New York“Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night.” The piece was a deep dive on the mostly Italian-American young adults who frequented a discotheque in Brooklyn called 2001 Odyssey. Vincent, for whom the club is a sort of safe haven, was the story’s complicated main character: “When Saturday night came round and he walked into 2001 Odyssey, all the other Faces automatically fell back before him, cleared a space for him to float in, right at the very center of the dance floor.
, directed by John Maggio. He turns out to be something of a Trojan Horse, since the documentary is largely about the making of, for which Cohn’s secretly fictional Vincent became Travolta’s character, Tony Manero. Maggio tells us at the beginning that he first embarked on a project about ‘70s disco culture, but soon shifted gears to zoom in instead on the Wizard of Oz-like figure at its center.
When Cream and the Bee Gees both subsequently entered flop eras, Stigwood gained traction in both the theater and film worlds, in part due to his professional relationship with Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice. Rather than abandoning the music industry proper, however, he had designs on bridging sound and picture in innovative ways. Directors of the New Hollywood had already
, for which he united an ensemble of pop stars, with The Who—clients from back in London—at the center of Ken Russell’s rock opera.