saturday night fever and grease--8/7/26

07 Aug 2026

saturday night fever and grease--8/7/26

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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.

“In their manufacturing, movies are such weird creatures. Each movie is its own separate industry, and they go through the alphabet of process from A to Z and then spin around again before winding up in a place that rarely is predictable. Fever was a particularly quirky movie: a good concept that became a better-than-good script without any central creative force animating it. There was no one person saying, ‘This is what this movie should be.’ It was a lot of kitchen helpers futzing around as it progressed from script to film.

“I'm not sure where the original idea to cast John Travolta came from, but Michael Eisner and I knew him from his television series, Welcome Back, Kotter. All the distribution and marketing people threw up their hands and said, ‘John Travolta? From television? Hopeless.’

“Added to that, first we hired the director of Rocky, John Avildsen, and then fired him, replacing him with a mostly untried TV director, John Badham. All these Frankenstein-like parts came together while all those around us thought we were amateurs. It was heady stuff, and quite a shock to the naysayers.

“Travolta became a superstar within a week of the release. When Princess Margaret came to visit L.A., I was seated next to her at a dinner. With nothing much else to say, I asked her whom she'd like to meet.

“She said, 'I want to meet John Travolta. Ask him to tea.'

“So I called up Travolta. He didn't know who Princess Margaret was. I explained she was the sister of the queen of England, and John said, ‘Sure, have her come over.’

“I said, ‘No, no, no, she's at the Beverly Wilshire hotel, and you have to go to her and have tea.’

He said, ‘I'm not going to her. I don't do tea!’ Finally I said, ‘John, just go.’

“So Travolta went to the Beverly Wilshire, and when he came back, he said, ‘She hit on me!’

“Robert Stigwood had signed Travolta to a three-picture deal, and we had shot Grease in the late summer of 1977, before Saturday Night Fever came out. It was a pretty shoddy production all the way through. Everything looked crummy, including the grass, which was supposed to be bright and green and was mostly patchy brown. Many of the shots didn't match. The pace was uneven. Travolta's instant fame created a dilemma for us, because after seeing the first rough cut, shortly after Fever had become a smash, we thought Grease was going to be a disaster. Fever was of the moment and Grease was a throwback bit of goofball nostalgia. We'd been geniuses in creating a superstar, and now we were about to be the dopes who killed his career in the very same year.

“We screened the first rough cut at my house. Eisner was there, and I'd invited Bob Evans to join us because he was such a genius at postproduction. It was like watching a train wreck. The music and sound, on the prerecorded tracks, without full orchestrations, sounded cheap and tinny. After the lights came up, Evans said, ‘You have to junk it. This picture is un-releasable.’

Everything was wrong. Evans was almost twirling around my screening room, saying, ‘You are going to ruin everything you built with him in Saturday Night Fever. Burn it!’

“Bob was married to the former Miss America Phyllis George at the time, and for some reason she sat in their car in my driveway while all this was going on. Maybe she had come to pick up Bob, but she ended up sitting in that car for two hours. I remember going out and apologizing to her as we kept talking about what to do. Bob couldn't have cared less.

“They divorced later that year. John Travolta was getting to be a bigger star every week because of Fever; he had just received an Oscar nomination for the movie.

“I knew Grease was bad, but also knew we couldn't abandon it. Our distribution and marketing people were now so stoked on Travolta that they'd set it up as next summer's big release. We were very, very worried, and had big fights with Stigwood because we insisted on reshooting some of the worst stuff. None of the other people involved seemed to have an inkling that the movie was so bad.

“We reshot and recut what we could, but were so nervous that we secretly went to Hawaii to preview it. We were petrified that advance word would get out.

“'Summer Nights’ is the first number–Travolta on the bleachers next to the high school football field with his friends. He gets up and duckwalks down the steps, the beginning of a music cue, and the entire audience started to laugh.

“We all groaned, ‘Oh no,’ because that was the best number in the movie.

“But as ‘Summer Nights’ went on, the laughter started to fade. After about three-quarters of that first song, which seemed to last an hour, you could actually feel the audience move into the groove, laughing with it rather than at it, and it built from there.

“The energy changed totally, the audience was charmed and that carried exuberantly through the whole movie. Moments that made me cringe in screenings got huge laughs. And by the end, it was clear they loved it! It wasn't a screening-room film; it needed a big, noisy audience to enjoy it for what it was: a campy, silly, entertaining movie musical.

“Grease opened, and everyone loved it. Period. It was a smash. Everyone started telling me how great it was, and I'm sure I always had a look of bemusement on my face. I still thought it was embarrassingly sloppy moviemaking, but the younger the people, the greater they thought it was. What a summer that year of '78 was–we premiered Grease at the State Theatre on Broadway and had a joyous party at Studio 54, which was at the height of being the best nightclub in the world.”