Saturday Night Fever  Twenty years after he wrote "Tribal Rites
of the New Saturday Night" for New York Magazine, filmed the
following year as Saturday Night Fever (1977), British
journalist Nik Cohn admitted he'd made most of it up. His
admission was met with a collective shrug of indifference. From
that fiction was born the first great movie musical of the post-
rock age. The soundtrack—featuring those brilliant Bee Gees and
Trammps' timeless "Disco Inferno"—sold a gazillion copies, and
the movie made John Travolta a superstar. It even briefly made
disco safe for straight white males—until the notorious Chicago
record burning and riot at a 1979 White Sox game. (Disco never
died, of course, kept alive by the gays and Madonna.) But
Travolta's Tony Manero has deeper roots than a dancing fad or
Cohn's fabrication; he's an outer-borough striver, a Brooklyn
dreamer who's drawn to the bright lights of Manhattan. Tony's
elegant white suit (later bought by critic Gene Siskel), wide
labels, and immaculate grooming—"Wa