John Badham remembers Saturday Night Fever as a production held together partly by instinct and partly by aluminum foil.
When the director joined the production, the original filmmaker had just been fired after receiving an Oscar nomination for Rocky, John Travolta’s fame was already causing near-riot conditions in Brooklyn and the nightclub at the center of the movie was being transformed with Christmas lights and reflective sheets bought on the cheap downtown. Nearly 50 years later, Badham can still laugh about how fragile the whole thing felt.
“You turned the lights on, the place looked dreadful,” he said on the latest episode of It Happened in Hollywood, recalling the now-iconic disco set. “But when you had the night, it was a fantasy wet dream.”
Listening to Badham revisit the making of Saturday Night Fever now, what emerges is not the polished mythology that has accumulated around the movie over the decades but something scrappier, stranger and much more human. The film arrived carrying the glow of a pop phenomenon, but underneath the white suit and Bee Gees soundtrack was a rushed production running on nerve, improvisation and the unnerving magnetism of a 23-year-old Travolta at the precise moment he became a movie star.
