HOME

TheInfoList



OR:

"Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night" is the title of a 1976 ''
New York Magazine ''New York'' is an American biweekly magazine concerned with life, culture, politics, and style generally, and with a particular emphasis on New York City. Founded by Milton Glaser and Clay Felker in 1968 as a competitor to ''The New Yorker' ...
'' article by British rock journalist Nik Cohn, which formed the basis for the plot and inspired the characters for the 1977 movie ''
Saturday Night Fever ''Saturday Night Fever'' is a 1977 American dance drama film directed by John Badham and produced by Robert Stigwood. It stars John Travolta as Tony Manero, a young Italian-American man from the Brooklyn borough of New York. Manero spends h ...
''. Originally, the article was published as a piece of factual reporting. However, around the time of the 20th anniversary of the film in 1996, Cohn revealed that it was actually a work of fiction. After persuading ''New York'' editor Clay Felker to let him write an article about the 1970s
disco Disco is a genre of dance music and a subculture that emerged in the 1970s from the United States' urban nightlife scene. Its sound is typified by four-on-the-floor beats, syncopated basslines, string sections, brass and horns, electric p ...
scene, Cohn, a newcomer to the
United States The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country Continental United States, primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 U.S. state, states, a Washington, D.C., ...
, set about researching the American working-class subculture he was trying to cover. One night he travelled to
Bay Ridge, Brooklyn Bay Ridge is a neighborhood in the southwest corner of the New York City borough (New York City), borough of Brooklyn. It is bounded by Sunset Park, Brooklyn, Sunset Park to the north, Dyker Heights, Brooklyn, Dyker Heights to the east, the Na ...
, to visit the disco 2001 Odyssey. However when he arrived a drunken fight was taking place outside the club, and one of the participants rolled over in the gutter and threw up on Cohn's trouser leg, leading him to return to Manhattan. Despite this brief visit, Cohn did notice that the scene was surveyed by one clubgoer standing in the doorway and calmly watching events. Cohn returned to the club subsequently but the young man wasn’t there. To overcome his lack of familiarity with the New York disco scene, Cohn combined the image of the figure outside the club with people he knew from his youth, including a gang member from the Northern Ireland city of
Derry Derry, officially Londonderry (), is the second-largest city in Northern Ireland and the fifth-largest city on the island of Ireland. The name ''Derry'' is an anglicisation of the Old Irish name (modern Irish: ) meaning 'oak grove'. The ...
, where Cohn had grown up, and a young man he knew in England. “My story was a fraud,” he wrote. “I’d only recently arrived in New York. Far from being steeped in Brooklyn street life, I hardly knew the place. As for Vincent, my story’s hero, he was largely inspired by a Shepherd’s Bush mod whom I’d known in the Sixties, a one-time king of Goldhawk Road." For additional detail Cohn returned to Bay Ridge during the day to get a better feel for the area. On the 40th anniversary of the article’s publication in 2016, Cohn said that he thought that such a fictionalised piece would not be published in the contemporary press:


References

{{Saturday Night Fever Magazine articles 1976 documents Works originally published in New York (magazine)