movie. We have no budget for anything,

certainly not the budget for security.

We might have had a cop, but only because we were required

to have it with your permit. It's a little disco movie.

Here's this guy and he's only done a couple of things

and there's like 10,000 kids outside of the disco.

From that moment on, we had to adjust our sights.

This was a different kind of picture.

We could not pan the camera to the right or to the left.

We couldn't even look up because people were hanging over buildings.

So, we could barely get a take in.

They'd say, "Action", and, boom, there'd be screams.

I had an audience walking down the street so, if someone thought,

"How could you be so confident walking down the street?"

Because I had 30,000 people going, "Yeah!"

Why wouldn't that give you confidence, you know?

Day one, we're in that car.

-Do you want some?

-No, we ain't dropping nothing till I say so.

We shoot that opening scene

and there are 3,000 kids waiting for John.

We come around this corner and they break through

whatever barricade there was and go to attack the car.

I thought I was in Cuba during the revolution, I swear to God.

And they're beating on the car.

Barry's driving and John yells, "Get out of here!"

And he floors it and we take off. I mean, they don't know where we are.

It was exciting. I remember every minute of it was crazy.

And then, another kind of heavy mob started getting in on the action.

The Mafia placed the whole shoot in jeopardy.

We got into some trouble in the neighbourhood.

We wanted to run some lights on a bowling alley across the street

and that was going to be X amount of dollars

and then there was a firebomb.

And this big old Cadillac with the tall fins came driving up

in the mid-morning and a guy who must have weighed 300 pounds

came out of there and said,

"I hear you boys had a little barbecue here last night."

It was my first and only brush with the Mafia,

which was enough for me to never hope to have to do it again.

We were going to be here for the rest of the movie

and if we had got shut down in any way,

it would have been a catastrophe. So, the stakes were very high.

I had to figure out a way to pay these guys off.

A day later, I'm in the bowling alley and the phone rings,

the payphone, and it's the district attorney,

will I wear a wire and talk to these people?

And I said, "I don't know what you're talking about."

I didn't need to be Serpico.

I'm just trying to get my movie made.

What's the matter? What's going on?

It's Gus, man. He's in the hospital. The Spics got in.

For most of the cast, this was their first film.

By comparison, John Travolta was a veteran. This was his second.

He became a vital resource.

I don't think John ever looked at it as anything but a team effort

among all of us to get us somewhere good with this movie.

He was always concerned about the overall scene

and how the actor who he was working with felt.

He would always say, "Are you OK? Are you happy?

"Do you want to do it again?" And that made me braver.

John Travolta was the lead, the star and the glue

that bound the team together.

So, when a few weeks into the shoot, he suddenly left the set,

everyone was stunned.

In California, his partner, Diana Hyland, was dying.

When I left to do the movie, it was six days a week,

16-hour days, and it was all-consuming.

So, when I got the news that it was going to happen...

I would talk to her often, but some days I couldn't talk to her.

And when I got the news, that she didn't want to tell me,

that it was going to happen...

So my lawyer called me to say, "You have to come out."

And I knew when he told me that, and I just sat on the edge of my bed

and sobbed and then I got on a jet and went out

and spent the last two days with her.

When he came back, he was a little bit more internal.

He would be in his trailer little bit more.

-DONNA PESCOW:

-He went through a lot of difficulty

and he never let it hurt the film in any way. He took some time off.

He really became focused on the part.

I had this distraction of the film to get me through,

but I can remember, at times, coming into the trailer,

crying in between takes and all that stuff.

So, I think, at least for half of the movie,

that was on my shoulders, for sure.

-DONNA PESCOW:

-When I watch the film,

I see little teeny moments occasionally where I'll think,

"Is that John being emotional

"because of what's going on in his real life,

"as well as what's going on for Tony?"

I was such a sensitive young man, more so then

because I didn't edit my sensitivities. I was just raw.

Hey, look who's sharp, huh?

Tough scenes lay ahead.

This was the era of realism in film

and Wexler's script reflected the abuse

he had seen dealt out to women.

-Ain't you going to ask me to sit down?

-No, you'd do it.

-Bet you'd asked me to lay down.

-No, you would not do it.

We didn't treat Donna very well, even though we loved Donna,

but we had to start getting into that mind-set.

You've got a stripper in the front of the club.

I mean, that's really their attitude.

That women were not to be taken all that seriously,

except for certain activities.

You've been in there 20 minutes! Come on!

25 in the car, 20 in the chick.

Two minutes in the car and now it's my turn, you know.

Hey, like who cares?

They were going for raw, real, authentic,

so it was very visceral in that way.

It was really a sense of who they were. It was a tough movie.

The script built the violence towards a gang rape of Annette.

John Badham thought it would be too challenging for his cast

and for the audiences.

-She's going to give everybody a piece of snatch pie.

-Yeah!

The raping of Annette, I was worried about that scene and I asked Robert.

I said, "Are you sure you want to do it the way it's written here,

"because I can do it much softer?"

And he said, "No, no, we have to do it."

-You can fuck all night on speed.

-Oh, yeah?

-Yeah, you will.

She initiates it to get back at John,

not understanding what was about to happen.

We're in more or less like a garage

and they've got a mock-up of the back of the car.

Closed sets, as few people as possible,

so you wouldn't feel as embarrassed and you wouldn't be as inhibited.

Joey, what you doing back there?

-Hey, you fuck, the first is always the best.

-That's right.

It was very hard for the boys to do that scene.

It was awkward, definitely,

cos we'd become friends and now you're on top of somebody

who was a friend and you're doing your first sex scene.

It was very, very uncomfortable.

It's a very rough scene.

I don't know if I've ever seen an American movie

with that kind of crudeness,

where, basically, they're gang-banging a girl

with detail, with graphicness.

And, you know, I remember not wanting to look at her

and John allowing me to just play it forward

because I said, "If I look at her, it's too connected."

-Hey!

-JOEY LAUGHS

The director, the crew, everybody felt horrible.

I mean, I could feel it.

People looked away.

They were upset because we all had a nice camaraderie.

I give Donna a lot of credit.

She was brilliant in those scenes and she was able to go with it

and disassociate from it.

The rape of Annette was followed by another harrowing scene,

one that actually risked the lives of the performers,

hundreds of feet above the Hudson River.

It's the biggest moment of scale in the entire picture.

Literally, all of the drama coalesces around this single act.

We would close the bridge, create traffic jams. They hated us.

They closed the upper roadway,

so nobody could drive on the upper roadway from five o'clock on.

That's during rush hour.

It was complicated and it was freezing and, in fact,

the night when we were actually going to do the stunt,

it started snowing in April.

The clock was ticking and the traffic police were fuming.

Producer McCormick now pushed his exhausted team

into a scene that might make his career or end it.

At first, they wanted to attach guy wires to us

cos we were 300 feet above the water, but it kept showing.

I was an idiot, I had a lot of fool's courage.

I jumped on and said, "Let's just go for it."

I mean, literally, we're near the edge of the bridge.

The stuntman who did Bobby's scene,

that guy's hanging from the wiring on the bridge.

-JOHN BADHAM:

-Nowadays, if I went to do it,

I would have more safety people out there

than you could shake a stick at.

You would not be allowed to film on the bridge,

you would not be allowed to show somebody jumping off the bridge,

but we got to do all of these things.

-BOBBY:

-I did it.

-What did you do?

I was out there climbing around on the lights,

300 feet above the water, freezing cold, a lot of wind blowing.

Bob, come on. We'll talk, all right.

I didn't want to fuck up this time.

SCREAMING

The stuntman, he jumped.

This guy goes, and that was crazy, man, to see that,

to see him jump off the edge of the bridge

and land 50 feet down on this padded platform that they had built,

cos if he misses that, forget it, the guy's in the Hudson.

After every imaginable challenge, the film was safely in the can.

Now came an unimaginable technical nightmare

that put its release in jeopardy.

One, two, three, good. Two, two, three, good.

The problem first surfaced in this scene.

In the finished film,

Tony and Annette dance to a piece of music,

specially written by composer David Shire.

When it was actually filmed,

they were dancing to a different song by Boz Scaggs.

One, two, three, two, two, three.

One, two, one, two, three.

That was a song that we loved,

so we shoot the scene, which took us most of the afternoon.

MUSIC: Lowdown by Boz Scaggs

And I get a call from Kevin McCormick telling me

that we cannot have the rights

to Boz Scaggs' Lowdown, so I'm like that.

I remember the music getting changed several times,

often after it was shot.

There were quite a few names that we'd already shot scenes to

and we had to withdraw the track, notably Boz Scaggs.

It was such a cool song at the time

and it was so beautifully popular, timelessly popular, you know.

It wasn't going anywhere, that song, the Boz Scaggs song,

so I wanted to use it in the movie but we couldn't.

His manager acknowledged he had lost out on about 5 million right there

because that's how much he'd have made from one song on the album.

MUSIC: Lowdown by Boz Scaggs

Composer David Shire quickly wrote a tune that exactly matched

the Lowdown beat and, in editing, it fitted perfectly.

# What you doin' on your back, ahh? #

Then, the problem of a mismatch between pictures and music

became much more worrying, with tracks that couldn't be replaced.

The Bee Gees music, we heard a lot of that during the filming

for the first time, which was really exciting.

We could all listen to the Bee Gees music,

all the rough demos on a tape deck,

and it was, like, unbelievable to hear those songs,

with just them singing with grand piano or guitar,

without the full production.

I had that demo tape and that's what we used

for playback for the entire shooting of the movie.

But when the finished master tracks arrived, they were slightly slower.

MUSIC: You Should Be Dancing by Bee Gees

When my editor, David Rawlins, goes to cut the musical numbers,

he finds that he can't use the good tracks.

The only things that will sync up are these playback tracks

which are all kind of echoey and like this and they sound terrible.

What we would have is dancers out of sync with the music

and stepping at the wrong time, and it would have been a mess.

In fact, it was a disaster.

Cast and crew were gone, John Travolta was back making TV,

the Odyssey scenes were unusable, and so was the new Bee Gees music.

It was an effort of several months

to find some kind of technology

that would get these things to sync up.

# Night fever, night fever... #

But even when the music problem was solved,

a new issue arose with the way the music was mixed -

one spotted by John Travolta and Barry Gibb.

I'm standing at the back of the theatre with John Travolta

and we're watching this movie.

The people dancing were louder than the music.

And he would look at me and I would look at him.

The music should be louder than the feet.

You don't hear people dancing in a club.

I said, "I think they're wrong."

And John said, "I think they're wrong too."

And if you see the film now, it's the music that dominates.

There was one final problem.

The star and director couldn't agree

on how the film's iconic solo dance sequence should be edited.

"I worked ten months for that," I said,

"and now it's all in close-ups. Why?"

I know that Fred Astaire had in his contract that, you shot him dancing,

you always had to see him head to toe,

and there was a good reason for that.

Too many close-ups of feet dancing might make audiences think

the star had a dance double.

That's the first thing people want to assume

is that no actor could be doing that level of fighting,

that level of dancing, that level of martial arts.

It has to be somebody else. So, there's an assumption there.

I went to the editing room and I said, "Show me the master.

"I did two masters. Show me those." I said, "OK, good.

"Keep it in the master."

At that point, I think we were mixing the sound on the picture,

when he looked at it.

I looked at David Rawlins, the editor, and said,

"He's absolutely right. We have to do this."

"Only do the close-up when I'm pointing at the audience,

"when I come across the audience,

"because I'm not dancing, I'm pointing," I said,

"so I don't care if you see my whole body.

"But, other than that, keep it in the master."

He took the film from the mixing room over to his cutting room

and worked on it for a couple or three hours.

It didn't take too long. Brought it back and that's what you have.

Movies is a collaborative effort

and that movie was certainly a mix of collaboration between Robert,

myself, the set designers, the wardrobe designers,

the dance instructors... and the director and myself.

Compromises all over the place, but good ones, ones that made sense.

With these problems resolved,

next Robert Stigwood faced showing the film to the studio.

It was riddled with bad language and Stigwood anticipated trouble.

I don't give a fuck about this.

No film that I know of had ever used language as strongly.

Hey, Tone, did you fuck her yet?

The vulgarity of it was just all over the place.

Oh, you ate pussy, man!

And, of course, the minute my actors found out that they could say

all of that stuff, it started to proliferate on its own.

You got nothing but three shit children now.

It wouldn't have been authentic to do it any other way.

Stupid fucking bastard.

The script broke new ground.

Certain practices were mentioned on film for the first time.

Just give me a blow job, right?

Studio bosses Michael Eisner and Barry Diller were dismayed.

They saw the film.

I knew Barry was disturbed because he would get up

and walk out of the theatre occasionally.

Do you know how many times somebody told me I was good in my life?

Two. Twice. Two fucking times.

Michael Eisner called me up afterwards and said...

You sure as fuck never did.

.."You've got to get rid of a lot of this profanity."

-Arsehole.

-Michael Eisner, I think, believed

that the language was just too rough.

At the same time, Robert Stigwood is saying to me,

"Do not cut a word."

I'm kind of caught between a rock and a hard place here.

It's agreed by Stigwood

that he'll take two swear words out of the picture.

Badham takes two "fucks" out of the movie.

Michael Eisner takes a look at it and he starts screaming at me.

Apparently, he didn't think anything had been changed at all.

When I told Stigwood of my encounter,

which was terrifying to me, he just started laughing.

John Badham knew that, even now, the studio might refuse

to release the film.

Behind Stigwood's back, he desperately tried to save it.

And so, I called Michael and said,

"Michael, we have cut 35% of the language."

And I just was saying to myself,

"I hope Robert doesn't notice that we've done this."

Well, we got by with it.

There was no way it was ever going to get to be a PG.

The studio accepted the new edit but they were still worried.

It was due for a Christmas release, a time for a family-friendly film.

Once he'd made the deal with Paramount,

the next movie was going to be Grease,

and Grease was going to be the 100 million film,

and so we were just this little disco movie

and we were a little disco movie that was an R-rated disco movie

and it was too long and had some violence in it.

There was no expectation.

I never detected that they were following the progress much.

It was, after all, not a studio picture.

Robert Stigwood had produced it and they were distributing it

and you're always second in the pecking order in the studio system.

They had no idea how to put a marketing hook on this.

It fell somewhere between an R-rated street picture

and a musical, so what you do with that?

Robert Stigwood now played a marketing masterstroke that he hoped

would have the public loving the film, even before they'd seen it.

Because he controlled the record label and the music publishing,

he was able to sort of make the commitment

that "I'm going to put all the muscle I've got behind this album."

MUSIC: Night Fever by Bee Gees

The movie soundtrack was released before the movie

and it went platinum.

The album was huge.

It was only when the records started flying out into the charts

and we got one hit after another, that took them aback, I think.

Robert said, "I'm selling the record everywhere.

"I want the movie on everywhere."

Start here, moving...

The producers dared to dream

that the fans of the record might also watch the film.

Could they cover the 3.5 million costs?

Even before the family-friendly version came out,

the film made over 85 million.

There was a line going all the way

around the block for the midnight show.

The ten o'clock show had sold out.

I was in New York and I'd go out just to watch people

stand in line, and it was crazy.

-We should have a guard behind.

-One guard in front, one behind.

I saw Robert after the film had been out for about three or four days.

He told me it had taken 40 million,

and I took it for granted he was just having me on.

This was a hit, not just in New York and Brooklyn

and LA and Chicago,

but places like where the Campus Crusade for Christ

drew 50,000 people, we were selling out.

In the theatre near my neighbourhood,

it ran for six months.

It never occurred to me what was about to happen.

Cops coming up to you, going, "Hey, Joey, how's it going?"

It's like, "What?!"

"Aren't you...?" "Isn't that...?"

"Was that you...?" And it was just terrifying.

The next thing I know, I'm being sat at a couch with Bianca Jagger

and Grace Jones.

Three weeks before that, I was completely unknown.

When Robert Stigwood first read the story

that became Saturday Night Fever,

even he could not have seen what the movie would become.

# My woman take me higher... #

Made on a shoestring, Saturday Night Fever is believed

to have made nearly 300 million since its release.

But the significance of this movie isn't just its blockbuster takings.

# Ahh, you should be dancing, yeah... #

It was a cultural phenomenon,

one of the genuine things that defines its time.

My manager cried when he read the review in the New Yorker

of the movie and my performance,

because it was everything he'd dreamed about having for me.

So, I knew we had a movie with gravitas.

But did I know it was a pop culture phenomenon? No.

The downside is that, you know, when I die,

the obituary will be, "Fever man kicks bucket."

I know that on my gravestone that they're going to engrave,

"Staying alive."

And then, underneath, it'll go, "Not!"

What came out of it was spun gold, actually.

I don't get emotional about it.

I get a smile on my face when I hear those songs. It was a good time.

It was a dark time in New York but out of the darkness came this movie.

Saturday Night Fever, under today's scrutiny, shouldn't succeed.

You know, it's racist, it's sexist, it's full of violence,

bad language and, yet, there is something so compelling

and so honest and so exciting about it.

And, at the centre of it,

you have this incandescent star in John Travolta.

And very few times in one's life do you see somebody arrive

and just take over, take hold, and be in everybody's imagination

from that point on, and he certainly did it.

I'm more of an actor that says, "Ooh, I have to dance now."

I have a natural ability, I don't have a style.

Because I have a happiness about it, an excitement about it,

it ignites people, do you know?

MUSIC: You Should Be Dancing by Bee Gees

When John Travolta signed his million-dollar contract,

Grease was the word. The little disco film was just a diversion.

He didn't know it would make him the biggest star in Hollywood.

As for the rest of us, as soon as we saw the fantastic dancing

on the illuminated disco floor,

we just had to get up and try the moves for ourselves.

# My woman take me higher... #

Saturday Night Fever became much bigger than the sum of its parts -

an intoxicating cocktail of music, storytelling and dance.

It became one of the most significant cultural events

of the 20th century.

40 years later, it's lost none of its power.

# What you doin' on your back, aah?

# What you doin' on your back, ah, ah, ah?

# You should be dancing, yeah

# Dancing, yeah

# You should be dancing, yeah

# Yeah

# Yeah

# You should be dancing, yeah... #