Genesis and Making of 'Saturday Night Fever'

Robert Stigwood, the 42-year-old Australian impresario known as “the Daryl Zanuck of pop,” was out of his mind. That was the talk in Hollywood, Bill Oakes remembers, on September 25, 1976, when his boss held a lavish press conference at the Beverly Hills Hotel to announce that the Robert Stigwood Organisation—RSO—had just signed John Travolta to a million-dollar contract to star in three films. Oakes, then in his mid-20s, had worked for the Beatles and had once been Paul McCartney's assistant. By this time he was running RSO Records, which boasted Eric Clapton and the Bee Gees among its roster of pop stars. “Everyone thought it was madness,” says Oakes, “because nobody had ever made the transition from television to movie stardom. So, a lot of us thought to pay a million dollars for Vinnie Barbarino [Travolta's character on the TV sitcom Welcome Back, Kotter] is going to make us a laughingstock.”