"Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night" was the title of a 1976 New York Magazine article by British rock journalist Nik Cohn. It was the basis for the plot and characters in the movie Saturday Night Fever.
Originally, the article was published as a piece of factual reporting. However, around the time of the twentieth anniversary of the film, Cohn revealed that the article was actually a work of fiction. Assigned to write an article about the early 1970s disco scene, Cohn, a newcomer to the United States, was unfamiliar with the American working-class subculture he was trying to cover.
To overcome this problem, Cohn based his piece on 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." The fraud was successful because mod and disco subcultures shared certain similarities, both emphasized fashion and music, and both the US and UK characters were working class.
Famous quotes containing the words saturday night, tribal, rites, saturday and/or night:
“Saturday night is the loneliest night in the week.”
—Sammy Cahn (1913–1993)
“What is this conversation, now secular,
A speech not mine yet speaking for me in
The heaving jelly of my tribal air?
It rises in the throat, it climbs the tongue,
It perches there for secret tutelage....”
—Allen Tate (1899–1979)
“The instincts of merry England lingered on here with exceptional vitality, and the symbolic customs which tradition has attached to each season of the year were yet a reality on Egdon. Indeed, the impulses of all such outlandish hamlets are pagan still: in these spots homage to nature, self-adoration, frantic gaieties, fragments of Teutonic rites to divinities whose names are forgotten, seem in some way or other to have survived mediaeval doctrine.”
—Thomas Hardy (1840–1928)
“The return of the asymmetrical Saturday was one of those small events that were interior, local, almost civic and which, in tranquil lives and closed societies, create a sort of national bond and become the favorite theme of conversation, of jokes and of stories exaggerated with pleasure: it would have been a ready- made seed for a legendary cycle, had any of us leanings toward the epic.”
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)
“And New York is the most beautiful city in the world? It is not far from it. No urban night is like the night there.... Squares after squares of flame, set up and cut into the aether. Here is our poetry, for we have pulled down the stars to our will.”
—Ezra Pound (1885–1972)