There’s nothing quite like seeing the words ‘based on a true story’ in a movie and knowing that’s a complete load of hogwash, the words ‘based’ and ‘true’ usually being taken for a ride.

This one all centres around a British rock critic called Nik Cohn, who penned the now famous ‘Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Nights’ article.

The piece was published in the June 1976 edition of New York Magazine, and essentially spawned the movie that would go on to gross $285 million worldwide.

So what’s all the fuss about, and where does truth blur with fiction? Let’s check the Guardian:

After crossing the Atlantic and signing on with New York magazine in 1975, the writer, who came to feel disenchanted with the establishment music business, persuaded the mag’s founder and editor Clay Felker to let him document disco – a new, largely ethnic, largely gay underground trend that had taken over parts of New York City.

The rest is cinema history: film rights were sold to producer Robert Stigwood, who had just signed a three-picture deal with a young TV actor called John Travolta. Screenwriter Norman Wexler transformed Vincent into Tony Manero. So unprecedented was the fanfare that when Stigwood’s 23-year-old assistant Kevin McCormick traipsed through Los Angeles looking for a director, one agent, according to Vanity Fair, told him, “Kid, my directors do movies. They don’t do magazine articles.” Director John Badham had no such qualms, and in December 1977 his movie took $11m in its first 11 days and Travolta became an overnight sensation.

Sounds well and good, but twenty years later the truth was revealed:

In December 1997 New York magazine published an article in which Cohn confessed that there never was a Vincent. There was no “Lisa”, “Billy”, “John James”, “Lorraine” or “Donna” either. While 2001 Odyssey existed, it wasn’t the way the writer described it in 1976. The whole scene of disco-loving Italians, as mythologised in Saturday Night Fever, was exaggerated. The most bizarre detail was that his disco protagonists were in fact based on mods Cohn had known in London. The writer was “painfully aware” that everything Fever had brought him – the fame, the fortune – was the result of a lie.

There’s more, far more to this one, and above we’ve only scratched the surface of the truth behind the fiction.

If you want to get deep into the nitty-gritty of it all read that Guardian article in full HERE.

Perhaps one good thing to come out of this all – maybe we’ll never have to see some shitty movie remake of an old classic, something Hollywood seems really into at the moment.

[source:guardian]