From one of the internet's tiny treasures, Delancy Place, August 7:
Saturday Night Fever and Grease
Today's selection -- from Who Knew by Barry Diller. As the chairman and CEO of Paramount Pictures, Barry Diller championed little-known John Travolta and the unorthodox Saturday Night Fever in 1977:
“Then, two months later, we opened Saturday Night Fever. All of us inside the company loved the little movie we'd made, and with hubris we decided to preview it for the industry at the grand Chinese Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard thinking that if we were standing this tall behind it everyone would take notice. At five of eight, the place was practically empty. Our old-time head of publicity came over to where I was sitting and whispered in my ear, ‘Travolta's the problem; he's a television person. You don't put a television person in a movie. The kid just doesn't put asses in seats.’ Well, not old Hollywood asses. But two weeks later we opened the movie, and there were vast lines around the block at every theater across America. Television execs and a television star had broken into the movies. We were on our way. The next year, 1978, we went from last place to first among all the major studios. And we would stay number one for the next seven years. Miracle of miracles.
“The most emotional moment for me, the most personal from those beleaguered Paramount beginnings, came after Variety headlined in big black type blazoned across its front page, SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER # 1 IN 17TH WEEK.
“A package arrived for me from the forty-second floor. Charlie Bluhdorn had the article encased in a silver frame. On it, he had handwritten the message ‘No one but no one deserves this more than you.’
“I still keep it close.
“It was a shock surprise to the industry, this solid hit from nowhere, but it was emblematic of how we were changing how movies got made. Kevin McCormick, a young producer working for Robert Stigwood, saw Nik Cohn's New York magazine article ‘Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night’ and bought it. That article became the loose basis for Saturday Night Fever. We heard about it, thought it was simply a great and original concept, and started to develop it–no stars, no pedigree, no package, no nothing–just a good idea.
“Dealing with Stigwood was a movie in itself. He was a British music impresario who'd worked with the Beatles and then the Bee Gees. He'd never made a movie, but had great instincts and was beyond a world-class promoter. In his early forties then, he was so pickled in alcohol he looked more like a lobster claw than any human being I've ever seen. He had that skinny, long, bright-red English face, and he lived a kind of grand life at a time when people were not really living grand lives. It wasn't good enough to rent a car in Los Angeles. He had his Rolls-Royce flown over.
“I never thought Stigwood had any real sense of how to ground-produce anything, but he had the shrewdest instincts about talent and promotion. He was prickly and one of those people you wanted to talk to as early in the morning as possible. As the day wore on, particularly as the evening wore on, he was subject to late-night rages. He would drunkenly call me at ten p.m., eleven, midnight, and then two in the morning. We'd have these deranged conversations, and the more he went on, the more his anger and paranoia deepened. I finally banned him from calling me at night. But thank the gods he came to us, and thank the gods we took him in with all his excesses. Before he inserted himself into Saturday Night Fever it had nothing to do with the Bee Gees. As the film developed, its internal rhythm called out for a great music score, and right there was the intersection of the Bee Gees and John Travolta, and out came that historic disco dance scene, just like the uptown and upmarket ones I was separately experiencing at the just-opened Studio 54....
....MUCH MORE
