AS YEARS GO, 1977 may not have been the greatest for fashion (polyester ruled), presidents (Carter was inaugurated) or Elvis (he croaked on the john). But when it came to cinema, 1977 was undeniably special.
1977 isn’t the greatest year in film history (that honor often goes to 1939), but it did usher in a new era in American film. The early ’70s were a golden age for gritty, director-driven films, including “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” and “A Clockwork Orange.”
That all changed with a story from a galaxy far, far away.
“I think ’77 was a transitional period, partly because of the success of ‘Star Wars,'” says David Schwartz, chief film curator at the Museum of the Moving Image. “Earlier in the decade, you had edgier films. Some very dark and edgy films came out in the early ’70s, probably climaxing with ‘Taxi Driver.’
“There was a 10-year period when Hollywood was taken over by these idiosyncratic directors,” he adds. “In 1977, you have the re-emergence of the blockbuster. ‘Star Wars’ really defines the new Hollywood that we’re still in.”
It was also a transitional year talent. Woody Allen elevated himself from a slapstick guy with “Annie Hall.” David Lynch put himself on the map with “Eraserhead.” John Travolta went from being a TV heartthrob to a full-fledged star with “Saturday Night Fever.” Steven Spielberg cemented his rep as one of the most bankable directors with “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.”
Here now, the stories behind 10 of 1977’s most unforgettable and influential films.
SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER
In 1976, John Travolta is already a star, but he’s famous for being a TV Sweathog and bubble boy. But producer Robert Stigwood – who has been looking for a movie role for Travolta ever since seeing his Broadway audition for “Jesus Christ, Superstar” – has just read an article in New York magazine called “Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night.” The story of pimped-out, dance- and sex-obsessed kids in Bay Ridge will ultimately launch two international phenomena: Travolta and disco.
What Stigwood doesn’t know when he buys the rights to Nik Cohn’s disco-fever tale is that Tony Manero, the young buck who makes the story so compelling, doesn’t exist. It’s not until some 25 years later that Cohn will admit he fabricated much of the story.
What really does exist is the 2001 Odyssey dance club at 802 64th Street in Bay Ridge. That’s where the actors are taken during director John Badham’s two-week pre-shoot rehearsal, which includes improvising extended scenes in character. Travolta and co-star Barry Miller, who plays Bobby C., decide to base their characters’ relationship on the same hero-follower dynamic that made James Dean and Sal Mineo legendary in “Rebel Without a Cause.”
Long before synergy became a corporate byword, Stigwood masters the concept. In addition to running his own label, RSO, Stigwood manages the Bee Gees. Stigwood calls the Gibbs in France, where they are working on a new album. Do they have any songs that might work for the movie? They suggest two: “Night Fever” and “Stayin’ Alive.”
“He felt that ‘Night Fever’ was too pornographic to be used as the title for a film,” recalls Barry Gibb.
Those two songs, along with “How Deep Is Your Love” and “More Than a Woman,” define the soundtrack, which becomes the best-selling album in history, until it’s topped by Michael Jackson’s “Thriller.” But holed up in a 16th-century baronial hall, the Bee Gees never even saw the film.
“It wasn’t right in the middle of New York City or the London club scene,” says Robin Gibb. “[The music] was done in the middle of the French countryside.”
When the movie begins shooting, Travolta’s teen idol-hood becomes a problem. Thousands of fans and gawkers turn out to line the streets every shooting day. One day, they flood past police barricades and besiege Travolta’s dressing-room trailer, rocking it back and forth and terrifying the star and crew.
“When we started outside on the streets of Brooklyn, we were hit by a riot of people,” says Badham. “We literally had to shut down and go home.”
On the dance floor, though, things go smoothly. Travolta rehearses three hours a day, developing strong technique and adopting choreographer Lester Wilson’s moves perfectly. But one move – in which he raises both hands in the air, fingers pointed up – bothers him. He’s more comfortable using just one hand and putting the other on his hip. He has just improvised a move that will soon rival the Twist and the Lindy as one of the all-time great dances.
The movie also gives birth to a notorious piece of memorabilia: the lighted dance floor, constructed for the film. When the club, now called Spectrum, is demolished in 2005, the floor is put up for auction. It goes to an anonymous bidder for $160,000.
STAR WARS
It’s 1974 and George Lucas is a young filmmaker with an uncertain future. His first feature, “THX 1138,” fizzled. Then he wrote and directed “American Graffiti,” but the film’s distributor, Universal, was confused by the film and pessimistic about its moneymaking power. Universal didn’t even want to release it. Now Lucas is having trouble drumming up interest for his next planned project, “Apocalypse Now.” (His friend Francis Ford Coppola eventually made it.)
Out of desperation, Lucas begins working on a space epic he’s been thinking about for years. The initial ideas were in a two-page treatment he titled “Journal of the Whills,” featuring characters named Mace Windy, Anakin Starkiller and Alexander Xerxes XII, Emperor of Decarte.
Universal, to which Lucas is under contract, passes, as does every other studio in town, except 20th Century Fox. Fox gives Lucas $100,000 to direct and a generous $3 million budget.
Lucas works and reworks his space opera. At first, Luke was a girl, Han Solo was “a huge green-skinned monster with no nose and large gills,” a lightsaber was called a “lasersword” and that familiar opening scroll began, “A long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away an incredible adventure took place…”
He meets a key member of his cast when he spots a carpenter installing doors. He has just found his Han Solo in Harrison Ford. Then collecting unemployment, Mark Hamill becomes Luke Skywalker and entertainment scion Carrie Fisher, auditioning during a Christmas break from London’s Central School of Speech and Drama, is Princess Leia.
Filming in England and Tunisia, the production is plagued by problems. Robots break down. Sets are destroyed in a sand storm. Alec Guinness nearly walks off the set because he’s upset about how he’s going to die. Lucas finally wraps the shoot in the summer of 1976.
Reviving the space adventure genre and revolutionizing special effects with Industrial Light & Magic, “Star Wars” opens on May 25, 1977. It is an immediate hit, with Manhattan’s Astor Plaza theater setting a house record: $20,322 on opening weekend.
ANNIE HALL
Woody Allen has just finished shooting his new movie, “Anhedonia,” and he’s in trouble. He’s got 10 months worth of footage, and none of it makes any sense. In there, somewhere, is a movie about two nutty New Yorkers in love. He’s known as a master of slapstick for “Sleeper” and “Bananas,” but he wants to do more this film.
In his memoir “When the Shooting Stops,” film editor Ralph Rosenblum describes Woody Allen’s “Annie Hall” as a “chaotic collection of bits and pieces that seemed to defy continuity” – at least when it arrived at his cutting room.
Allen wrote the film as a murder-mystery, with a bit of romance tossed in for good measure. He picks the working title “Anhedonia,” from Greek, meaning an inability to appreciate the basic joys of life. According to Rosenblum, Allen has no more idea what of what to do with his movie than a goldfish would with a Buick.
Ultimately, Allen wound up with a love story that mirrored his real-life relationship with Diane Keaton, whose real name is Diane Hall and is nicknamed Annie. In a further blending of art and reality, her wacky ties and hats are based on the clothes she actually wears, and spark a fashion trend.
Broad physical comedy takes a back seat to the rueful neuroses of Allen’s Alvy Singer, who predictably manages to foul up the great romance of his life. It is the beginning of Woody Allen, film artist, and the end of Woody Allen, standup comic and talk-show habitue.
Before going on to become one of Allen’s most beloved films and the blueprint for all of Norah Ephron’s romantic comedies, “Annie Hall” wins Oscars for Best Picture, Actress (Diane Keaton), Director and Screenplay (Allen and Marshall Brickman).
ERASERHEAD
In 1970, David Lynch is a student at California’s Center for Advanced Film Studies (CAFS). He’s just begun shooting a film based on a scant 21-page treatment he conceived while living in Philadelphia. Unlike his other films, Lynch admits he has no clue where the idea came from.
The bizarre, dreamlike black and white film – heavy on atmosphere but light on linear storytelling – focuses on Henry Spencer, who lives in a bleak apartment and is forced to care for a deformed baby. Philadelphia, where Lynch says you could be in a room and still “feel the bleakness outside,” inspires the drab, industrial landscape.
Lynch and a few friends build the sets in an unused stable from $100 worth of material bought from a studio’s going-out-of-business sale. Lynch patches holes in the set’s walls with papier-mache made from Wall Street Journals he delivers as a day job. Goodwill is the source for lead actor Jack Nance’s wardrobe.
With incessant funding problems, the film takes five years to complete, but it finally opens in the fall of 1977, at New York’s Cinema Village with an audience of just 26 people. After a screening, Lynch’s own mother says, “Oh, I wouldn’t want to have a dream like that!”
Because of its horrific imagery and creepy vibe, “Eraserhead” eventually becomes a hit on the midnight movie circuit, and propels Lynch to fame. It’s why Mel Brooks later taps him to helm “The Elephant Man.” But to this day, the film’s precise meaning remains a mystery.
“It is a personal film, and no reviewer or critic or viewer has ever given an interpretation that’s my interpretation,” Lynch says in a DVD feature.
CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND
In 1951, Steven Spielberg is 5 years old and living in New Jersey. Late one night, his father taps him awake, puts him in the car and drives him out to a field. There, they lay down a blanket, look up in the sky and watch a brilliant meteor shower.
“That was my first introduction to the world beyond the Earth. That impregnated me with wanting to tell stories not of this world,” Spielberg has said.
While filming “Jaws,” Spielberg begins fashioning the story that would become “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” His fascination with the mysteries of space is fueled by news reports about extra-terrestrial contact.
“There were too many similarities in the sightings,” he says. “You’re talking about witnesses who were seeing things in Des Moines, Iowa, and reporting the same things they were seeing in Albuquerque, New Mexico. I really believed in this whole UFO phenomenon.”
Spielberg wants Steve McQueen to play Roy Neary, the family man who becomes obsessed with UFOs after an encounter. They meet at a dive bar to discuss the role. The veteran actor knocks back 14 beers and nearly gets into a fight with another patron. He passes on “Close Encounters” because the script calls for Neary to cry, and McQueen says he’ll never be able to shed tears on camera.
Spielberg goes to Dustin Hoffman, Al Pacino and Gene Hackman. They all pass, as well. He finally picks Richard Dreyfuss, though he has reservations because the actor is so closely associated with “Jaws.”
On the set, a gigantic hangar on
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1977, from Page 39
an Alabama air force base, Spielberg tinkers nearly every aspect of the film, from the special effects to the famous five-note tune used to communicate with the aliens. John Williams composes some 300 versions of the theme, all of which Spielberg initially rejects.
His pickiness includes depictions of the space creatures. He’s adamant that they appear otherwordly, not just as humans in costumes. At first, he wants to dress up orangutans. But during a test, the animals rip their costumes off, and Spielberg says he “knew in five minutes that wouldn’t work.”
OH, GOD!
At the opposite end of the spectrum is “Oh, God!” a mainstream comedy about a grocery store manager (John Denver) commanded by God (George Burns) to carry a message to the world. The film marks the first lead film role for pop star Denver.
But Denver barely got the role. Screenwriter Larry Gelbert, adapting the story from a novel by Avery Corman, originally envisions himself directing, with very different actors in the starring roles.
“I approached Mel Brooks to play God and Woody Allen to play John’s part,” Gelbart recalls. “Woody said no, he had his own take on God and this wasn’t it. And Mel didn’t want the demotion.”
Even Reiner is initially reluctant about getting involved. He feels the material is too similar to his and Brooks’ classic routine “The 2,000 Year Old Man.” But after reading Gelbart’s screenplay, he signs on.
It’s a good thing, too. “Oh, God!” becomes the first of the director’s movies to make money.
Despite the success, the film doesn’t turn Denver into a screen star.
“John really had a talent, a natural talent as an actor, but he never found another picture he wanted to do,” recalls director Carl Reiner. “I guess after God touches you, what else can you do after that?”
NEW Y0RK, NEW YORK
Coming off the gritty “Mean Streets” and “Taxi Driver,” director Martin Scorsese wants to do something different with his next movie. He’s in love with the artifice of the classic musicals of the ’40s and ’50s – the fake sets, eye-popping colors and characters spontaneously breaking into song.
“We understood it to be a different kind of reality. But that doesn’t mean that the films are any less true,” the director says.
Scorsese bucks the current trend of shooting on location and films the entire thing on an MGM soundstage. Into this artificial world, he drops a down-to-earth story of two struggling musicians, played by Liza Minnelli and Robert De Niro, who find love and success.
1977 is filled with hits, and this one looks like a surefire winner. De Niro has an Oscar for “The Godfather” and Minnelli, has just won an Oscar for “Cabaret.”
Audiences aren’t impressed. “New York, New York” makes just $13 million.
But something lasting does come out of the film: the theme song. Scorsese hires the team of John Kander and Fred Ebb (“Cabaret”) to write five songs for the movie. When they play their ideas for the director and stars, De Niro tells them he wants the song to be “stronger,” and “would we mind trying again?” Ebb later recalls on NPR.
“We walked out of there, highly insulted that some actor was going to tell us how to write a song,” Kander says. The team goes back to the piano and writes a new tune “in very short time and great anger.”
That new song is the classic “New York, New York” we know today. De Niro “turned out to be right,” Ebb admits.
LOOKING FOR MR. GOODBAR
On January 1, 1973, around the time a young actress named Diane Keaton is enjoying her first major hit, “The Godfather,” a 28-year-old New Yorker named Roseann Quinn is murdered by a man she picked up in a bar. Four years later – as she is about to win her Best Actress Oscar for “Annie Hall” – Keaton plays Quinn, a k a Theresa Dunn, in a movie based on the schoolteacher’s murder: “Looking for Mr. Goodbar.”
That Keaton’s character is seen reading “The Godfather” when she meets the unstable Tony- played by a young Richard Gere – seems just a curious coincidence, but the timing of the movie is anything but.
In a pre-AIDS, post-’60s America, the sexual freedom being enjoyed by the young seems to carry no price. Quinn’s murder, however, reveals a dark side to liberation. “Goodbar,” from Judith Rossner’s 1975 novel, becomes a cautionary code word for the normal-seeming psychopaths lurking in singles bars.
Directed by Richard Brooks, the film also stars William Atherton, who goes on to play the creepy bureaucrat in “Ghostbusters” and the even creepier TV reporter in the first two “Die Hard” pictures. But it is Keaton’s mix of vulnerability and adventuresome spirit that make the film so poignant. She’d been bland as Kay Corleone in “The Godfather” and loopy as Annie Hall, so “Goodbar” cements her credibility as a serious actor.
THE GOODBYE GIRL
After 19 years of marriage, Neil Simon’s first wife, Joan, has died of cancer. Four months later, he marries actress Marsha Mason. He feels guilty about his quick remarriage and will later pour those emotions into “Chapter Two,” but for now is upset that Mason is constantly travelling to make movies – leaving him alone in New York.
“I decided if she was going to work, we might as well work together,” Simon tells the New York Times in 1983. “So I wrote ‘The Goodbye Girl’ for her.”
The film, an Upper West Side romance about an egomaniacal actor and the mother and daughter he finds living in his sublet apartment, is directed by Herb Ross, and is pivotal for both Mason and Richard Dreyfuss, who plays Elliott the actor. Dreyfuss has done “The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz,” “American Graffiti,” “Jaws,” and “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” all of which typecast him as – in his words – “a dink.” Mason charmed audiences as a prostitute in “Cinderella Liberty” opposite James Caan, but “Goodbye Girl” will catapult her into the top ranks of contemporary screen actresses.
“Goodbye Girl’ becomes Simon’s biggest hit after “The Odd Couple.” It garners Oscar nominations for the three principal actors, including Quinn Cummings as Mason’s daughter. Dreyfuss, though, is the only winner and remains the youngest Best Actor ever until Adrien Brody wins for ‘The Pianist.” The win also starts him on a long, ego- and cocaine-fueled binge that derails his career until he gets sober and makes 1986’s “Down and Out in Beverly Hills.”
SMOKEY AND THE BANDIT
A veteran Hollywood stunt man, Hal Needham is getting divorced. He temporarily moves in with his pal, Burt Reynolds, and winds up staying for 12 years.
The two friends team up for a Southern-fried trucking comedy starring Reynolds as a cocky driver who helps bootleg a load of Coors beer cross-country. The film also stars Sally Field as the requisite love interest and Jackie Gleason as an overweight, inept sheriff.
A thief is responsible for planting the seeds of “Smokey and the Bandit” in Needham’s mind.
While working on “Gator” in Florida, Needham brings a few cases of Coors from California to cool off the crew. He chills it in his refrigerator while shooting, but the suds keep disappearing. Finally, Needham catches the cleaning lady pilfering the beer.
Turns out it’s illegal to sell Coors east of the Mississippi.
“She said, ‘You can’t get Coors around here!’ That’s the thread that put ‘Smokey’ together,” Needham recalls. From that idea, he pounds out a script.
“I read it, and I said, ‘Hal this is the worst script I’ve ever read in my life. Honest to God, it’s God-awful,'” Reynolds recalls. “‘But I’ll do it.'”
Reynolds is the star, but the most visible role turns out to be Bandit’s black, T-top Pontiac Trans Am, a model Needham once saw in a magazine. After the movie opens, the car’s sales explode.
Pontiac is grateful, and the company’s president promises Reynolds a Trans Am for life. But his car never comes. He calls GM to ask about the hold up and is told that the company has recently changed presidents. The old one made the promise to Reynolds, the “new president doesn’t want you to have one.”
The actors finally gets a Trans Am, but he has to buy it himself.
