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30 years ago, 'Saturday Night Fever' boogied down

By David Freedlander, amNewYork Staff Writer
More stories | dfreedlander@am-ny.com

December 14, 2007

Thirty years ago this weekend, a tough young kid from Bay Ridge strutted across America's movie screens and struck his finger in the air to announce a new moment in the country's culture.

That kid was Tony Manero, played by a young John Travolta, and that movie was "Saturday Night Fever."

"I'm always thinking, 'Golly, people must be sick of this thing by now,'" said John Badham, the film's director.

"It tells such a universal story though of the kind of things kids forever and ever will continue to go through."

Disco had been bubbling in the underground for a few years before the film came out, opening the sub-culture to a mass audience.

"Few films have ever touched upon the zeitgeist in quite the same way," said Alan Jones, author of "Saturday Night Forever: The Story of Disco." "People who didn't know about the underground disco scene realized they were missing out on something quite interesting."

"Saturday Night Fever," tells the story of Manero, a 19-year-old working a dead-end job at a paint store who enters a dance contest at the local disco. It's come down to us for it's kitsch factor, which even hard core fans admit is high, but is in fact a dark and gritty film that is wildly racist and misogynistic, and includes an aborted rape attempt, a suicide and a defrocked priest.

The only refuge from the gloom and malaise is on the dance floor.

"It was a way to escape from your shabby, cramped existence where real opportunities are not what they once were," said Bruce Schulman, history professor at Boston University. "Disco represented a last gasp of an ideal of American life where different kinds of people could together on the dance floor and other things wouldn't matter."

Alex Marchak, 50, who as a teenager hung out at the 2001 Odyssey dance club featured in the movie and was an extra in the film, recalled the era: "You made sure you were dressed up, you cared about the way you carried yourself. You don't have that any more. We took pride in the way we presented ourselves, the whole aura of the way we were. Kids don't dress up and worry about going out anymore."

The neighborhood is far different now. Arabs and Asians replaced the Italians. 2001 Odyssey later became a gay club and is now gone entirely, its flashing light dance floor auctioned off in 2005 for $188,000.

"You can look at it all as a sort of requiem for a type neighborhood that doesn't exist in the same way today," said rock journalist Nik Cohn, whose 1976 New York Magazine article "Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night," was turned into a screenplay for the film. "There's this idea that we're totally separate and we're in our neighborhood and we're not coming out."

Marchak still gets ribbed by friends when they hear one of the Bee Gees' hits from the movie.

"It's ok, I got only good memories of it all," said Marchak, who owns the Bay Ridge Funeral Home but moved to New Jersey. "It's hard to believe it's been that long. It seems like another lifetime."

FLICK FACTS
-Released December 16, 1977
-Grossed $85.2 million
-The sequel, "Staying Alive," was released in 1983.
-The movie was produced as a musical on Broadway and ran for 501 performances, from 1999-2000.
-Gene Siskel bought Tony Manero's white disco suit for $17,000 at an auction.

Bay Ridge: THE WAY IT WAS
-Opening scene of Travolta walking: 86th Street at Bay 20th Ave.
-Tony Manero's pizza parlor: Lenny's Pizza, 1969 86th St.
-Tony's paint store: Bay Ridge Home Center, 7305 Fifth Ave.
-Manero home: 221 79th St., Bay Ridge,
-Dance Studio: Phillips School of Dancing, 1301 W. Seventh St.