Manero / Balboa Deux

Before pairing up for Staying Alive, Stallone and Travolta, aka Manero / Balboa, headlined this inspired drive-in double bill...

New York-Style

In memory of Erland Van Lidth  de Jeude, immortalized as Terror, leader of the Baldies, and owner of the most impressive onscreen display of rapid pizza ingestion.

I spent a few years in Chicago and there's probably nothing I missed more about the New York Tri-State Area than (good, easily obtainable) thin crust, New York-style pizza.

If you know of other similar moments (i.e. people chowing on slices) in NY-set movies of the era, please send 'em my way so that I may add them to this video.

I've a feeling Lenny's wasn't selling that Philly Cheesesteak when Travolta was prowling 86th St.

Manero / Balboa

It's by no means unusual for a successful film to spawn imitations, along with the inevitable official sequels, prequels, remakes, and re-imaginings...happens all the time.  So it was that the phenomenon that was Rocky inspired music impresario Robert Stigwood to quickly develop and produce his own urban, working class fable, optioning Nik Cohn's New York article "Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night" and enlisting Serpico scribe Norman Wexler to write the screenplay version of what would eventually be called Saturday Night Fever.  It's fitting that Rocky director John G. Avildsen was the original helmer of Saturday Night Fever before having "creative differences" with Stigwood and star John Travolta, leading to his being replaced by John Badham during pre-production.  I can only assume that the Rocky poster on Tony Manero's wall is a remnant of the production design overseen by Avildsen (additionally, there's a Serpico poster in Manero's bedroom; incidentally, Serpico is another film that Avildsen was attached to at one point).  Prior to their near-collaboration on Serpico, Wexler and Avildsen teamed on Joe, another blue collar cinematic icon of the '70s, which J. Hoberman wrote about here on its 30th anniversary.

Even with that not so unusual production history in mind, it is interesting to see the mythos and cultural impact of a film, right down to the Rocky poster prominently displayed on Tony Manero's wall, so quickly and openly acknowledged and absorbed, in part, by another film; to put this in perspective Saturday Night Fever was being produced while Rocky was still in theatrical release.  It's this relationship between Rocky and Saturday Night Fever, Rocky Balboa and Tony Manero, that I play with a bit in this short video essay:



Continuing this Balboa - Manero strand, Rocky writer and star and Sylvester Stallone would direct Saturday Night Fever's inferior sequel Staying Alive (complete with theme song by Stallone frere Frank). 

 

Completing this circle, over thirty years later, Saturday Night Fever would inspire the fascinating Chilean film Tony Manero, darker and more disturbing than anything on screen in either Rocky or Saturday Night Fever.

Trailer Not on the DVD: Saturday Night Fever (1977, John Badham)

Paramount has been pretty bad about putting original theatrical trailers on their DVD and Blu-ray releases.  I've heard that music in trailers also needs to be cleared for home video and this may be why so many vintage Paramount trailers remain absent from DVD.  Still, I find it doubtful that all the other studios are clearing music rights for the original trailers on their disc.  An interesting example of this sort of thing is the Last American Virgin DVD, which is missing Human League's "Love Action" (replaced by another go round of "Whip It") because the band refused to re-license it for the film.  However, the DVD also contains the original theatrical trailer, which includes a portion of "Love Action."  I'm guessing no one was paying too much attention to the content of the trailer.

This trailer, which probably came from an old VHS, runs fairly long and has a promo for the soundtrack album at the tail end. 

File under: "What might have been."

From the pages of the long-defunct industry trade journal Film Bulletin, John Travolta is the American Gigolo...

"That's our train. We gotta make it!"

One of the first things I recall about Pauline Kael's rave review of The Warriors, which may have been the first Kael piece I ever read, was her allusion to the then-recent Saturday Night Fever at the start of the article. I don't have a copy and it's not available online so far as I can tell, but the gist of Kael's review was that the working class young protagonists of Saturday Night Fever seemed quite rough-edged and downtrodden at the time of its release in 1977, but that The Warriors was eye-opening because its characters were even lower on the socioeconomic scale.

Watching Saturday Night Fever again for the first time in several years, I most enjoyed the invaluable mid-'70s Brooklyn footage contained throughout the film. Here's a New York movie that mostly stays out of Manhattan, although it does have several iconic shots of the lower Manhattan skyline, and shows audiences a part of the city rarely depicted on film. This focus on the outer boroughs is one of the things I also love about The Warriors, which confuses things somewhat by substituting Brooklyn and Manhattan locations in some scenes that are supposed to take place in the Bronx.

Two of my favorite moments from Saturday Night Fever and The Warriors are the long subway journeys that come near the end of each film. In each film, the subway serves as a venue for the characters to rest after a long, arduous evening and also reflect upon what came before.

I'm sure it was coincidental, but I was struck by the visual similarities between John Travolta's Tony and the surviving Warriors on the graffiti-filled subway, from their weary expressions to the eye bruises that Travolta and Michael Beck's Swan share.

Check out Jeremy's tribute to the opening credits of Saturday Night Fever at Moon in the Gutter, which inspired me to pull out my DVD.

De Palma Premieres

Body Double, October 1984:

Scarface, December 1983:

Blow Out, July 1981: