The Great Saturday Night Fever Fraud
How one man created the world of disco
It was one of the biggest “fake news” stories of the decade. Nik Cohn’s inside story of New York’s disco subculture was the cover feature of New York Magazine on the 7th June, 1976. The article was a sensation – and, the following year, it inspired one of the most famous films of the 70s: Saturday Night Fever.
And it was all made up.
“My story was a fraud,” Cohn later admitted. “I’d only recently arrived in New York. Far from being steeped in Brooklyn street life, I hardly knew the place.”
Cohn was a British pop music journalist who relocated to the USA and wanted to establish himself as a successful writer. His big break was the article “Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night”. It told the story of a young man named Vincent. This is how Cohn described him:
“Vincent was the very best dancer in Bay Ridge—the ultimate Face. He owned fourteen floral shirts, five suits, eight pairs of shoes, three overcoats, and had appeared on American Bandstand. Sometimes music people came out from Manhattan to watch him, and one man who owned a club on the East Side had even offered him a contract. A hundred dollars a week. Just to dance.”
During the week, Vincent sold paint in a hardware store. But on Saturday night he took to the dancefloor at a New York disco and, for a few brief moments, became a star. In the film, Vincent was renamed Tony and was played by a young and little-known actor named John Travolta. His daily life was dull but his night-life made him a star. “Whenever he gazed into the mirror, it was always Pacino who gazed back,” Cohn wrote.
But Vincent didn’t exist. He was, Cohn says, “completely made-up, a total fabrication.” Speaking to The Guardian newspaper in 2016 Cohn said: “It reads to me as obvious fiction, albeit based on observation and some knowledge of disco culture…. In the 60s and 70s, the line between fact and fiction was blurry. Many magazine writers used fictional techniques to tell supposedly factual stories. No end of liberties were taken.”
Far from being native New Yorker, Vincent was inspired by a Shepherd’s Bush mod whom Cohn had known in the 1960s. The idea for the New York Magazine feature came to him after he had seen some drunks fighting outside a New York nightclub one night. One of the fighters, reputedly, threw up over Cohn’s trousers. That was when Cohn noticed a slickly-dressed young man watching the brawl from a doorway. Cohn wondered who that man was, why he was at the club, what his life was like – and that was the genesis of Vincent.
The original magazine article was beautifully illustrated by James McMullan. However, even the artist was not told that the central character, Vincent, was fictional. “People mistakenly believed that the picture of the handsome kid was Vinnie,” McMullan said, “It was not.”
Invented or not, the world described in Cohn’s article was soon to become a reality as the film, Saturday Night Fever, more or less defined the public image of what 1970s disco was – or should be. The film made a star of Travolta and also got him an academy award nomination. The soundtrack album, featuring various disco musicians and, notably, some killer tracks by the Bee Gees, became the top-selling album in history up to that time. This was pretty remarkable for a relatively low budget film. It cost just $3.5 million to make and made over $237 million worldwide – equivalent to about $674 million at present day rates.
And all that from a made-up magazine article!