In 1975 Nik Cohn, a British émigré and contributing editor for New York, met a black disco dancer calling himself Tu Sweet. Striking up a friendship with the newly crowned winner of the Great American Dance Contest, Cohn felt there was a story afoot. After pitching the idea to his publisher he received permission to follow Sweet out on the town looking for the pulse of the night and the seemingly underground thrills of disco music.

Setting out for parts unknown one Saturday that December, the pair ended up on an extended dance club trawl. Eschewing the better-known Manhattan nightclubs, they took a gypsy cab to the Brooklyn neighborhoods of Bay Ridge, Borough Park, Bensonhurst and Sheepshead Bay looking for a good time and some floor space for Sweet.

It was a cold night punctuated by the socially dense chill of ethnic segregation and the difficulties of working class struggle. Yet it was also a night of discoveries for Cohn who followed Sweet into the dead end shambles of the Crazy Country Club where a drunken reveler vomited on his leg thereby ending his first foray into the nascent disco scene of New York City. Aside from soiled pants, though, he did manage to take home the lasting memory of a man he spotted in the club's entrance standing under neon lights with an air of certainty and calm that evoked for him a sense of stardom.

Returning to Bay Ridge on another night, Cohn and Sweet visited a club called 2001 Odyssey when the writer realized he had nothing to show for a story that was fast becoming due. Drawing on his memory of the Crazy Country Club's anonymous doorway man, he added his collected observations of two nights in Sweet's company and invented a character called Vincent. Interspersed with ideas about the vibrant disco subculture that featured a largely non-white, non-heterosexual core, Cohn wrote a total fabrication with a journalistic tone that somehow passed muster with his publisher.

The finished article included accurate neighborhood details culled from a follow-up trip while allowing the certainty of his references to some of the area's major landmarks. Called "Another Saturday Night", the article was at least partially derived from Cohn's working class experience growing up in Derry and was intended to suggest Saturday nights were a creative ritual in an otherwise dreary slice of the missed American dream machine.

Eventually appended with illustrations by James McMullan and re-titled "Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night", Cohn's article was published in New York in June 1976. The morning of the magazine's release to newsstands he was called by Robert Stigwood who was interested in taking an option on the story for the big screen.

Known at the time for being a concert, theatrical and music promoter who managed the Bee Gees and had produced Jesus Christ Superstar, Stigwood was an entertainment power on the rise. Struck by the potential of Cohn's story that described a scene then coming into the flower of popular appeal, Stigwood wanted to parlay his three-picture deal with TV phenomenon and Welcome Back, Kotter star John Travolta into a bonafide franchise of musically flavored movies. Already developing a project based on "Grease", the problem was finding a second, and eventually a third, project for his contractee so Cohn's article about the rituals of Saturday night seemed to be just the thing Stigwood was looking for.

Agreeing to terms Cohn removed himself to Texas, spent six weeks hashing out a screenplay and turned in the result to his would-be producer. Quietly remove for having produced an uncompromisingly bad screenplay, the task of adapting Cohn's story for the big screen fell to Academy Award-nominated screenwriter Norman Wexler. Thereafter Vincent became Tony Manero, the title became "Saturday Night Fever" and the rest, to elide some 15 months of subsequent effort, faded favorably into the TechniColor stuff of our collective pop cultural history.

Premiering at Hollywood's Grauman's Chinese Theater on Pearl Harbor day 1977, Saturday Night Fever was tagged with the hip, viral marketing line, "Catch it." In due course the nation did exactly that and the John Badham-directed disco music melodrama became a defining portrait of the late 1970s. It also catapulted Travolta into superstardom, put disco over the top of top-40 musical tastes and made the cross-media appeal of music, movies and fashion a highly influential trend that has continued on ever since.

Centered on Tony Manero (Travolta), a working class, 19-year old, Italian kid living in Bay Ridge, the movie focuses on various tensions in his life bringing about a moment of real maturation and change. Though he's a regular neighborhood guy, he's also a dreamer who knows he's happy only when he's dancing even if the clouds of adult responsibility threaten his youthful license at every turn.

Continually troubled and encouraged by his gang of friends who look up to him as a kind of father figure and reluctant role model, Tony is also doggedly pursued by the hopelessly naïve neighborhood girl, Annette (Donna Pescow). Conflicted about these relationships that anchor and define him for both good and bad reasons, Tony is also filled with a guilty Catholic conscience and stunning self-esteem problem. Increasingly at odds with his out-of-work father and emotionally abusive mother, he longs for a way out but can't quite seem to determine how to change his life for the better.

Into his Saturday night revelries steps Stephanie (Karen Lynn Gorney), a local girl with some sophistication and an off-putting nature who captivates him. After struggling to earn her attention and interest, they enter a dance contest together, form a romantically underscored but chaste friendship, and finally escape their circumstances to experience the potential of the wider world symbolized by the skyscrapers of Manhattan.

Though a fairly straightforward coming-of-age story, Saturday Night Fever is easily dismissed by some and praised by others for being a prototype of the high concept, lowest common denominator style of filmmaking that crystallized with Steven Spielberg and George Lucas in the '70s. To minimize the impact of its Italian-American ethnic enclave in this way, however, would be to ignore much of what makes the film so endurably provocative and entertaining. To wax philosophic about its social importance and ignore the crass commercialism of outstanding songs by the Bee Gees, Yvonne Elliman, Kool & The Gang and K.C. and The Sunshine Band, though, would be to miss the point of Stigwood's enterprise as well.

Scored by Barry, Maurice and Robin Gibb working with David Shire, Saturday Night Fever championed one of the long known, but heretofore secondary, ancillary markets of Hollywood. In directly connecting Tinsel Town success with the sales of accompanying soundtrack albums the movie's commercial bonanza was easily boosted by unparalleled box office success and an extraordinary number of album sales.

Though seemingly designed to capitalize on a compelling source in Cohn's story and then vouchsafed a success with the Gibbs brothers' film score, Badham's movie is surprisingly effective as a character study in its own right. To that end it was a surprising risk from otherwise bottom line oriented producers who were careful to play up the marketable elements of the film including its profanity, nudity, adult situations and urban types, though not to the exclusion of Cohn's original inspiration in the anonymous man at the Crazy Country Club.

From its opening credits cut to the infectious sounds of "Stayin' Alive", the film is instantly about Tony Manero who is, at base, a good kid cut from a perhaps less than ideal social fabric. His pleasure and skill on the dance floor is truly magical and, not for nothing, Travolta has justifiably spent the last 25 years living down his early success that featured him as a dancing machine of a sort not regularly seen since the hey day of Fred Astaire or Gene Kelly.

Plus his characterization is achingly honest, sexy and charming. As both a hoodlum and artist, Tony is that captivating contradiction of modern youth in that he's a close-minded and status conscience young buck who privately longs for the tenderness of acceptance and love. His personality may very well be in keeping with the Bay Ridge milieu from which he finally escapes but it remains for us a convincing portrait of a man, and a movie star, on the cusp of evolving into something exciting and unknown.

Altogether, Saturday Night Fever is a movie with an interesting production history but it's also indelibly connected concerned with a new kind of male star. Watching it with a few decades remove brings back the familiar charge of electric drums, falsetto voices, fast grooves and the bend of wah-wah pedals. Fortunately, it's also a capstone on the point of disco in that the movement, as a musical form and dance style, is about breaking down personal boundaries and achieving the possibilities of one's imagination, if only for the limits of a "Disco Inferno."