Saturday Night Fever is a 1977 American musical drama film directed by John Badham. It stars John Travolta as Tony Manera, a working-class young man who spends his weekends dancing and drinking at a local Brooklyn dicotheque; Karen Gorney as Stephanie Mangano, his dance partner and eventuyal confidante; and Donna Pescow as Annette, Tony;s former dance partner and would-be girlfriend.
The story was based upon a 1976 New York magazine article by British writer Nik Cohn, “Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night”; in the mid-1990s. His idea of the life within the disco community was fabricated and didnt come from someone who actually had these lived experiences.
The director John Badham admits to not knowing anything about the disco world. At the time he decided to direct this film, he had just turned down working with Diana Ross on the The Wiz. Badham was a huge fan of Carole King, an American composer and Stevie Wonder, an artist, songwriter, producer and musician. Badham felt as if he could turn any form of dance into disco, “you just had to play around with the beat” he said in an interview with the NY Times.
No where does the director, John Badham or John Travolta give credit to artists such as James Brown, Michael Jackson, Donna Summer, Diana Ross, Chic, Thelma Houston, or Cheryl Lynn for originally starting disco and bringing it mainstream.
Disco later became popular in a lot of white arenas.
Today, Hipsters appreciate disco music although you can hear samples of it in pop music. For instance, Bruno Mars is the modern day James Brown and in his song 21k, you can feel and hear the disco genre in it.
